Busting IE8’s Mythbusting

[woodyear99]

You gotta advertise your product somehow right?
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http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/06/busting-ie8s-mythbusting/

Over the last 12 months or so I was starting to like Microsoft a bit because of their efforts in trying to connect to the users by opening up IE and Windows7 developers blog and taking inputs from everyone on what features and improvements they want to see on future versions. That takes some balls considering the fact that many people were furious with IE & Vista in general. They took a lot of these user suggestions and implemented on Windows 7 and IE8 (not enough). So, lets give them credit where its due: Windows 7 is the best Windows yet (unlike Vista) and IE8 is the best IE yet (unlike IE6-7). They are not better than the alternatives but its their best effort yet.

Recently they doubled up on their efforts on IE8 promotion. First the Browsing For the Better promotion where MS will donate 8 meals for each IE8 download (partnering with Feeding America). Even though its a bit shady, I am not going to sit in the comforts of my home and criticize something that will help those in need. Their second effort is in the form of an online competition dubbed “Ten Grand is Buried Here”, where you download and install IE8 and follow their twitter account to play a treasure hunting game. You get hints to look for the location of $10k somewhere hidden online, apparently it only works with IE8. Another shady move, but even on this one I am prepared to give them a pass, a lot of companies use this kind of promotions to get users.

But, then came the LIES.


Microsoft recently (few months?) started IE8 mythbusting on their IE8 ‘Get The Facts’ campaign. But lets take a closer look at them

[UltimateGamer]

Heh, and i read that original article about IE8 some time ago. I said to myself wow, Microsoft must be really trying here so lemme upgrade.

I did the upgrade, and found the browser severely lacking. It was slow and clunky and always freezing. Very very irritating to develop for (I'm a web developer). So i did the only thing that a sane person will do, downgrade back to ie7. Though lacking in the web standards department, it was still much better than its beta counterpart.

But now though i am rolling with ie8. Its not my browser of choice i just need to ensure compatibility across applications. The only issue is, there are alot of things that are firefox/safari/IE7 compatible that can't even smell IE8. I have to use separate techniques across browsers now, which is very frustrating (well you know time consuming).

For now, i will keep telling clients to use firefox, safari or chrome.