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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.
With FireFox, only the user can customise the browser. With IE, any remote attacker can as well!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... 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
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.
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
Yes, Mozilla is lying.
They put a tick next to "Compatible with modern Web pages and technologies" for IE.
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?
Tell that to my 5th Xbox 360!
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/
You speak truth, my friend. Several months ago, I begrudgingly bought a Microsoft wireless mouse/keyboard combo, because - get this - it was the only set stocked at The Warehouse (New Zealand's Walmart) that played nicely with linux.
Now, I dual-boot Ubuntu and XP. The pure gold part is that roughly 75% of the time, XP doesn't recognize the hardware at first and I have to piss around replugging the USB cable, pressing the connect button and watching tiny green flashing lights for ten minutes before I can log in. When I boot Ubuntu, it just works.
So it becomes clear, the reason that Microsoft's software is second-rate is that it wasn't made to run on linux.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign
'Microsoft Launches New Get the "Facts" Campaign' There, fixed that for you....
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.
Like you, I disagree with these "comparison charts" which let the marketing people cherry pick what options they want to show and completely hide all others. However, an important difference lies between the way these two charts are set up. The items on the chart at Mozilla are actually things that the browsers have or do not have (boolean values if you will), and therefore at least the checkmark is appropriate. On the Microsoft chart, they use the same checkmark system for things that are not 'true' or 'false' at all, like "Security" and "Privacy". They use this to suggests not only that IE is better at these fields, but that the others do not have this feature at all. It's a subtle difference that is very important to how people read the chart.
I pirated my WIndows lunch bag.
/\
|____ [not a fast learner]
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!
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.
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.