Microsoft IE8 rolls out the astroturf Microsoft is hawking the near-ready version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser at its staff in a desperate attempt to snatch back some of Mozilla’s growing market share. The company is asking its UK employees to take part in its very own astroturfing campaign by getting MS wonks to send out an email to at least ten soon to be …
Ive just downloaded the latest Beta and will be summing up courage to try it out at some point.
Will it be like all their other application updates?
Suddenly extra features added that simply slow down your machine, making the old version feel more useable and easier. Having to crawl along at a slower pase until you can convince your boss that you need a faster machine.
Please Microsoft can I have a new version thats trimmer and faster than the old version?
First person who tells us how much better Opera is will get a punch in the throat.
Thank god I don't know any friends who work at Microsoft if this news item is true, because after they have spammed me to death, I umm, wouldn't have any friends who work at Microsoft anymore...
"You know I work at Microsoft, and that I love technology," it reads. "Sometimes I love Microsoft technology so much that I can't wait to tell people about it, and this is one of those times. Microsoft has just released the Release Candidate 1 for Internet Explorer 8, and I think you should install it and use it today."
"Then, come with me to the Scientologists and take one of their friendly, friendly personality tests"
The article says:
"It comes loaded with two modes for viewing sites. The default mode supports the latest web standards such as CSS 2.1, to help satisfy EU regulators."
Well, actually, CSS3 is upon us (although I'm not totally sure of its status, I have to admit) and most browsers include at least some features of the latest standard. Rounded corners, anyone? I guess IE will catch up some day.
Having said that, I checked IE8 RC1 on a few of my sites (all of which are xhtml 1.0 strict compliant) and they render just fine. I'm very relieved to see that. IE8 beta2 made a real mess of them - sometimes rendering the banner, sometimes not (alternate refreshes could pretty much toggle between the two states), and altering the banner's position seemingly randomly - although it was perhaps linked to whether or not the cursor passed over a link. So I was fearing the worst.
As for the astroturfing ... Pathetic!
Cheers
Peter
"You know I work at Microsoft, and that I love technology,
Sometimes I love Microsoft technology so much that I can't wait to tell people about it, and this is one of those times. Microsoft has just released the Release Candidate 1 for Internet Explorer 8, and I think you should install it and use it today."
Presumably followed by a download link?
Can you hear that? Malware writers the world over just let out a massive cheer.
:/
Wow, that was an unbiased take on IE 8...not. How about some real information about it. How fast are various browsers? How do they look. How about the fact that a lot of people like IE's antialiasing, and a lot of other browsers look stone-age because they don't do AA fonts.
As for standards, what exactly does it mean when a browser has overwhelming market share, and then a European committee proclaims it has to work another way? Some of the decisions of W3C are cool, some (like the behavior of old tags like <font> with tables is just wrong, and many browsers ignore their rulings).
i feel a bit taken aback that microsoft is asking it's own employees to spam their friends. surely they pay people for advertising normally..
it's a new twist on those crappy chain letters i suppose: "if you don't send this mail to 10 friends by the end of today, a fairy will die and your loyalty & usefullness to the company will be questioned"
is there no rule to stop companies meddling in their employees private lives?
..... Pandoras' Wishes Fulfilled and XXXXPlAIned in Binary Details.
What happens if you send them AIMacrosoft UniverseCity Satellite email address ...amanfrommars@g.ho.st.
What will IT Generate? Spam or the Real McCoys?
Feel Free to BetaTest ITs Powers of QControl with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT....... For Holywood Future Productions Hollywood Style.
Which I would like you to consider is a Civilian Expeditionary Force Engaged to Military Resources and Sources for Crown Protection and Royal Warrant/Public Purse Provision/Provisional Support/Maundy Source Wealth.
Although what is the Bank of England for ...... if not to Source Wealth with Paper?
And please, let's MoveON and forget the medication nurse jokes. Everything is as should and could but maybe definitely can't now be. However ..... Thinking of what can and could and should and therefore must always have been what is to be ..... a Beautiful AInitiating Confusion every Time Love just Happens and Appears on a Wwwhim .... Llan Twittering Circuits.
How to tell when a brand/product is dead: Telling your employees to tell/beg their friends to use their half-baked, legacy-canoodling, standards-defying, user-infuriating, developer-destroying, virus-enabling, shit-bag output.
They're just mad at Goodle and becuase Google fund Moz/Chrome, we MUST COMPETE!
Roll over and die. Good dog.
I know Im going to never hear the end of this but for some reason I doubt this was intended at the author says. Two ideas come to mind. Either its an over-zealous wonk sending this out to the mailing list or a PR/Marketing drone thought this was a good idea. I really doubt its intended to be "malicious" but thats neither here nor there. Personally Im using IE8 Beta2 (thanks for heads up so I can update) at work along side the latest FF3 and its more stable in every way. FF crashes about every other time I have to fire off something in the browser so yeah, rather not use it for that when I woul dhave expected behavior like that out of a beta product not a released product.
Yes yes call me what you will dont really care. TTFN
Since I have two machines I can keep IE6 and IE7 on them and use each for testing. How am I supposed to test IE8? Microsoft could at least acknowledge this problem by allowing parallel installs of their browser instead of forcing an upgrade.
I know there's some software out there that allows IE3-6 to be installed on one machine but it doesn't work with IE7 (and presumably 8).
If you read some of the interviews from MS staff, what they said was that they hope some users who use other browsers will start ising Internet Explorer but don't expect that to happen.
Anwyay, if you look at the browser statistics you'll probably find that of the '32%' of users not using IE, a large portion, maybe say 1/2 of that, are non-windows users too.
