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IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wish-it-was-a-cheesecake dept.

GDI Lord writes "The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2! "P.S.: No, it was not poisoned" " That they know of anyway.

14 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Something like they did to Netscape? by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Reminds me of the prank they pulled on the Netscape team long time back. Not that this is another prank, but well...

    1. Re:Something like they did to Netscape? by jZnat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, it seems like only yesterday people thought the blue e was the internet and had no idea what a web browser is.

      Oh wait...

      --
      'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
  2. Eww by yoyhed · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Nobody likes black frosting. Consider it an obscene gesture.

    --
    WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
  3. An improvement from the IE/Netscape days by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Better than the big IE logo they left back when IE4 shipped, although the cake surely didn't provide as cool of http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/mozilla-ie-car d.jpgpictures. (It is sad seeing the guy placing the marketshare number there, however.)

  4. Of course it wasn't poisoned by roystgnr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If it wasn't for the Firefox team, we'd all still be stuck with IE6 and the Internet Explorer team would have had to look for new jobs.

  5. I would do the same by javilon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Should mozilla not exist, there would be no IE7 team. The IE7 team must be glad that mozilla keeps releasing new versions so they can keep their jobs. Without competitive pressure M$ left 5 years pass without a IE release.

    --


    When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
  6. I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been trying to use Firefox 2.0 for the past few days. I never got around to using any of the release candidates, but I had kept reading that there were a lot of improvements and that it was going to be a great release.

    That's not what I've found. The memory consumption issues of Firefox 1.5.x have still not been dealt with. The Firefox process I'm using right now has been running since yesterday afternoon. Using the Task Manager, I can see that Firefox is taking up 593 MB of RAM. I've heard that this can be caused by bad extensions, so I didn't install any. Furthermore, I heard that Firefox's caching sometimes uses a lot of memory, so I completely disabled it.

    I've also tried IE7, and I've been really pleased. They've gotten their act together and their product works very well. I've been using Firefox 1.0.x for a long time now, but I think I might just switch to IE7. I was hoping that I could take the Firefox 2.0 route, but based on my experiences so far, that won't be happening.

    I hope the Firefox developers enjoy the cake the IE7 team sent them. They should eat it, and then get to work on fixing Firefox for 3.0. I'm hoping Firefox 3.0 finally gets around to lowering the memory consumption to a reasonable level.

    1. Re:I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change. by arevos · · Score: 4, Interesting
      That's not what I've found. The memory consumption issues of Firefox 1.5.x have still not been dealt with. The Firefox process I'm using right now has been running since yesterday afternoon. Using the Task Manager, I can see that Firefox is taking up 593 MB of RAM. I've heard that this can be caused by bad extensions, so I didn't install any. Furthermore, I heard that Firefox's caching sometimes uses a lot of memory, so I completely disabled it.

      I'm always intrigued by these comments. There's barely a time at work when a Firefox window isn't open in the background, I have numerous extensions installed, and having over two dozen tabs open is not particularly unusual for me; however, Firefox has never even come close to using up that much RAM on any machine I've worked on, even when I have that amount of memory to spare. Even the huge pages the new Slashdot comment system produces doesn't raise my RAM usage very far over the 100M mark, and the majority of that is likely caching.

      I wonder why Firefox seems to use up so much memory for some people, whilst others get away with relatively little. Did you have any plugins installed that might have been the cause of this problem?

  7. Re:You have to admit by Random+BedHead+Ed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Good points, but look at it this way: the IE folks owe everything to Firefox. Really. The fact that their offices no longer smell of mothballs is a direct consequence of Firefox's rise. Microsoft was able to keep an open and evolving cross-platform development platform at bay (i.e., the web), but the fact that their strategic product wasn't a profitable product kept development in the dark ages until Firefox came along. IE will always improve (and indeed, will only improve) if it has this competition. As one of the co-creators of Firefox said recently:

    Firefox brought Microsoft back to the table, but they make no guarantees how long they'll stick around. I can't imagine why any individual--let alone an IT department--would bet on a company with a proven track record of gross abandonment.

    IE people should be very glad there's a Firefox, and pray it has staying power. And should keep sending cakes to the Mozillers.

  8. Re:You have to admit by eck011219 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I agree -- I have a couple of friends who work in Redmond and are just as fed up with the corporate BS as any Slashdotter. But they're working on things that deeply interest them, and they (as yet) believe that they and the other very sharp people on their teams can produce better stuff than Microsoft has in the past (besides, it's apparently a great place to work, if you can get past the corporate sellout thing that so many of us have a problem with). So I'm not at all surprised about the cake -- you have to figure that the IE folks and the Firefox folks are in contact from time to time and are watching each other carefully all the time, and the IE team at MS is going to be just as interested as Firefox in getting something cool out for the public.

    The problem with Microsoft is not bad coders. I'm sure they have some, but I bet the percentage is no different from other companies. The problem is when upper management starts making coding decisions based on shareholders' concerns, or when marketing starts making standards decisions and passing them down to coders. One of the friends at MS said that pretty much all the coders he knows would much rather be working with accepted standards instead of hackneyed MS pseudo-standards.

    Anyhow, I agree completely that this was a classy move. I would still have some marketing intern taste it before the whole team digs in (lest today be remembered as the day Firefox development froze forever at 2.0!), but I think most in-the-trenches coders would be happy to pat a rival on the back for something cool.

    --
    It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  9. Re:itsatrap by jZnat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Pretty much every Microsoft story that involves someone outside of Microsoft as well has been tagged "itsatrap". I've been keeping track: all but one of the itsatrap articles have been Microsoft-related.

    --
    'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
  10. actually from microsoft? by Loconut1389 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone actually verified that the cake is in fact from Microsoft?

    I can hear the phones ringing....

    Mozilla secretary: Mozilla- home of Firefox and Thunderbird, how many I help you?
    Microsoft secretary: This is Ursula from Microsoft's browsers division- we didn't send a cake...
    *phone drops*
    ****DON'T EAT THE CAKE!****

    Or perhaps upon closer inspection, there were flakes of white powder on the bottom of the cardboard...

    I'd be wary of food items being dropped off anonymously.

    Did an IE rep physically hand over the cake and show real ID?

  11. Re:It takes time.. Give it another year or two by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    and then a strange product appears on the market ..
    http://www.msfirefox.com/

  12. Class by dr00g911 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This might be the classiest thing I've ever heard of MS doing. No in-joke, no sarcasm, here's your non-pretentious cake, you deserved it.

    It's how the rest of the world works. Healthy businesses acknowledge competition and inspiration. Their workers even go out for drinks with rivals now and again. $giantcorporateentity != $employee and all that.

    I'm not exactly heralding the coming of a kinder, gentler MS that consistently behaves like a grownup, but baby steps like this are the beginnings of a change in corporate culture and should be encouraged.

    Props to the IE 7 team, you guys showed some serious class and also delivered a great upgrade (minus a few bizarre interface choices) recently.

    Now who do I have to send a cake to to get my menus back in IE without hitting alt?

    I kid!

    (mostly)