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Microsoft Offers Phone Support For IE 7
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a short piece detailing Microsoft's newest step in testing Internet Explorer 7, which just went into Beta 2 yesterday. They're now offering free phone support to U.S., German, and Japanese users who try out the trial software." From the article: "'We believe that IE 7, even at this beta stage, is a significant improvement and we want as many people as possible to try it and use it,' said the browser development team in a post on its blog. 'IE 7 is feature complete and has been through significant compatibility and reliability testing. People (especially technology enthusiasts) will have a good experience with it,' continued the post. Microsoft said the new version addresses some problems affecting banking and news sites. It is also designed to be more secure than the current version, with built-in protection against malicious software and online phishing scams."
Customer: Hello MSFT? I can't get IE7 to work
Support: Let's check some basics, Is your computer plugged in?
Customer: yes
Support: Is your computer on?
Customer: yes
Support: Is your monitor on?
Customer: yes
Support: Are you running Windows XP?
Customer: yes
Support: Aha, I think I found your problem.
That the software can "phone home" more easily?
P.S. Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this one: Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, Show Updates, scroll to the bottom.
Yeesh! Really? Why do you have to do that?
Another attempt at copying a Firefox feature into IE7?
Until recently, when installing Firefox on a Windows computer, you had to do the uninstall old version / install new version thing to avoid duplicate - and "dead" - entries in the list of installed software.
"IE 7 is feature complete" Is this in the same way that Vista is now "feature complete"? Yeah right.
I'm not a web professional, but I've been given the job of designing a small website for my employers, and IE's crappy CSS support has caused me a world of hurt.I was going to ask whether anything has been done about fixing it, but an earlier post regarding the Acid 2 test has pretty much answered that. (It's a wish list? Well, yeah, but if Konqueror and Safari can grant those wishes, why not IE?)
Haven't you learned? Microsoft doesn't support standards, it writes them. That way, whatever broken stuff their software does, it is "standards compliant". Referring to Acid2 as a "wish list" as the previous post you mentioned said says everything you need to know about Microsoft's plans. For what it's worth, Firefox can't correctly render the Acid2 test page either.
This is a troll, so you may want to mark it as such, but IMHO the BBC is to technology reviews as gardening magazines are to motor vehicles: The BBC knows only one operating system, and that is Windows, and one software company, and that is Microsoft. When the BBC writes about any computing article, it's usually from the point of view of a Microsoft press release, and their articles on any other piece of computing or technology is usually very suspicious and highly critical.
To be fair, I don't think they are really trolling for MS. I think they simply ask the same reporters to write articles on computing that they ask to write articles on the Queen's birthday.
Mod this down if needed, but think about it, please.