The Blog

For anyone who’s slightly out of it in regards to the browser world, Microsoft has started a new campaign for IE8 called “Get the Facts” (it makes you kind of shiver, doesn’t it?), which tells us New Ways in which Internet Explorer 8 is taking on the Competition.

The related links:

• Reasons to Install (this one isn’t that critical, as they’re comparing against IE7 and 6 [I HOPE], which aren’t difficult to beat)
• Browser Comparison
• “Myth”Busting

Browser Comparison makes me want to laugh – or cry. (Oh, by the way, who cares about Safari or Opera? They just have a piddling MORE THAN CHROME market share. It seems like Microsoft chickened out testing their namebrand browser versus Apple’s.) It also confuses me that they managed to condense such wide issues as Ease of Use and Security into check marks. Does this imply that Firefox and Chrome are completely unsecure and impossible to use, while IE8 is the opposite?

Security -  IE8 gets a check mark. Firefox and Chrome? Nah.

“Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.”

Which begs the question: is there some developer at Microsoft who’s religiously opposed to details? Pity. I would like to, you know, see some.

Privacy – Again, IE8 gets a check mark, and Firefox etc. don’t. Microsoft cites IE8’s InPrivate browsing feature.

The funny thing is…Chrome has that. It’s called Incognito and has shipped with Chrome for months before IE8 final came out. This isn’t even a biased opinion…it’s just kinda crap. I don’t know much about Firefox’s private browsing stuff.

Ease of Use – IE8? Check. Others? Nowai.

After all, every little internet user knows that a browser with a bunch of features that turn on at unexpected times is easier to use than a garbage interface like Chrome’s. Right? P.S.: The “add-ons disabled” warning bar still pops up whenever I open a new page in IE8. I followed the instructions to turn it off. But IE decides I need it anyway.

Web Standards – Finally, all three browsers get a check mark. The table, this time, does admit that Firefox and Chrome have more support for “emerging standards” but that IE has “world-class, consistent support” for CSS 2.1.

This isn’t technically wrong. After all, IE8 *does* support CSS 2.1. Of course, so do Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror, Safari, and every other browser that’s come out with a new version within the last year. It’s like Ford advertising their new pickup truck as having tires and a steering wheel.

According to Quirksmode.org, a site I highly recommend, IE8 and Safari 3.0 (a previous-generation browser) have “incomplete” support for CSS3. All the other current browsers, which include Safari 3.1 and 4, “almost” support it, which is basically a level up from incomplete.

By the way, on the Acid3 web standards test, Firefox 3.56 scores 94, Chrome/Safari/Opera 100, and IE8…20.

Developer Tools – Check mark for Firefox and IE8. None for Chrome.

This is really perplexing. Chrome is based on Webkit, which has a vaguely Firebug-like developer’s popup window (the same that comes with Safari). It comes with it out of the box. Firebug, of course, trumps all competition with its developer tools. I find the IE8 ones a bit clunky.

Reliability – Check for IE8 and none for the others.

If you prefer more frequent crashes with better recovery over far less frequent crashes with worse recovery, this part is certainly accurate.

Customizability – A check for all three.

“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.”

Does it have an equivalent of NoScript? (no) AdBlock Plus? (no) FlashGot? (no) DownThemAll? (no; by the way I’m listing the most popular add-ons on Mozilla’s site)

Compatibility – IE8: check! Firefox? No! Chrome? No!

It certainly is the Most Compatible. Illegal monopolistic business practices tend to do that (which then result in massive usage of a crap browser which sometimes requires browser-specific code). Firefox and Chrome will probably display the webpages right anyway.

Performance (skipping Management, I don’t know anything about it) - It’s a tie, again.

So —- the masses of documented Javascript and page load tests all over the web! What we need is videos made by Microsoft that show a page load in slow-mo! The video boldly states that the benchmark tests “don’t show what’s really going on.” (au contraire.) “As it turns out, Internet Explorer 8 is one of the fastest browsers.” (Yes, it’s one of the top eight. It’s the eighth.) In fact, the point of the video seems to be that Internet Explorer 8 is the browser for the uneducated masses.

Besides – and this seems like a blindingly obvious point to me – they don’t explain anything about the test. They say they take Many Factors into account, such as Browser Caching. Then they show a series of slo-mo videos of the different browsers loading webpages. For all I know, they loaded the page several times before with IE to cache it. I would go back and watch the video again to make sure I didn’t make a mistake, but the Microsoft video player stopped working correctly after a minute or so. (I’m using Safari. Thank God that at least they didn’t make a webpage that shoots out demons that stab Mac users in the face.)

I won’t get into the MythBusting section right now because I’m too nauseated to write any more about it. Then again, looking at Microsoft’s previous Get the Facts campaign, how can you expect less?