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:"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.

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?

[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: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.