With Internet Explorer 8 out the door, Microsoft is trying to capitalise on its latest browser release with a marketing campaign outlining several benefits Internet Explorer 8 supposedly has over Chrome and Firefox. The campaign is titled "Get the facts", so I guess most of you will know what will come.
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Member since:2007-02-17
There is at least one big bold barefaced lie.
The claim that the web standards which IE8 fails to meet are "evolving" is a flat out lie.
Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome all pass the majority of Acid3 tests. IE8 passes only about 20% of them.
The levels of the web standards that are tested by Acid3 have been stable for 5 years or more in most cases, and some of them have been the standard for over eight years and IE STILL doesn't meet them.
It is not really a case that the web standards in question are "evolving" so much as it is the case that IE is a dinosaur when it comes to web standards compliance.
These are "the facts" that one needs to "get".
Edited 2009-06-18 23:33 UTC
Member since:2008-08-19
Actually, what they say - that IE8 is the best browser for CSS2.1, but that Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards - is entirely true.
That's all they're actually claiming - they don't claim to implement all definitive standards. It's just the usual story - if you do something well, shout it to the world. If your competitors do something better, downplay the importance of it. It's not lying - it's marketing.
Member since:2005-07-06
Microsoft will use what ever excuse in their book to justify why they step up to provide support for at least some routine standards that the alternative browsers have supported since God was a teenager. The only way that I can see things ever improve is if the EU forces Microsoft to implement these standards fully and open up fully all their internet technologies (Silverlight etc) and dependent technologies (the CODEC's etc used in Silverlight) for third parties to implement free of charge.
Until someone forces Microsoft to conform to the standards that exist already and put a due date for it, things will just keep either getting worse or Microsoft will use Silverlight to embrace and extend the internet in lieu of properly supporting the web standards.
Member since:2006-01-18
This is so true, the biggest lack of standards IE8 has is SVG support, there is none, zilch, nada, and SVG is not evolving anymore it is a robust standard and has been for the last 8 years!
The funny thing is that Microsoft basically forked SVG for silverlight and called it XAML, it was that good, but yet they do not provide a standards compliant implementation!
SVG support alone is one of the reasons why Microsoft lost around 30 points on ACID3. The rest is tests for other finalized things Microsoft has not provided.
Note ACID3 does not test for HTML5 elements where the argument would be valid, but only existing standards, and Javascript compliance and IE8 got around 30%!
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2006-02-05
MSI. It doesn't matter too much for home users, but in corporate windows environments it is a very big deal. MoFo has repeatedly refused to publish MSIs, which is part of the reason that IE rules in many corporate environments. There is a company called frontmotion that repackages, but they usually take awhile to get to new builds, and personally I have run into issues using them in the past.
Member since:
2006-02-05
Security: Both chrome and firefox have phishing and malware protection too
Privacy: Chrome shipped incognito mode long before IE8
Ease of Use: Every browser out there has features the others don't. What matters to you is completely subjective.
Web Standards: They pass the most css 2.1 tests because they wrote and passed them along. While IE8 is better then IE has been for ages at web standards, it is still a generation behind the competition who are supporting more and more of HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Developer Tools: While the dev toolkit is built in and is definately quite nice, firebug is the one and only real choice for web dev tools.
Reliability: Chrome has recovered my tabs after a crash several times now, and shipped process isolation before anyone else.
Customizability: If all you count is features out of the box, Opera beats everyone by miles. Opera's marketshare shows just how irrelevant a metric this actually is to most people.
Compatibility: One of two points that are true. The only sites that are not compatible with IE8 are ones using other peoples vender specific extensions to the standards, or HTML5/CSS3 features.
Managability: The second point that is completely true. Neither firefox or chrome use the accepted standards in windows package management, and because of that are a bit of a nightmare to deploy and manage on a windows network.
Performance: The rendering engine is quite fast. However, the javascript engine is still a generation or so behind the competition.
This is obviously all marketing, but very little of it are flat out lies. Most have a kernel of truth, but only if you look at it in a specific way