Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign

ko9 writes that Microsoft has re-launched its "'Get the facts' campaign, in an attempt to promote Internet Explorer 8. It contains a chart that compares IE8 to Firefox and Chrome. Needless to say, IE8 comes out as the clear winner, with MS suggesting it is the only browser to provide features like 'privacy,' 'security,' 'reliability.' It even claims to have Firefox beat in 'customizability.'"

Comments

Two wrongs...

[Manip]

While Microsoft's campaign is rubbish, unfortunately Mozilla is no better.

Re:Customizability...

[tverbeek]

If they're figuring customizability based on the number of malicious ActiveX and other BHOs supported, IE8 wins hands-down.

Two words: Active Directory

[tepples]

And what the hell does "Manageability" mean? Rate at which the browser is able to be handled or controled? What the hell?!

I think "manageability" might have something to do with the IT department's ability to control settings on hundreds or thousands of computers in an Active Directory environment through Group Policy objects. Do Mozilla, Opera, and Google provide analogous tools to manage thousands of installations of Firefox, Opera, or Chrome?

Re:Two words: Active Directory

[smoker2]

Why should 3rd parties have to provide tools to make their product work with a competitors product ? Besides which you can easily have a local repo for your customised Firefox and set them to all get their updates from that.. ( about:config app.update.* )

Re:Two words: Active Directory

[eulernet]

Firefox has a MSI version that can be deployed on a whole domain: http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/index.htm

Re:Two words: Active Directory

[parlancex]

Software settings are managed and enforced in Windows domains through a tool called Group Policy. Group Policy modules are nothing more than a collection of registry key settings tied into the Group Policy editor through a relatively simple script that exposes those settings in a more straightforward way. Not only does Group Policy allow you to specify target registry information and data directly, but it also allows you to deploy file system changes en masse to targeted files (like specfiying that an included file should be copied over %appdata%\mozilla\firefox\config.ini). Group Policy comes with a dandy IE module out of the box, but there's no reason any program can't be managed easily in an Windows enterprise environment if you took a few seconds to either find the I'm sure already existing GP module or created it yourself.

Furthermore, there are many tools available to convert standard executable installation into an MSI package and Firefox would be very far from alone in any enterprise in requiring this small nuisance.

Re:Two words: Active Directory

[lazyforker]

Furthermore it is easy for a competent admin to easily customize and lock down FF. We just started rolling out FF to 10000 PCs globally. We have a Windows PC/Active Directory environment. GPOs were used to force the user's profile locations to be a network share, configure proxy settings etc. For anyone who might be contemplating deploying FF I'd say "Yes - you can use your well-known Windows management tools such as SCCM and GPOs to deploy and manage Firefox. All the settings, configuration etc are very well-documented.".

Re:Two words: Active Directory

[dave562]

The Group Policy Objects do more than just update the browser itself. They update the settings within the browser. For example if you need to add a new site to the Trusted Sites zone, on 100,000 PCs, you can do that pretty simply with a Group Policy. Another policy mentioned updating prefs.js, and perhaps that would be the equivalent for Firefox. Group Policies can be further targetted to specific Organizational Units (LDAP containers). So in the above example of updating Trusted Sites, there might be a site that developers need access to, but you don't wnat the rest of the organization going to. With GP, you can apply the policy to the subset of computers that you want to roll it out to.

Someone else pointed out that it might be possible to write Group Policy specific plugins for Firefox. It very well might be. Maybe the Mozilla Foundation can get right on that?

Re:Excelent Microsoft products

[drunkennewfiemidget]

That's because everyone else makes their hardware for them. They just outsource it.

Re:But does it run on linux?

[morgan_greywolf]

No, but you can run IE6 and IE7.

Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Customizability

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 -- right out of the box.

How can it be a customisation if its there right out of the box. customisation means thats its MY CHOICE wether i want that feature or dont want it. If its there right out of the box then, that means that YOU have made that choice for for me and i can't get rid of it.

M$ please STOP making decisions on behalf of ME.

p.s to M$
I really dont like the Choice you made for me by including IE with my Windows installation. How do i remove it?

Web Standards

It's a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.

Did you hear that? Because my head just fucking exploded.

And what the hell does "Manageability" mean? Rate at which the browser is able to be handled or controled? What the hell?! And their little quip for this one:

Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That's just not nice.

You know what's not nice? Having to write in my freaking javascript if(IE){ do tons of fucked up shit } else { everybody else's predictable behavior }. You know what else isn't nice? The scourge of websites that will forever taint the web because you couldn't get your shit together for IE6 and then you let it fester for years.

I am so done with internet explorer in any form. This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off. Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves for making me jaded and opposed to any form of IE.

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 â" right out of the box.

