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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.'"
now give me the story!
~Once you have your choices narrowed down, the rest will fall into place.
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.
Those Grapes are Sour ANYWAY!
And nothing is worse than this one:
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.
My work here is dung.
I can't find it in the repos.
While Microsoft's campaign is rubbish, unfortunately Mozilla is no better.
With FireFox, only the user can customise the browser. With IE, any remote attacker can as well!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I love my Microsoft keyboard. I love my Microsoft mouse.
I loved their Z-80 Softcard on my Apple II.
It's too bad they insist on making second-rate software. Their hardware is excelent.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
... you keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
web standards? no browser has given me more greif by completely changing the layout of a page which every other common browsr in every common OS displays perfectly fine. Not to mention all the 'made for IE' pages that look like shit in every other browser.
IE is going to have to work damn hard to get rid of that reputation amoungst developers
It's pretty hilarious on all of the categories which are ties that Microsoft admits the other browsers are better, but then discounts the reasons why because, according to them, it turns out that the category doesn't matter for some reason or another so, it's a TIE!
I clicked the "Download Now" button, and I can't find my operating system in there.
Compe up with a native Linux/BSD version Microsoft, and then we will talk.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Actually, the 'customizability' advantage comes from the fact that IE can be quickly customized by third parties, online, in real time and without even needing to notify you.
No doubt MS is overrun by business managers, which I am sure is most of their problems. To a business person, the product is the after thought, but the marketing is the most important thing. IE does not have problems because of poor marketing. It has problems because of of countless security issues with the code itself that have in the past left machines very vulnerable to malicious attempts. Any technology person can tell you this, but I bet this will not be presented as a "fact" on their marketing campaign...
They seemed to take out a couple of categories from the original chart.
* Browser most likely to cause the user to pull out hair - IE8
* Browser able to download viruses and malware the fastest - IE8
* Browser able to crash and take your whole OS down faster than a $2 hooker - IE8
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
They're using the definition of fact that says: "fact : a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference "
The catch is, it's biased people at MS who "accept it as true" on the "basis for [inherently flawwed] argument or inference"
Microsoft is becoming infamous for these bogus get the "facts" campaigns, which are really marketing attempts to use Microsoft's truth to distort common belief, replacing the facts with MS' contrived point of view.
Looks like this campaign is not even aimed at the market. Microsoft announced a lay off. It appears they are not culling the employees by performance and competence. They seem to be lopping off whole programs and letting everyone go in those programs and all the lucky ones who happen to be in the rest will continue employment en masse. This leads to low employee morale as the IE team people go, "my job depends not on my performannce but the kind of contacts my manager has with the higher ups and how well my team's output is doing in the marketplace. IE is steadily losing marketshare. Europe is going to unbundle IE and there will be a push to get IE less Windows in USA too. What is going to happen to my job? Should I bail out?". So the IE Team VP gets the higher ups to show some signs that his reportees will not be left high and dry. Just a product of internal turf war, empire building and palace intrigue within that large bureaucracy. Nothing much to see here. Move along.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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?
I had to uninstall IE8 from vista because it screwed up folder views for all of Vista. For some weird reason, on some systems, IE8 causes every folder to be opened in a new window. The only fix at the time was to go back to IE7. Pretty sad when upgrading a browser downgrades your OS.
I use a program called SpiceWorks to monitor the network, run the helpdesk etc which makes heavy use of interactive content.
I notice that the very last item is about performance.
I can load up the entire inventory of my network in around 3 seconds in Chrome and Opera. It takes 11 seconds in IE8.
Not fast at all.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I have absolutely no idea what those things are, or for that matter where in IE8 you can find them.
Why is this even being discussed. Its obviously PR. If you wanted a serious comparison go look on google for one. Honestly you don't trust the sales man to give you the best price on your car. You know he is going to fleece you. Its the same thing here.
Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign
'Microsoft Launches New Get the "Facts" Campaign' There, fixed that for you....
Fact: Internet Exploiter is PART OF THE USER INTERFACE of every windows operating system since 95.
Fact: You can't uninstall IE without effecting your core operating system functionality. (Windows updates, programs that use IE's rendering engine for their own user interface - antivirus software, I'm looking at you!)
Fact: A VAST majority of Windows users have automatic updates enabled by default and will receive IE8 whether they like it or not (and they probably won't care anyway, as most users couldn't even tell you what version of IE they're running in the first place.)
Fact: Internet Exploiter has nearly always been, is currently and will always be the most used browser on Windows platforms. Yes, suck it up FF/O/Etc fans. We will gain market share, but when you're aftermarket and not OEM, people generally don't care. How many people change the stereo in their car? Sure. You can get an awesome stereo to replace the factory one, but if the factory one functions correctly and lets you listen to music, then why change?
I have worked in IT for over 10 years in the frontline. I'm tech support at a retail store, so my customers are the general public. We load FF on every PC that comes in and encourage our customers to use it. We load IE8 on every clean install of Windows we do because, and here's a really important point, that's the only safe time to upgrade IE without having the OS get screwed over. When IE8 first became a "Critical Windows update" and customers were installing it, we were inundated with fxxked computers that lost network connectivity, or crashed, or ran dog slow.
