IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team

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.

Comments

Of course it wasn't poisoned

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:You have to admit

[Random BedHead Ed]

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.

Re:You have to admit

[eck011219]

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.