Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign 524
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.'"
If you can't beat 'em, tie 'em? (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
IE8 and vista (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Javascript (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Double Blind (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed - as a developer, I'm sick of Microsoft throwing its weight around trying to force the world to accept its standard as THE standard. This just doesn't work in the age of the web! They were sued over it when they tried to publish J++ (their 'Standard' microsoftian Java)... they've been in countless anti-trust lawsuits over IE...
When will they learn? The way to dominate the market isn't to force your own sub-par standards on everyone else - it's to adopt early and adopt often. Be the most compatible and feature-complete and you will be a developer favorite for years to come.
As for IE - I am in agreement with eldavojohn - I will never again use IE for my primary browser. Microsoft did far too much damage with their browser under that name for IE 5 & 6. If Microsoft is such a good marketing company, then why don't they recognize a product that is not salvageable when they see one? If I were in their unfortunate shoes, I'd re-brand and rename IE... give it a nice new coat of paint and call it something new and different... make it sound like its not just IE with a candy coating. Hey - us IT folks would know better, but it might help them win back part of the non-technical market.
Most folks I know, IT or not, have a burning hatred of IE for all the s*** it put them through in its earlier revisions. They will not come back to IE... but they may come back to a Microsoft browser just so long as it doesn't look or feel like IE on the exterior. If Microsoft can't figure this little marketing ploy out then they are even more irrelevant these days than I thought them to be.
Re:what a laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that for every one of us developers that hates IE, there are 10 more developers who know nothing else and think this Firefox thing is some hippie fad, and are very adamant about it. Frontpage and .Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup, but if you're the kind of imbecile who knows nothing but Frontpage, your P.O.V. is that all the other browsers suck.
No matter how you slice it, it is always easier to support a single platform, than to support all of them. It just so happens that when you develop "for" Firefox, you're usually closer to that cross-browser goal than had you aimed for IE in the first place. But then once in a while, I'll forget to test my template in IE and sure enough, that's the one that breaks.
Who is the target audience? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Two wrongs... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its campaign may be rubbish, but it's working! Also, we have been pounding MS for sticking to IE6 for long enough. Now that they're trying to get users to switch to a better browser (IE8 may not be the best, but it's definitely a lot better than IE6) we pound them again. They may claim what IE8 is better than Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome put together, we may hate them for that, but we have to spare a bit of love for the fact that they're finally letting their users know that they can have better than IE6. Now, unless they suddenly stop supporting IE8 and put it in the WGA program, we should be thanking them.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:5, Interesting)
It shouldn't be so hard to:
if (IE) {
hack IE
Download and install FF with IE skin
Set Desktop link to point FF
Set default browser to FF
Open FF to current page
Close and uninstall IE
}
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:2, Interesting)
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:
It means that IT cannot control any setting it wants on FF or Chrome. With IE though, I can set IE settings, and the user won't be able to change them.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Two wrongs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not the best FF advert I've seen.
Having said that, I think it's not desperate and needy like "Okay... how much to use IE8? Ten grand? [microsoft.com]"
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's definitely about getting the facts. Just not all of the facts.
Can we come up with coherent rebuttals? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Translation (Score:2, Interesting)
And yet when a Linux distro includes everything but the kitchen sink, that's helpful.
Re:what a laugh (Score:2, Interesting)
WHY would they need a marketing campaign to get you to use IE8 if they didn't have a larger population of NON-IE users, hm?
I would wager a guess and say that maintaining 8 year old legacy code is far less cost-effective than something new.
The end results might not be much better, but they way they write code has surely changed, and an old beast as IE6 probably an utter beast at this point.
And say what you want about the lack of reasonable implementations of CSS and whatnot, developing for IE8 is surely better than IE6. There are of course new quirks and oddities, but the base on which to build is much wider, and with MS having realized that "oh, hey, the world is going kinda web", being restricted by their own legacy code is a really really bad thing. So they push IE8 - they don't want to be held back by themselves.
More and more sites are displaying IE6-warnings. So they push IE8 - they don't want their users to see that what they're using is crap.
Yet other sites are BLOCKING IE6. So they push IE8 - see previous point, and add a couple of bold exclamation marks.
It's all about the bottom line. Less money for maintaining a dying piece of software, more users led to believe they're actually using something good (if they don't see messages about how bad it is on their favorite social networking site or whatnot, how do they know?).
But then again, I'm just pulling guesses out of my ass.
Re:Excelent Microsoft products (Score:3, Interesting)
The best input device I have ever used, bar none, is the Microsoft Trackball Explorer.
It was so good, in fact, that Microsoft - inevitably - stopped selling it, in favour of a crappy unloved cheapo thumb-ball. The proper Explorers now sell on eBay for $150 and up - if you can get one. The ball alone sells for $45. Heheh, balls.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:2, Interesting)
If I were in their unfortunate shoes, I'd re-brand and rename IE... give it a nice new coat of paint and call it something new and different... make it sound like its not just IE with a candy coating. Hey - us IT folks would know better, but it might help them win back part of the non-technical market.