Hell, I recommend customers use OpenOfficeOrg instead of forking money out for Office.
And you can blabber on about developers. I do some web developing myself and I adhere to the W3C standards - NOT Microsoft standards. But the END USER doesn't care. If the page works fine, then whoopedy-doo! If they run FF/O/etc and the page doesn't work, where do they go? Do they send emails to the website? Do they complain to the W3C? Do they send mail to Firefox? No. They click the shiny (e) icon and try it there. Then what? Most users will continue their browsing experience in IE. Why switch back and forth between 2 browsers? End users see that as redundant.
This may be a little off-topic, but how about an "Only works with IE" blacklist website where IExclusive (hehe, I just came up with that LOL) websites are NAMED AND SHAMED. Then promote the shit out of the site. Maybe developers who cater only to Microsoft's needs would think twice about firing up Fro... Front.... Frontpa.... damnit, I can't say it.
We'll hide your porn.
Apple Safari v3
Google Chrome 1.0.154
Microsoft Internet Explorer v8 (RC1)
Microsoft Internet Explorer v7
Mozilla Firefox v3.07
Opera 9.64
So they compare a Release Candidate vs "older browsers"?
Safari is at version 4 as a regular release, not sure about any beta's or RC's...
I'm using Chrome 2.0.172.31 right now to post this
Firefox is at 3.5 for a Beta (Or RC by now..)
Opera is at 10 for a Beta
They should have done apples to apples. When the IE8 RC was out, so was pre-releases of FF 3.5, Opera 10, as well as Safari and Chrome in more updated versions than they used.
This looks like the same thing that happened when Motorola started hemorrhaging. There were to many middle managers and they were all trying to save their jobs so they did what ever they could to look like they were doing something even if it was not value added or looked ridiculous in the marketplace. If this is not a fine example of that nothing is.
Who are they aiming at here? Certainly not this group. Definitely not developers. Anyone in IT is going to get a good laugh. It's just surreal.
It's like this ad campaign was designed when the execs were baked. It sounded good in the hot tub but when reality strikes, they discover that planning ad campaigns when you're high is a really bad idea.
If there's some super sekret ad strategy at work here I'd sure like to know what it is, because it's hard to see it as anything but a massive waste of time and money. I don't think most people even care and it reminds the development community how much they hate IE.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think they don't get it. And to be honest Mozilla no longer does too. Customization is great. It is (well, was) the great thing about Firefox. Once you start packing a whole load of features into the basic browser you are losing all that flexibility. That's what add-ons are for, giving the user choice, while keeping the basic browser fast and effective.
I'm not using IE8 this side of Hell freezing over. However, I do appreciate upping the ante and offering competition.
Mozilla sat on their asses in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, while they stuff the basic browser full of crap in the same way they destroyed Netscape. That's the one good thing about IE8 it kicks Mozilla up the ass.
Now maybe Mozilla can start working harder on memory leaks, multi-threading, making Firefox not suck on a Mac, and getting rid of needless bloat like the Awesome bar.
My first thought was to laugh myself silly with a touch of indignant rage.
But actually I take this a bit more seriously.. There is a well known phenomenon (that I am sure somebody else knows the name of) where people tend to believe what they read and we are not the target audience of this advertising tripe. Many people who will read this (and do not know better) will believe it and follow it and pass it on. And that irritates mes.
In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.
I sure have no answers, but I do not feel like mocking this kind of crap anymore.
At work I use FF - but I am forced to use IE for the corporate portal because apparently only IE can possibly work on the portal, so they paid somebody to edit the script to reject all "non-approved" browsers. That is the end result of ill informed high up decisions based on fluff like this.
As lame as this clearly is, I can't really fault Microsoft entirely; I think this is just a product of the deteriorating state of advertising and marketing in general.
Time was, you only had to take an advertiser's claims with one grain of salt, but in the last few decades it seems like there's been a kind of hyper-inflation; now, you can't even read an advertisement critically to filter the hyperbole and extract some useful information, because there isn't any left. After years of being unabashedly lied to by advertisers, we now have no choice but to assume that all advertising is pure, unadulterated lies.
It's a little sad; it only took a few companies abusing the consumers' trust to ruin it for everyone.
Can we come up with some intelligent, thought-out responses against this? I'm picturing myself in the shoes of a non-anti-Microsoft zealot and I'm seeing nothing more than "Microsoft sucks because it does" here.
And that customizability can even be applied to the OS !! Without having to click on anything ! Damn ! If only firefox could do that...
And yet when a Linux distro includes everything but the kitchen sink, that's helpful.
I just witnessed victory at hand when recently I saw someone not very computer oriented boot a random computer and say when looking at the desktop: "damn, there's no Firefox, how do I get on the Intharnet?" while IE's icon was right there.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You were thinking about maintenance.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
M$ has finally admitted that the Mac Platform runs Windows best?
The story is, quite simply, that it is appallingly easy of companies to shamelessly and flagrantly lie, to produce the most obvious falsehoods, and for absolutely no one whatsoever to bother stating the obvious fact; that they are appalling liars.
