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MS To Slip IE8 Into Vista and XP Through OEMs

Posted by kdawson on from the for-our-own-good dept.

crazyeyes writes "Microsoft says it's 'optional,' but they are already planning to slip Internet Explorer 8 into all Windows Vista/XP PCs by March. MS claims that IE8 will offer better performance and security. But what about unwanted stuff like 'Monetization opportunities (for OEMs)' and 'These services will be used (by OEMs) to deliver brand exposure... to the users'?"

26 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. IE has had these for ages by TheSpoom · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ever notice the "Internet Explorer provided by Dell" title bar?

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
    1. Re:IE has had these for ages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Fap fap fap

    2. Re:IE has had these for ages by Aphoxema · · Score: 5, Funny

      We could just start naming the articles "Microsoft still exists" and the content could be "Microsoft is still out there doing something and it's that time of day to bash them for it".

      I'm quite happy with this idea, myself, for I find bashing Microsoft regularly to be a healthy practice. Everyone should do it and most people probably do in their own privacy.

      I understand some people may need some 'stimulation support' with unclothed Firefox logos and centerfolds of penguins and free software ganging up mercilessly on bound bits of Windows and Photoshop. I, personally, have no need of these devices and will happily sneak a Microsoft bash in when no one's looking. Sometimes I do it out in the open, but only in places I'm sure nobody knows me.

      --
      "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
    3. Re:IE has had these for ages by RonnyJ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Recently the standard of Slashdot articles about Microsoft has taken a huge nosedive, any opportunity to bash them seems to be taken. It used to be mainly misleading summaries, but nowadays anything with an anti-Microsoft slant, even something basically made up or down to the incompetence of the submitter, seems to get posted.

      http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/06/1544207 - bashing Microsoft for letting you download Microsoft software on another PC besides the one you intend to use it on.
      http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/16/2259257 - the worst example I've seen - unfounded, unproven allegations with no substance whatsoever.

    4. Re:IE has had these for ages by Rary · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Just accept that Slashdot needs at least one masturbatory Microsoft bashing article every day and let the geeks get on with the wanking.

      What, kdawson's previous "some guy tried to pirate Photoshop and then failed to understand how reparse points work so therefore Windows 7 is full of evil DRM" pseudo-article wasn't enough for today?

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

    5. Re:IE has had these for ages by LMacG · · Score: 4, Funny

      Exactly. On the very rare occasions I need to use IE, it amuses me to see "Internet Explorer provider by Robot Aliens".

      --
      Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
    6. Re:IE has had these for ages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      We could just start naming the articles "Microsoft still exists" and the content could be "Microsoft is still out there doing something and it's that time of day to bash them for it".

      I'm quite happy with this idea, myself, for I find bashing Microsoft regularly to be a healthy practice. Everyone should do it and most people probably do in their own privacy.

      I understand some people may need some 'stimulation support' with unclothed Firefox logos and centerfolds of penguins and free software ganging up mercilessly on bound bits of Windows and Photoshop. I, personally, have no need of these devices and will happily sneak a Microsoft bash in when no one's looking. Sometimes I do it out in the open, but only in places I'm sure nobody knows me.

      Sweet Merciful Crap, did you just invoke Rule 34 on Microsoft bashing? I just got an image in my head of what that would look like. The horror... the horror.

    7. Re:IE has had these for ages by RonnyJ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As an addition, even those who have serious issues with Microsoft would do best to ignore these 'stories' and even perhaps make a stand against them themselves.

      Posting half-truths, exaggerations and downright untruths discredits Slashdot probably more than it does Microsoft. If Slashdot focused on legitimate problems and grievances, and actually verified the accuracy of what they post, it would give those legitimate grievances far more weight than Slashdot carries right now.

  2. Rule of thumb. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anybody who uses the word "monetize" or any variant thereof, is not to be trusted.

    1. Re:Rule of thumb. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Profit isn't evil; but when people start spouting grotesque pseudowords referring to it, I get nervous. "Incentivize" is another troublesome one.

    2. Re:Rule of thumb. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Profit isn't evil; but when people start spouting grotesque pseudowords referring to it, I get nervous. "Incentivize" is another troublesome one.

      Tell me about it. This guy on the street offered to galvanize me for free. I thought, hey, that sounds cool. The next thing I know I've got a face full of hot zinc and I'm getting tazered.

    3. Re:Rule of thumb. by gardyloo · · Score: 4, Funny

      They're just verbing their nouns, thereby incentivizing efficiency.

    4. Re:Rule of thumb. by spun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, because it's a euphemism for "let's find a way to take this previously free thing and charge people for it." It is a deceptive phrase, spoken by pointy haired bosses and marketroids with black little hearts and the morals of rabid weasels.

      It's not that profit is evil, and money itself is not the root of all evil. The desire for money is the root of all evil, and this phrase is used by people who get a stiffy thinking of all the ways they can screw you out of yours. They fall asleep dreaming of ways they could monetize breathing. "Hmmm, zzzzz, poison the atmosphere... znurk, hmph, sell oxygen.... yeah... zzzzzzz"

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
    5. Re:Rule of thumb. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I am Iron Man.