Most folks I know, IT or not, have a burning hatred of IE for all the s*** it put them through in its earlier revisions. They will not come back to IE... but they may come back to a Microsoft browser just so long as it doesn't look or feel like IE on the exterior. If Microsoft can't figure this little marketing ploy out then they are even more irrelevant these days than I thought them to be.
It's the other way around. IT people will recognise the change (and maybe for the better, if they get the act straightened out and provide something that adheres to standards), but 'the common people' will be confused. Just think about it, IE is the most brilliant name you can name any internet browser. "Internet Explorer", explore the internet. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, all great names, but the name itself has absolutely nothing to do with internet. Just replacing the familiar E icon with something else will confuse users, since most of them see that little blue icon as The Internet, not a program to view websites through. I've recieved loads of phonecalls or general questions about why their internet has changed all of a sudden with the release of IE7, and people who couldn't find their IE icon since it was a other shade of blue. And that was with just a little change in the layout of IE and an icon change! Imagine what would happen if they revamp the whole 'theme' of IE, or replace it with something entirely different.
As a webdeveloper, I'm already glad that IE8 does things somewhat along standards, instead of that hackjob implementation of "The Microsoft Standard©", along with the fact that other browsers are gaining ground. Atleast now normal people with their default searchbar ridden browsers can look at my site and see something that looks somewhat allright, instead of all the crap you used to put up with, such as non-alpha pngs, things alignment out of whack, half-assed attempt at CSS implementation, etc.
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is pathetic and infuriating at the same time, which is common with MS propaganda. As I went over the list (as well as the mythbusting [microsoft.com] bit) I laughed in a "black humor" sort of way -- it reads like a parody, kind of like something you'd read on TheOnion.
Isn't it nice that as long as you keep things just ambiguous enough, you can use the word "FACT" in an ad to state just about anything. At some point, if the law doesn't intervene, they will start positioning Google as the "Dark Corporation that spies on you", and Apple as a religious cult. I'm pretty sure they could do that now and they'd be un-sue-able.
Re:Translation (Score:1, Interesting)
Isn't it the fixing of memory leaks and improved memory management that made FF3 so slow? Chrome doesn't give a shit about memory management and that seems to be a really popular strategy with browser fans this month.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, our corporation has mandated IE6. Sometimes its about managerial stubbornness, not user awareness.
Your CTO or equivalent should be putting a stop to that, and if he is not, he is not doing his job.
P.S. WTF is up with comment post dialog. Nice work, slashdot. Fucked it up AGAIN.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:5, Interesting)
Web standards (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:2, Interesting)
The Web Standards statement is the one that absolutely freaks me out the most. We don't even need to start talking about CSS. We can talk about really really simple stuff like HTML unordered lists. From what I remember in my testing, IE6 (and IE7) displayed them differently than FF, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (lining up the bullets outside the margin of paragraphs above and below). Why?
FTC Advertising Guidelines (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [ftc.gov].
"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.
Re:IE8 performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:IE8 performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
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) !
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:3, Interesting)
He could be forced to himself.
I am currently forced to support, if not mandate, IE6. Reason? Our main web application was programmed braindead enough to work only (!) in IE6. Yes, the dev team are migrating it. Rather, they've been migrating (and billing) for almost 2 years now.
What? Do without? The company hangs on that effing application. Vendor lock-in doesn't only exist in consumer electronics...
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:3, Interesting)
but don't need this kind of guerrilla marketing that pretty much pisses people off.
Actually, I am not too sure if that is a bad thing. I have this warm fuzzy feeling in my belly that with each marketing campaign that pisses people off, MS are bringing themselves one step closer to the tipping point where people will start dropping anything with the MS logo on it as if it were a red hot fire-poker.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up.
Firefox deployment is seriously hampered by the lack of official MSI packages and administrative templates for Group Policy.
Lots of people have pointed out that some random third parties have MSI packages on their website. That's nice, but my boss won't deploy a core application downloaded from some guy's homepage. So what's left... I can roll my own package, except that Firefox has hundreds of fiddly little files, which change rapidly across versions, so I have to do this over.. and over.. and over. By hand. For every release.
If Mozilla devs had half a brain, and actually read any one of the dozens of feature requests that have been sitting in bugzilla for years now, they would have added an MSI build step to the build script, and with almost zero effort they could be spitting out MSI packages automatically. They wouldn't have to change their setup program, they'd just have to add a link to a "administrative download" page for network admins with the MSI packages there. Lots of vendors do this. For example, you can get MSI packages for the Flash plugin.
I just can't understand why they wouldn't have done this years ago. Maybe they feel like anything Microsoft is 'teh enemy', but then again something like 85% of Firefox installations are on Windows... so that would be silly.
I suspect that the real problem is that the Mozilla devs completely and totally ignore bugzilla issue reports. I don't know why they even bother running the website. They should just turn that server off to save power.
