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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.
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but they didn't have time, seeing how they were too busy building a better browser! Good night, everybody!
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I think this is the poster child for the "itsatrap" tag.
...just got a whole lot friendlier
Reminds me of the prank they pulled on the Netscape team long time back. Not that this is another prank, but well...
Are they sure it wasn't just humble pie? :)
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.)
That was pretty classy. (Even if ultimately it was intended as a bit of good-natured competitive ribbing, which it doesn't look like.)
I have to say, often times we're prone to think that large organizations such as Microsoft are just a big, faceless entity. As a whole, this may or may not be true, but either way, they're only made up of people. The IE team only wants to ship the best software possible given their resources, as does Mozilla.
The best to both teams -- let the competition continue!
Shouldn't it be http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-wi th-love/ ?
When the cake was opened, the Firefox team found it was not quiet finished and full of bugs.
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.
While the IE team touted the cake as 'new and innovative', after further investigation, the Firefox team discovered that Microsoft had used ingredients that originally appeared in Mozilla cakes several years earlier.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Then the FF team will slowly start disappearing from mysterious causes
Remember, Microsoft disbanded the IE team shortly after 6 was released. The IE team sends a cake not just for a "birthday," but as thanks for giving them jobs!
Who says Microsoft does not give back to the open source community?
Developers later found that they were unable to open the box containing the cake. When attempting to do so, they kept getting a message from WGA telling them that it was attempting to verify that theirs was in fact a Genuine Windows Cake, then their connection to the server would time out.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
reads "Thank You for tabbed browsing."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
For a change, Microsoft's IE team was showing a bit of class and acknowledging that without the competition and innovation from Mozilla Firefox, there (probably) wouldn't have been an IE 7 project. It also hints that there might be some subtle changes in Microsoft's old Cult of Bill approach. At the end of the day, software developers are just people, and political football aside, there really is no reason for animosity. Kudos to Microsoft's IE 7 team for being good sports.
Maybe while us users squabble in our own browser war, the development teams actually don't care all that much. Maybe they truly are just glad of how everyone is advancing (as opposed to just trying to one-up each other). I'm not saying that everyone in both companies feel that way, but instead of reading stuff into this surprise present, maybe it was just a good gesture.
"But did they include the recipe?"
Was the icing #FF6666, #6600FF or something else?
Was there a nice #FF0000 cherry on the top?
AT&ROFLMAO
P.S.: No, it was not poisoned
Montgomery C. Gates: Look at them stuffing their faces, never knowing they're getting closer to the poisoned part of the cake... There IS poison in the cake, right?
Smithers Balmer: Uh, no sir, our lawyers said that's considered murder.
Montgomery C. Gates: Damn their oily hides!
So I guess Firefox is just going to forward the cake to Opera then?
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
Seems even the IE team knows that IE is dead.
As for the ex-lax, bugs, pubes in the cake of course none of that is true. Those things would only be possible if someone at Microsoft actually made the cake, and that's not how MS does things. They knew they couldn't make a good cake so they just went out and bought a cake from someone who already knew how to make one and then stuck their logo on it and called it theirs.
""The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2!"
And being the nerds they are, it was baked into the shape of Counselor Troi. The Firefox nerds, now trendy Galactica fans, merely laughed at the nerds who were so out of it as to still love "Star Trek".
Where were you when the voynix came?
the real obligatory comment is:
;-)
Nice cake...but what's with all the bugs?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The picture is hosted on flickr.
Shouldn't it have been cookies?
Ok, maybe they were afraid they don't accept cookies.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
I heard Microsoft was originally going to book the entire Firefox dev team on Oceanic flight 815....
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
After all, Firefox has probably caused more updates and work on IE than anything else. Those IE developers are probably quite thankful seeing as their budget increased quite a bit, partially because there is now some decent competition on the field.
... did they accept the cookie ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Just as they did with the Nintendo Wii and Xbox360, Microsoft is getting free publicity.
With Firefox just releasing their new version, it has eclipsed the launch of IE7. By sending a cake, which is sure to getting bloggers and slashdot to post, Microsoft directs the attention back on them. Also, it's good publicity. But we all know, no publicity is bad publicity.
SLASHDOTTERS YOU TOOK THE BAIT!
Bugs are a good source of protein. They're features!
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?
Lots of comments about how the IE team is happy to be empoyed, a friendly gesture, poking fun, etc etc. But I think this sort of thing is more common place than most of us imagine. Big companies that spend a lot of their time working on similar products follow eachother's progress very closely and are aware of the same difficulties they're both having. They may not be on the same team, but they're fighting the same battle. Even physical wartime battles have been known to halt to celebrate a common holiday, together.
I know that Terminix (a client of my company) congratulated Orkin (the evil competitor) on one of their recent anniversaries. It's a way of saying "We know what you're up against, and we know it kinda sucks. Hang in there."
My wife and I watched an episode of Dharma & Greg last night (TiVo, don't know the air date) where they're entering a dancing competition. Dharma's parents were against it claiming competition makes people mean and greedy. I see that a lot in society, and it doesn't have to be that way. Competition is to make us better individuals. Without competition we'd never progress to the next level. And because of that we should thank our competitors for putting up a good measure of excellence.
Even in sports like track and cross country where you can effectively compete against yourself, where's the push to keep getting a faster mile time, higher polevault, or longer long jump if you have nothing to compare it against? At the end of high school track meets I remember walking around and shaking the hands of everyone I competed with. If it weren't for them I wouldn't have been "in the top three" regularly. I'd have just been a dude running crappy lap times on the weekend.
Here's to competition! The evolver of our modern society. Thank your competitors, for they are what bring us a better life.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I would have sent a cake back to the IE team. Except I would have included the recipe on exactly how the cake was made along with it.
It secretly contained chopped-up bits of the IE source code. Having ingested it, the entire Firefox team is now legally disqualified from working on open source competitors.
Or something like that. It's early still.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Did Opera send them a singing telegram?
Underneath the cake is the EULA that starts with:
By consuming this cake, you agree to the following terms in the cake end user license agreement (EULA)...
Probably they sent it as thanks because they could code something other then security holes/fixes.