    6. Re:Rule of thumb. by Gonoff · · Score: 4, Informative

      I do think so.

      There are a number of real words that would fit the bill in your example. They include...
      encourage
      cause
      incite
      persuade
      and lots more. The English language has an enormous number of words. Sometimes, when there isn't an appropriate word, one needs to be invented. Sometimes they are imported from other languages and sometimes they are existing ones used in a new way.

      What it does not need is sub-literate PHB buzz-speak. That fits the word "pathetic". That sort of excuse for communication just shows the need for basic literacy.

      --
      I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
  3. standards by incripshin · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll be happy when the Internet becomes more standards compliant. If it needs to be funded by Dell, so be it.

    1. Re:standards by davester666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, if you want Dell to help make that happen, maybe encourage them to shovel money in a direction other than Microsoft, as it'll happen MUCH MUCH FASTER.

      While IE 8 is more standards compliant, it is still significantly behind it's competition (Safari/Webkit, Opera, FireFox to name three). It's pretty sad, given that MS has thrown the most number of developer hours at it (except perhaps for FireFox), that IE 8 is still behind, but it's not the developers fault. Management has basically ordered them to make sure that IE helps them sell IIS and developer tools, because the corporate intranet sites will 'work best' with IE, and only with extra effort work OK with non-IE browsers.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  4. Re:Oddly enough by cryfreedomlove · · Score: 5, Funny

    You're lucky!

    At my place of employment, we're still using un-networked Apple II computers so we can utilize a rocket thrust calculator written in BASIC by our founder. He's been promising us 64K Macs for the past 20 years but I'm not holding my breath.

  5. IE must be architecturally borked by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.

    Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.

    At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.

    MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  6. New computers need *SOME* sort of browser by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A new out-of-the-box computer with no browser at all would not be fun - especially for the non-computer-literate user who doesn't have another system to download with.

    So, if a manufacturer is shipping a box with Windows, why not supply the latest version of Internet Explorer??

  7. Re:Oddly enough by Nerdposeur · · Score: 4, Funny

    Luxury.

    At my place of employment, we have to use an abacus with razor-sharp beads, and when we get done, we have to verify our numbers by writing longhand division with the lump of coal we all share.

  8. "Incite" by XanC · · Score: 4, Informative

    The word is "incite", not "incentivize". There's no need to make up a new word when the word you're looking for already exists.

  9. Why branding ? by billcopc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I never really understood the value of OEM branding. I've already bought the damned PC, what more do they want ? Having a stupid Dell logo spin in IE while their site fails to load, is not going to make me want to buy more Dell gear.

    People take branding way too seriously, especially when we're talking about major brands that everyone knows.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  10. Re:F*ck Microsoft by Aphoxema · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back in "the day" when I still regularly used Windows, I made it a habit to reinstall Windows at least once a month. What I really did towards the end was just archive the entire Windows/Program Files/Documents directories in Ubuntu and restore them as needed.

    --
    "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
  11. Re:And Microsoft deserves it. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But how can one disagree with the truth?

    It would be good if MS-bashing articles contained any truth than, rather than a random assortment of hearsay, wild conjecture, lies, and outright idiocy on behalf of the author, like that recent one about "super-DRM" in Windows 7, which ended up being just a guy using a bad crack for Photoshop, and not knowing what an NTFS junction is.

    Oh hey Visual Basic, case-sensitivity would like a word!

    BASIC has been case-insensitive since it first appeared. VB is a dialect of BASIC. What's surprising about it?

    A lot of other languages are case-insensitive too, by the way, and quite a few people consider case sensitivity to be a bad idea. I'm not in that camp, but it's certainly not a strong point for you to debate on.

  12. March? They're rushing IE8. This could be bad. by TodLiebeck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a developer of an AJAX-based web framework, I'm upset to see IE8 being thrown out the door so quickly. RC1 was nothing short of a disaster: it had a performance bug where nesting absolute-positioned DIVs would result in exponential performance decreases.

    Test case here: http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/ie8/

    The 25-nested DIV test would require killing the browser. Nesting absolutely positioned DIVs is somewhat fundamental to delivering application-style user interface layouts in a web browser.

    I reported this bug everywhere I could, and Microsoft actually did a great job in responding to it. They say they've found it and fixed it. But there is no way for us to test this. We must simply take their word for it and wait. They're going from RC1 to final, and begging and pleading for an interim build didn't warrant much of a response.

    From reading forums (e.g. Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/push-back-digital-tv-or-ie-8), my IE8 experience is not uncommon with other web frameworks as well. The average developer's opinion there suggests RC1 is nowhere near ready for a final release. Every build of IE8 (beta1, beta2, win 7's "beta2+", and the RC) have each had major unique problems not found in other releases.

    I have developers asking me if their software will work in IE8 on day 1 and the only honest answer is "I have absolutely no idea." Anyone (without a final build) who tells you otherwise, even offerring a rough estimate, is a liar, IMHO.

    I don't understand the point of putting out a "release candidate" and then not using feedback to determine whether the next release is a "candidate" or a "final". Our bug alone means that IE8 RC1 has never been publicly tested with many complex web-based applications.