I wonder how long it will be before all those identical messages start being identified by spam by some of the anti-spam engines?
And of course there will be the malware people who will now start sending out Fakes with links to malware downloads.
Oh fun and games.
Luckily I dont know anyone who works at MS, well not anyone who will admit to it
the derivation running something along the lines of it being an artificial form of generating grass-roots support.
I have to laugh at the disingenuous suggestion that Microsoft finally getting round to supporting (however badly) well-established standards is indicative of a love of technology...
Firefox - crashing? This comment's posted using a nightly build* - these are not even /alpha/ quality, and I don't remember the last time it crashed. (Admittedly, Thunderbird wedged today & needed "Terminate" click, probably something to do with susdid pending my laptop and bringing it back up on alternately my work and home networks for a few days without logging out, or possibly because my Exchange password was changed.)
@Don Mitchell - I don't know where you get that idea about AA fonts in non-Microsoft browsers. Apart from the fact that I've got nice AA'd fonts pretty much throughout KDE (this is on Mandriva 2009 GNU/Linux), every time I'm forced to rdesktop onto a terminal server at work I find myself marvelling at the primitive, blocky and certainly not anti-aliased fonts in MSIE . And it's been that way since, oh, 2003 at the latest.
(* Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090127 Minefield/3.2a1pre , actually, fact fans. Notice that "20090127"? That's the build date)
'Astroturfing' refers to trying to fake the appearance of 'grass roots' support (it's quite a clever coining, really). So actions like paying off PR people to post in forums and discussion threads about how awesome your product is - without disclosing their status - come under the heading of 'astroturfing'.
I wouldn't say this is actually a case of astroturfing, because there's no fakery going on. The email states clearly that the sender works for Microsoft. So there's no misrepresentation going on here - just a really bad marketing idea.
Pay attention. The article is not about IE8. It is about the astroturfing. Therefore all you say is irrelevant. Were I in a less charitable mood today, I would seriously question your intelligence, or at least reading skills.
Oh, have you sent the message to your ten friends yet?
By the way, were I a Microsoft employee, I would create myself 10 Hotmail accounts and then send the pathetic spam to them. Then forget about the accounts forever -- or until next time MS wants me to send ridiculous messages that sound like a bad advertising campaign.
If this whole story is true, of course.
Does IE8 have support for standardized cookies? Standardized as in RFC2109 (Feb 1997) and/or RFC2965 (Oct 2000)? IE6, FF2, and PHP5 only support the Netscape proposal. They don't support the standards. I don't have IE7 or FF3, so can't test those. I guess 12 years isn't enough time to implement a standard.
"You know I work at Microsoft, and that I love technology," it reads. "Sometimes I love Microsoft technology so much that I can't wait to tell people about it, and this is one of those times. Microsoft has just released the Release Candidate 1 for Internet Explorer 8, and I think you should install it and use it today."
OK, what repository should I add?
Until then, I'll be happy with Firefox on my Linux, Mac and Windows computers for a unified experience.
I have long being a FF user, and before that the original Mozilla / Netscape browser.
Hated IE6. Then IE7 caused no end of issues. But you know what, IE8 is bloody good and stable, and nbelievably faster...as another reader confers above better so than FF3.
Whether it is as secure, well that's the ultimate question for me. So for now, I will gradually migrate to IE8 when its finalised, but also keep using Opera for all the financial and banking sites.
Never trusted FF entirely for those secure sites - not because of FF itself but all those great add-ons / extensions which to be honest are written by anyone and no way can you monitor all those to ensure no backdoor / holes.
Bloody hell, at this rate I'll be upgrading to Win 7 instead of wasting my spare time f'ing around with various flavours of linfux trying to get it to run my biz apps under wine, crossover of f'ing around with win4lin and other VMs that slow my system to crawl. It's great and stable and secure, but unfortunately MS still rules the real world of the business desktop, at least for the next upgrade cycle / 5 years.
Jeez, all you weeners complaining about needing another machine to test IE8, how about you catch up with the rest of us in the 21st Century and use Virtual Machines?
Microsoft is even providing IE8 in a free XP Virtual PC:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en
It's obvious that actually learning anything new might be asking a bit much for some of you, but at least the 20 minutes you spend figuring out how to install a VPC is 20 minutes that you won't spend pissing and moaning on ElReg.
I must admit that IE7 has been my favourite browser. Nice and clean interface. For the past few months however, I've been having real trouble with Flash under Limited User Accounts (which I outright refuse to change to admin accounts). The same thing happens with FF. The only browser I've been able to get to work with LUA's is Chrome. I hoped that the issue would have been sorted out with IE8 but it behaves exactly the same way as IE7/FF. It's a pity, as I'm not too fond of the Chrome UI, but the kids and I just can't live without Flash, so we put up with it.
Using FF on my Ubuntu partition, Opera on the Wii and Bon Echo (a lightweight FF variant) on my Elonex OneT. We're OS and browser agnostic in our house !
"Can you hear that? Malware writers the world over just let out a massive cheer."
LOL good point.
Personally i'm all for this as there are rumours we may move to IE8 at work once the final release is out (up from IE6..)
Just thinking to myself a minute ago.. what is in this for MS? The browser has always been free, surely it doesn't sell OSs. Where is the profit in developing the IE product?
Firefox works well for me anyway :-)
How about IE6? 7?
Do you need another license? Does IE change when you have Vista Ultimate rather than Vista Basic? etc.
How about not making IE the core functionality so you can change the browser maybe per account to be whatever you need to frigging test against.
You don't need a VM to test FF2 and FF3 on windows, do you. So it's hardly necessary.
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