Re:"Ease of Use"

[El_Muerte_TDS]

After some investigation I did find the "Accelerators", seems to be a collection of plugins to do things with selected text (other than searching the internet).
According to the help "Web Slices" appear to be special features offered by websites. So unless a website supports that you won't have any use for it. It's probably some advanced RSS feature, or widget like thing.
But "Visual Search Suggestions" remains an unknown feature.

MS. Here's a fact. This says it all...

[hAckz0r]

From the Download Center "Windows Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP" page:

Others who downloaded Windows Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP also downloaded:

1. Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP

The number one thing downloaded with IE8 is its successor IE7, meaning that they either automatically don't trust that IE8 will work correctly or that know they want to revert back to IE7 after trying it. Take your pick. Of course, if you wait until AFTER you screw up your OS its too late to be able to download the required downloader needed to fix the problem, so I concur.

Am I convinced yet about IE8? Well, the javascript on that page completely stalled my current browser of choice while just trying to load that page. I had to actually turn off javascript and force a reload just so I could cut and paste the 'fact' above. So, tell me Microsoft, is that why I should be running IE8?

Re:Excelent Microsoft products

[gabebear]

I've seen this repeatedly with Microsoft hardware I own... it is painfully obvious they don't do adequate testing.

The real fun comes a couple years into owning it, when Microsoft completely cuts support for Windows, while it still works perfectly everywhere else.

Re:what a laugh

[Dotren]

Frontpage and .Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup

Please, tell me what broken markup .net server controls emit.

I may be mistaken on this but I don't believe .Net server-side page controls, by default, translate into standards compliant HTML and Javascript. That is not to say they can't, with some modification, but just that they don't in a new install of Visual Web Developer or Visual Studio.

I would point out that while Frontpage has indeed left us with a rather nasty legacy in the form of many horribly written and horrible looking websites, the software itself has thankfully died and its successor is actually a pretty nice program. I was majorly skeptical when my previous employer wanted me to start using Expression Web but after using it a while I found it to be quite useful and I suspect the next versions of it with SuperPreview and all of that will be as well.

Re:Lies and Lying Liars.

[TheRaven64]

My reply text is being squashed into a 25 character wide column to the right of a mass of grey. It would be great if Slashdot rendered properly these days.

It appears that this is due to a bug in the CSS which prevents proper line breaking in the grey line under the comment title ('by ObsessiveMathsFreak...'). I see this quite often, but can't work out why it happily line-wraps on some but doesn't on all. If you make your browser window wider, eventually you will get to the point where it all fits on one line and then the comment suddenly displays correctly.

Re:Can we come up with coherent rebuttals?

[the_womble]

1) IE8 does much worse at ACID3, so it is less standards compliant.
2) What IE8 does out of the box covers what a few Firefox extensions do, out of thousands available. Where are Tree Style Tabs? No squint? No Script? Its All text? (to pick a few I like)
3) Compatibility not that good because there are sure to be lots of sites around that still serve IE7 CSS workarounds to IE 8.
4) Performance does matter for very javascript heavy pages, which are now quite common
5) IE8 developer tools cannot match Firefox + Web developer Toolbar + Firebug + YSlow etc...
6) The others have malware protection. What about MS's generally bad track record.
7) tab isolation and recovery are not the be all and end all of reliability: how reliable is the rendering engine for example? It is better not to crash than to recover.
8) Firefox has some terrific ease of use features, as does Opera. The search in the FF location bar, and Opera quick dial come to mind, but there are a lot more.
9) IE is Windows only, which is also bad for security.

Re:I got the facts ...

[Ash Vince]

As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.

This article is about IE8, which you do not appear to have used. The developer tools in IE8 are pretty decent, certainly far better than what comes with Mozilla Firefox by default. For starters it now also colour-codes the source code as well instead of just passing it out to notepad. I know they should have done this years ago, but we can at least recognise that they have finally done it.

I work on a very complicated, hosted web application and I have yet to find anything broken by IE8. In contrast IE7 broke a whole bunch of stuff so with this in mind I have been testing our application on IE8 since the first beta came out. Now that it has finally been released as stable I have installed it on a few of my machines and it seems to have some nice other features.

I really like the ability to highlight text then search Google for it using the right click menu. I know this is just robbed from Mozilla, buy they do say copying is the highest form of flattery.

I also like the ability to highlight text then see it translated into a different language in a little popup. Hopefully this is not patented so other browsers can now copy it but I am probably being overly optimistic here.

So all in all it is not a bad browser. On the other hand, this "Get the Facts" page did make me laugh as some of it is utter baloney. Suggesting IE8 is the only browser that offers you privacy seems to completely ignore Chrome and its incognito mode.

I also had to giggle at the performance bit since there is no way IE8 matches Chrome in real world Javascript performance. I have not benchmarked this, but in the AJAX applications I have to use on a daily basis Chrome seems more snappy and I always value how fast something feels over some theoretical benchmark any day.

