Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral 151
Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."
Hate to speak ill of the dead, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sadly, you have to posses the protection and know how to use the protection for it to be effective.
It never succumbed to viruses (Score:2)
BTW the roses from Microsoft are infected with a plant virus.
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Re:Hate to speak ill of the dead, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Back in the day, when IE 6 was released, it was easily the best browser around.
IE 6? I was happily using Opera at the time.
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Stop being such a grammer nazi.
I invoke Goodwin on you, sir!
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Not true. I actually know what the announcement is going to be, and it's going to make a lot of people who visit sites like Slashdot happy (or surprised).
Here's a hint: it's about supporting a standard that no one thought Microsoft would support.
Maybe a new version as well..
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
HTML?
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Awesome. So Microsoft is planning to release IE9 sometime in early 1998?
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OGG Theora? SVG? PNG?
Microsoft will have to follow the standards this time because people (web developers and knowledgeable customers) won't put up anymore with custom development for specific browsers. ActiveX bit and will bite many corporate customers in the behind and with the plethora of portable devices, computers are not the only hardware that receive the web anymore.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
That's OK, corporations are starting to move on....to Silverlight ;-)
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Nothing wrong with that. SL will work on FF, IE or Safari, and on Windows or Mac.
Plus its a great way to use all those MS devs out there, who (like me) don't know Flash.
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I agree it's an improvement. But why can't corporate types just use HTML/CSS/minimal Javascript and let their software run on ALL platforms? Why does the core of any web-based corporate software have to be some plugin-dependent binary?
Re:Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Translation (Score:4, Informative)
For one, because Silverlight makes writing web-apps much easier.
No, what you get when you use Silverlight are *Silverlight* apps. There's a difference, and not knowing that difference is why we're in the "Can't move away from IE6" problem. Learn the lesson, please.
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Because I can write and test it ONCE on Silverlight, instead of dealing the sthe stupid idosynocies of each browser. Oh, and with Silverlight I can do most of my UI testing automatically if I use patterns like MVVM. Seriously, testing a website blows because its so time and resource invensive; I literally have to sit down with each browser (and usually mutiple versions of the SAME browser) and MANUALLY test.
In other words, its much cheaper.
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Microsoft will have to follow the standards this time because people (web developers and knowledgeable customers) won't put up anymore with custom development for specific browsers.
Wishful thinking. That's exactly what was said before IE7 came out. And then again before IE8 came out. I'll believe it when I test their next browser myself and see that it works. This is the realist in me talking.
The cynic in me says that even if they DO start supporting realistic standards, they'll probably turn around and try
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Out of curiosity, what do you have against IE8?
I haven't had to jump through any hoops for it, but on the other hand I'm working mostly in Javascript and DOM, and less in layout/CSS-type stuffs.
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Out of curiosity, what do you have against IE8?
I haven't had to jump through any hoops for it, but on the other hand I'm working mostly in Javascript and DOM, and less in layout/CSS-type stuffs.
I deal almost entirely in HTML/CSS issues, which is my problem with IE8. I'd dearly _love_ to be able to use border-radius without having to load some javascript hack to make it work with IE (all versions). It's not that the browser can't DO them, it just requires a javascript hack to make it understand the standard
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That's correct, SVG support is required in order to pass Acid3.
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ODF?
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it's about supporting a standard that no one thought Microsoft would support.
W3C standards?
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Here's a hint: it's about supporting a standard that no one thought Microsoft would support.
I'm guessing Theora
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Assuming you're talking about HTML5 in IE9, isn't that (almost) common knowledge right now? You act as if it's some huge secret.
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IE9 is entirely rebuilt with 100% HTML5 support. SVG support.
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Don't you mean MS' flavour of HTML5
and MS' flavour of SVG?
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What? Are you saying embedded .NET applications stored as Base64-encoded strings in XML aren't in the SVG standard? (Yeah, I made that up but I develop .NET apps eight hours per day and sometimes I can't tell if the larger Java frameworks or C#.NET is worst when it comes to that kind of "enterprise ready" behaviour)
/Mikael
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
I've already said too much. They're looking for me now, I can hear the helicopters.
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They're going to use the Webkit renderer.
Something was missing.... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody is completely evil (Score:5, Funny)
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The firefox 2 cake was pure evil. Cake with black icing stains teeth and it is very hard to remove with anything but a long brushing. Pretty much any bakery will advise you to not use black icing for an office party for this reason.
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Wasn't our fault. We ordered over the phone, and that's what the bakery did.
For Firefox 3, we had an IE alum living in the area who could go talk to the bakery, so you got a better cake.
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You couldn’t just tell them to “put the internet icon” on it?
(Don’t ask me “what internet icon”... you know exactly what icon.)
Such a pity (Score:5, Funny)
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It's so sad when a parent outlives a child.
Not in this case...
Re:Such a pity (Score:5, Informative)
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Um, no. In fact, the child outliving the parent guarantees that it *won't* become a zombie, unless you've broken init.
The flowers I'd send (Score:4, Interesting)
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flower by the snail mail
Say it with dead flowers at my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave
No I won't forget to put roses on your grave
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And another girl to take my pain away
Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning..."
IE 9 perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm.. So they might show up with a build of IE 9? Would be appropriate (turn a 6 upside down).
I feel sorry for the IE team at Microsoft - they get a lot of flak for a situation they didn't cause. They didn't choose to discontinue browser development in 2003. Where it up to them IE 6 would have been superceded in 03, 04 at the latest, instead of 07. And if IE 7 had come sooner IE 6 wouldn't have become as entrenched as it is now.
