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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."
I was absolutely sure they mean it will contain a skype-like application, voice chat, internet telephony.
Nope. Support by phone will be available. MSIE won't support a phone.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What's the criterion for inclusion in this scheme? Your mother country has to have invaded another sovereign state? ;-)
I'm really looking forward to a good experience when running Windows Update experience, since that's all I ever use IE for.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
that we don't start bashing MS for this. Give them credit for beta testing and making sure that the product works and also for providing support to the end-users that try it. This seems like a interesting move on their part and a good effort to make sure that the code they will eventually release is stable. I use many beta products every day and they do not provide me phone support. If gmail craps the bed then I am SOL.
/. trashing this for one reason or another. Just don't bash them later for not testing their code.
I can image that we will see a lot of people here at
- Andrew
I meta-moderate because I care.
Yes, that's right. You get this lovely tripod with gripping arm, absolutely free with your trial of IE7 Beta. Now, when you are stuck on interminable hold with Microsoft Tech support, you won't have to hold the phone up to your ear -- the Phone Support will do all the work! It frees up your hands so you can send hate mail to Bill Gates while still waiting for the next available tech support specialist.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"Hello, welcome to Microsoft Internet Explorer Seven phone support..."
"Press 1 to be told to reboot, press 2 to be told to reinstall IE7, press 3 to be told to reinstall the OS, press 4 to be told to apply next month's patches to the OS, press 5 to be told to contact the website's administrator for writing non-IE7 compliant HTML, press 8 to purchase Microsoft malware protection services..."
Remain calm! All is well!
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?)
I suppose the most we can hope for with IE7 is that it stays broken in the same ways as previous versions, so we don't have to learn a whole new raft of ugly hacks just to a get a page to look presentable.
No it does NOT prevent phishing scams, but actually IE actually makes various online hosting providers' anti-phishing filters useless. If someone hosts a text (yeah, .txt) file with HTML, *only* IE renders it as an HTML page.
One of my friends who was drowsy late night after cramming for exams, got phished!!! All fault of IE and partially his (being too drowsy!)... by this site : http://newphotosfamyli.bravehost.com/link2.txt
(Yeah, the site is still up after being reported to concerned people! If someone knows this fellow please punch him in the gut for me, thanks!).
More details and comparison of how Opera, Firefox and IE handle this phishing site are in my blog : http://blog.mritunjai.com/2006/04/23/gone-phishing /
- mritunjai
"Hello, this is Dogbert's Internet Explorer 7 Helpdesk. How may I destroy you?"
"Please hold while I disconnect, erm, redirect you to the appropriate expert. Sucker!"
Hmm, I just did the acid2 test in both MSIE 7 and Firefox. NEITHER passed it. MS's background is red with a vague happy face shape over on the left side, and although firefox doesn't have the background the image is still all discombobulated.
I've been running beta2 for months now and it actually seems to work better than the previous versions by a long shot. Not nearly as many problems with loading content that has traditionally given IE problems.
The tabbed browsing has a few advantages over firefox's and a few features are yet missing that firefox's tabbed browsing had from it's earliest incarnation. Of course beta 1 of firefox was based off of a heavily tested and proven codebase, and much of IE7 has been a complete rewrite.
It would be nice to right click and "open in new tab" now and then, a feature that is glaringly absent. However I do like the new layout, it took me a while to get used to the fact that the standard button layout was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it, but once I got used to it, it worked well, probably more efficient than my previous surfing experiences. However, there should be an option to use the standard web controls that people have used since the stone age of the world wide web, as my wife, being a neophyte, hates it, and refuses to get used to it. And she cant use firefox on her web applications her work provides because firefox doesn't like cold fusion, so she sort of has to. It would be nice if she could use the familiar interface.
It also seems to load pages much faster than previous versions of IE, and dare I say it *gasp* firefox. One of the first things I tested, out of curiosity. Of course these tests were not scientifically conducted, and results can changed based on connection, and host bandwidth, client bandwidth, etc. etc. but it's competetive in that area.
Prior to downloading the beta, I was getting sick of firefox, and hadn't been having a very good experience with it for a while. Probably because of an extension I loaded or something else completely unrelated to the sacred browser itself, but it seemed to be a resource hog. I have heard there were fixes, and I applied them, but my browsing experience continued to suck. And I was considering buying opera. I figured I'd try ie7 before I went that route since I was considering a change anyway, and so far, nothing has been bad enough to chase me off. I'll continue testing it. However I'll probably still buy opera if they don't add a few features and refine a few they don't already have.
And to the guys at MS, why not make it acid2 compliant? While your at the drawing board, might as well just make the necessary adjustments. One less thing to be critisized over at least, and I doubt it would require huge amounts of sweeping changes.
... what did you expect, something profound?