I can understand if they ignore random feature requests by 'AweSomeHax0r57', but the devs also seem to ignore common showstopper error reports that cause severe data corruption, so I'm fairly certain they just ignore the whole site.
For example, back around the 2.0 days there was a bug that would wipe all your settings, including bookmarks, history, cookies, everything. If you were a Thunderbird user, it would also blow away your mail too, for your convenience. Even without the source, I figured out the problem in 30 minutes: It's the same issue that plagued ext4 - Firefox was writing settings out by simply overwriting your files in-place, one line at a time. If it crashed during shutdown, you ended up with almost nothing left, and your bookmarks, history, everything would be wiped. I cheerfully created a Bugzilla account so I could report my findings, but found to my dismay that the error had been reported already... four fucking times. Each duplicate had hundreds of messages from panicked users begging for help in restoring their data. Some of the reports were old. They had accumulated serious history, across major product releases. At least three of the reports had users reporting the precise cause of the issue, the area of the source where it was happening, and at least one guy had proposed the correct fix (the atomic rename method for replacing files).
I still sometimes lose all of my settings in Firefox. It's rare, but it happens. I suspect it's something else these days, but as far as I know, that file-overwrite bug wasn't fixed for something like two or three years.
If the Mozilla dev team can't be bother to fix a showstopper data corruption bug, I'm not holding my breath for 'enterprise features'. Until they get their act together, Firefox will always be that 'other' browser in the corporate world.
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:1, Interesting)
Interestingly it would appear that Microsoft is only prepared to blatantly lie in the US and not the UK.
Compare:
IE US Home Page [microsoft.com]
IE UK Home Page [microsoft.com]
It seems you cannot get the "facts" in the UK.
(Perhaps Microsoft is taking a leaf out of the UK governments book?)
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [w3.org], but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases [msdn.com], or at least that was the case last August 18th.
This is the most interesting lie I noticed. For the record, if all 3221 of those test cases Microsoft submitted to the W3C are legitimate (and, if the W3C has incorporated them into the test suite, I would hope that they are), then it doesn't particularly bother me that Microsoft's contributions make up 87% of the test suite. What it tells me is, Microsoft has been very active at finding CSS bugs in IE (which, to be fair, is rather like shooting fish in a barrel). It just happens that the CSS bugs that Microsoft has fixed recently aren't all the same ones that Mozilla and Apple and Opera have fixed. That's fine. Test suites are one of the ways we can quickly identify bugs that need fixing, and by contributing to the W3C's CSS test suite, Microsoft is actually helping other browser vendors to find their own bugs. This is a Good Thing.
However, this is obviously not a complete test suite, and I'd bet IE doesn't "[pass] more... test cases than any other browser" by a particularly wide margin. Presumably, IE passes all the tests that Microsoft has submitted, which is 87% of them. I'd guess that pre-release versions of other browsers probably pass even more, but Microsoft probably only compared shipping versions (which is fair, but doesn't tell the whole story).
Interesting that they single out Firefox 3 for having "more support for some evolving standards." Are they referring to things that Firefox 3 supports but Chrome doesn't, or are they being disingenuous again?
Re:Two words: Active Directory (Score:1, Interesting)
It is a great strength. But most management sees "Third party huh?, Not supported, no go" or "So this was built by some nerd in his mother's basement? No way it can be any good!"
Enterprise is all about perception, not actual results. If Mozilla doesn't step up to the plate and provide this (or at least slap their name on it) it will never fly. This is the way things work, because the great masses of people lack the basic knowledge about computers (understandable) but refuse to listen to those who know (lack of respect for our profession).
Ah, the joys of a newly created profession. Machinists and Welders went through the same growing pains. (My family goes back 3 generations of modern Machining and Welding, LONG generations, ie my Grandfather was 75 when my mother was born, and so on, we have a huge written history about this in the family. Writings my Grandfather had that we're pretty much written bitch fests about the lack of respect from managers (in his early days) to lack of respect from customers (Unrealistic requirements, timeframes, and stuff that just can't be done. Its quite amazing the parallels between his own frustrations and ours.)
Just give it time, Open Source will grow as respect for our profession grows. As respect for our Profession grows the uninitiated will listen to us better. When they begin listening we can push to actually do stuff the right now. Once we do stuff the right way, we can improve. Its a slow process, but all professions in history (maybe sans Prostitution, they can't get past step 1 for numerous reasons, and Dolphin Protectionists.. *growls* Oh how I loathe them) have gone through this same exact process. Just because WE move at the speed of electricity (and light) does not mean the rest of the world does.
All that said... /me whines with everyone else. I tried to get the Firefox MSI through RFC, was denied twice. =(
Re:Two wrongs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Mozilla is lying.
They put a tick next to "Compatible with modern Web pages and technologies" for IE.
Well, Firefox doesn't pass ACID3, so they have to consider ACID2 to be "modern", and IE8 passes that just fine...