And finally - they aren't comparing with Opera. Probably because they won't dare to do it!

Or they choose to not bother comparing with a browser that is not really a competitor in the desktop market. I know it has been around for years and has loads of great features and is probably more standards compliant and whatever else, but it has no market share on the desktop amongst non-geeks.

I have never once been asked by a client to ensure a site works in Opera. I keep it on my machine and test in it to be thorough. On the other hand I do get asked about Firefox a lot, Safari occasionally and Chrome once or twice. Obviously nobody would ask about IE since that is still the defacto web browser on the desktop.

Re:Can we come up with coherent rebuttals?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) IE8 passes more W3C compliance CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser. ACID3 is not an official test, covers non-standard items (CSS 3 and HTML5 are NOT standards yet) and cherry picks specific items known to be unimplemented. Being better at ACID2/3 does not make a browser more compliant with the standard. As it stands, IE8 is the most compliant browser for CSS 2.1, the latest CSS standard.

2) IE8 does have a large number of addins. They just aren't centrally managed like they are with Firefox, so quantifying them is significantly more difficult. Tabbed browsing was originally a feature of an IE addin. There are thousands of such addins, as obvious by the number of nefarious toolbars that have appeared in the wild. I had comprehensive ad blocking and Java applet blocking on IE before Firefox existed. MS's argument here is fairly silly, but to claim that IE8 is not customizable is just as silly, especially when you pick and choose only those addins that matter to you.

6) The malware protection in IE8 is only matched by the malware protection in Chrome which employed the same mechanisms. IE8 with Protected Mode on Vista with UAC enabled is the most secure browser as everything runs within the context of three different sandboxes. First, the entire process is executed within the constrained environment of UAC which runs lowest common privileges. Second the process employs UAC APIs to establish a lowest common permission set to lock down access to only that which the process requires to function, such as reading and writing the content cache. The process can't even write to the user's local profile directory without negotiating through a specific security broker API. Third, the HTML renderers are all loaded into child processes which are constrained through the job API to have a further constrained permission set. No other browser employs this level of security. If a vulnerability in a plugin is exploited in Firefox on Linux that exploit can trash the user's profile. In IE8/Vista, at best it can read files but it can't do anything else.

7) Tab isolation is better than no isolation, and it is better for one or two tabs to crash than the entire browser. You don't seem to understand the point or purpose of this functionality nor how it is implemented. The renderers are loaded as individual child processes for each group of tabs. If the renderer fails the child process dies, IE8 loads another child process for the tabs and tries again. If the tabs die more than twice IE8 stops attempting to render those tabs and displays a message to the user in order to prevent an infinite loop. This is an excellent feature and also used in Chrome.

8) IE8 can do both via addins, such as IE7Pro's EasyHomepage.

9) I do believe that item #6 covers this. Firefox running on a plethora of platforms doesn't make it more secure to vulnerabilities. An exploit of any vulnerability, either in the browser itself or in a plugin, will allow malicious code to run directly within the context of the user with all associated privileges. That is not the case with IE8, even on Windows.

Re:I got the facts ...

[Satanicolas]

I really like the ability to highlight text then search Google for it using the right click menu. I know this is just robbed from Mozilla, buy they do say copying is the highest form of flattery.

I also like the ability to highlight text then see it translated into a different language in a little popup. Hopefully this is not patented so other browsers can now copy it but I am probably being overly optimistic here.

try the ubiquity firefox addon

Re:Can we come up with coherent rebuttals?

[Super_Z]

No other browser employs this level of security. If a vulnerability in a plugin is exploited in Firefox on Linux that exploit can trash the user's profile. In IE8/Vista, at best it can read files but it can't do anything else.

Sorry to rain on your parade here, but we have already seen a IE8/Windows7 drive-by complete escalation exploit.

Re:I got the facts ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I also like the ability to highlight text then see it translated into a different language in a little popup. Hopefully this is not patented so other browsers can now copy it but I am probably being overly optimistic here.

Firefox has had an extension for this for a while now called Ubiquity. And it does so much more than just translating selected text. I doubt Microsoft would be able to patent it.

Re:Lies and Lying Liars.

[More_Cowbell]

OK, I have now stretched the window across both of my 19" monitors. Rendering is still FUBAR. Weird gray boxes around the left of seemingly random peoples comments, as well as the friend/foe colored dots tossed randomly into the middle of text.
For what it's worth, I have Firefox 3 here at work, Firefox 3.5 RC on my laptop, as well as Chrome and IE - none of them render /. properly these days :(

Re:I got the facts ...

[shutdown -p now]

Well, in practice Opera with its built-in developers tools is also faster than Firefox without FireBug installed. As for security - we'll see.