It's not even deceptive wording, or qualified phrases we're talking about here. Most companies and organisations just come right out an lie nowadays. Some choice selections from the article. Note that the tick marks in the article next to browsers are replaced by stars here.
A lie.
A falsehood.
A barefaced, shameless, utterly false lie. For you see, there is no W3C CSS 2.1 test suite. There is a Pre-Alpha CSS 2.1 Test Suite, but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases, or at least that was the case last August 18th.
Perhaps some would argue that these are merely exaggerations or omissions, not lies. I beg to differ. Taking these statements as truths would lead one to believe that IE has less exploits, less chance of exposing private data and a higher or equal chance of rendering web pages correctly that either Firefox or Chrome. All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
Some will believe them, but even sadder, more will not accept them as lies.
P.S.
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.
P.P.S.
Perhaps I'll try it in IE8!
May the Maths Be with you!
Now it tells me I don't preform well in bed and I need V1ag5a! or C1al1s!
fact (plural facts)
1. An honest observation.
2. Something actual as opposed to invented.
In this story, the Gettysburg Address is a fact, but the rest is fiction.
3. Something which has become real.
The promise of television became a fact in the 1920s.
4. Something concrete used as a basis for further interpretation.
Let's look at the facts of the case before deciding.
5. An objective consensus on a fundamental reality that has been agreed upon by a substantial number of people.
There is no doubting the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.
6. Information about a particular subject.
The facts about space travel.
Microsoft adds this to the list:
7. Something Microsoft pulls out of their asses.
"Get the facts".
They have given bogus 'facts' about their software offerings with regards to Linux, and now to Firefox. Do they think we're idiots? Are they really that scared about competition? That they need to resort to outright lying? How can you build a trust-relationship with them, if you can't trust them when they come out with 'facts'? What happened to ethics?
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
The first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Maybe Internet Explorer 8 is a born again standards compliant browser if it needs a special button to render sites designed for IE6.
What is this? Bizzaro World?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Microsoft is widely misunderstood. People think Microsoft is a software company that is often abusive. But it isn't. It's an abuse company that uses software to deliver abuse. Like for example, deliberately releasing faulty versions of operating systems.
Microsoft got as big as it is only because it was possible to take advantage of the ignorance of the average person about computers.
Ever think maybe IE7 was a PREVIOUS download for these people, that they upgraded to IE7 then upgraded to IE8? You are taking information and skewing it to fit your own bias and agenda, much as you and others are accusing Microsoft of doing.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I think Microsoft is over the line with this campaign from a legal standpoint and will get the smackdown from the FTC.
Fromt the STATEMENT OF POLICY REGARDING COMPARATIVE ADVERTISING http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/policystmt/ad-compare.htm.
"The Commission has supported the use of brand comparisons where the bases of comparison are clearly identified. Comparative advertising, when truthful and non-deceptive, is a source of important information to consumers and assists them in making rational purchase decisions."
If the page "Clearly Identifies" the basis of the comparison, I don't see it.
And
"Some industry codes which prohibit practices such as "disparagement," "disparagement of competitors," "improper disparagement," "unfairly attacking," "discrediting," may operate as a restriction on comparative advertising. The Commission has previously held that disparaging advertising is permissible so long as it is truthful and not deceptive."
As many others have pointed out, several of the claims are, to put it generously, a stretch.
Now, this is the bit where I call you an idiot. Every modern browser has support for auto-playing MP3s (unless you are on a stock Linux install in a jurisdiction where software patents are legal, but then you're as likely to install the VLC plugin as you are Flash). It is trivial to do this without needing Flash, and without the dependency on Flash it would have worked on platforms where Flash is not supported, such as the iPhone or any non-x86 *NIX system.
In short, it's less surprising that your site breaks in IE8 than it is that it works anywhere else. You do some very wrong things in the CSS (e.g. declaring a style for BODY in XHTML, which is case sensitive and only provides a body tag; a browser that actually followed the spec and didn't implement work-arounds for bad sites would not use any of your CSS). The way you are handling the animation is horrible. It reminds me of the Web circa 1999.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm not sure if you can blame any browser if your frontpage has 188 Errors, 6 warnings on the html validator.
(try hiding your script language) !
Parody of Microsoft's browser comparison
Viagra is for lovers what steroids are to weighhtlifters. I'm average to mediocre without it, but give me a blue pill and I'll give her an orgasm.
If you're over 50 all you have to do to get a prescription is ask the doctor. Insurance even covers it.
It's actually for men whose wives have gotton so old, fat, and ugly that NOBODY could get it up for them without drugs. Ever noticed that the commercials for these drugs have gius with hot wives? Christ, anybody who couldn't get it up with those women must be gay. It's for guys with UGLY wives!
Free Martian Whores!
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests. There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
So unless you accept such unofficial an unvetted submissions as proper impartial tests (whilst simultaneously ignoring the legitimacy of addons), and ignore the universally know, documented and lamented inability of IE to render properly coded web pages correctly, the no, IE does "draw even" if a Web standards comparision. THAT is the lie.
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality. IE is less secure, offers less privacy protections and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari, conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
May the Maths Be with you!