Re:IE 9 perhaps? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't. They openly ignore standards, because they don't see it as necessary. I was at an event where the IE team lead (this was a month or two before IE8's release) gave a talk and was answering questions. He said that IE8 will support "most" of CSS 3. Someone asked why not all of it, he replied to the effect that they don't think the parts they left out "mattered". When asked how it did on the ACID test, they said that it didn't matter, because that test doesn't test anything that's necessary (and it requires things that they didn't see a reason for)... Keep in mind, this was a developer, not a manager. So unless management has it so ingrained in their heads that "This IS the only way", these decisions are being made at the development team level... And you wonder why IE sucks so hard in comparison (and is a thorn in the side of every web developer). It's not that they don't follow standards. It's that they purposely don't follow them... They know better, but make the rational choice to be different. I have no pity for someone who thinks like that...
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yeah but in fairness most developers don't get to choose feature sets. Those are chosen by "business people" that know it all.
Re:IE 9 perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
But perhaps he's right? Everybody likes to jump on ACID as some ultimate measure of a webbrowser's worth. Neither ACID2 nor ACID3 were based on the most important or commonly used features of HTML, JavaScript and CSS, but a sampling of obscure little bits that most webbrowsers were doing wrong at the time.
As useful as ACID are, it's important to realize that they are NOT proper compliance tests. It could be argued that one of the real failings of the W3C standardization process is that they never produce a compliance test suite. So you can't accurately state that a browser (like IE) poorly supports relevant standards, without relying heavily on anecdote.
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Hell, if they even made a halfhearted effort to comply with standards it would be an improvement.
I’m not asking for 100/100 on Acid3 (Firefox is only at what, 94/100)... Internet Explorer is only just finally passing Acid2.
Re:IE 9 perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
You missed the parent's point completely. If the test is useless, or mostly-useless (which I personally believe ACID is), then who gives a shit what score IE gets? And, more importantly, why should the IE team waste their precious time caring about it?
Since there's no good reference implementation, and since the W3C is fucking awful at writing standards, frankly I don't blame the IE team for anything that's happened. My only gripe is that they stopped development for so long, but then again-- why would they have bothered to developer it since their major competitor, Netscape, gave up? So even that I have trouble criticizing them for.
Microsoft are masters of pragmatic code. The W3C is nothing but pie-in-the-sky good intentions that don't actually get day-to-day business done. (Proof: pick a successful website, any random website, check to see if it validates. It doesn't.) While the W3C was dinking around with some moronic plan to make HTML XML compatible, for several years and for God-knows what reason, Microsoft was creating real useful code.
Look, I have no problem with people writing perfectly compliant websites, or perfectly compliant browsers, but peopel on Slashdot act as if your perfect renderer is Jesus. It's not even a tenth as important as this forum thinks it is.
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Acid2 was mostly focused on getting stuff like CSS layout to work correctly, if I’m not mistaken.
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When I looked into it back when it was new (and my memory might be fuzzy here, bear with me), I remember it being primarily about how browsers handled rare edge cases and errors, more intended to test error-handling than whether or not the page was rendered how its creator wanted it to be rendered.
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Well... considering the number of ugly CSS hacks that had to be done to make a page compatible with both compliant browsers and IE... I don’t think the IE team was “only” ignoring the standards that weren’t “important” or not widely used.
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I'm not saying they were. In fact, I really have no clue what you're replying to. For example, you bring up standards, but the ACID test isn't one.
What I'm saying is that the ACID test doesn't necessarily test anything that Microsoft is interested in testing. Or anything required to make a quality web browser. That's all I'm saying.
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I know it's completely out of place when discussing adherence to web standards, but the last part of your post:
It sounds like a citizen in a totalitarian state with stockholm's syndrome. ;-)
They did choose to build the piece of shit (Score:1, Troll)
IE6 is a piece of shit and the devs who build would either have to be criminally incompetent or they did it on purpose.
And IE7 is little better. It is just XP compare to Vista. When you are the bottom, every direction is up.
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Actually, they did cause a lot of that situation. IE 6 was implemented to use completely proprietary standards, and it was a focal point for MS vendor lock-in. It was designed to pretty much launch anything that said "you should launch me." Years were spent patching its numerous security holes, and that comes back to the team that developed and supported it.
Yes, they might not be at fault for the discontinuance of development. Yes, newer editions may have lessened the impact. But the browser was design
Re:IE 9 perhaps? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they did it in 1998, yet shat out IE 6 after.
It's not like IE 6 was some first, beta version that they sent out that got adopted before it was ready. It was the sixth major release! They stopped caring because they had market share based on monopoly, not a superior browser. It wasn't until Firefox gave them serious competition that they started trying to fix it.
"Thanks for the good times IE6" (Score:1, Redundant)
Oh yeah... good times, good times.
It's funny they didn't bother showing up. (Score:1)
Were the flowers sterilized? (Score:4, Funny)
And shortly afterward, plants surrounding the funeral began to wither and die from a exotic new fungus.
Re:Were the flowers sterilized? (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, Microsoft has a working fungicide but they refuse to ship it until next Tuesday.
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The fungus immediately bloomed into advertisements, and funeral organizers had difficulty pruning quickly enough to keep up with what they are now calling "deadware".
Human moment (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's a fantastic gesture on their part. Yes, it's all in good fun, but look - one of Redmond's lawyer types could've gotten a hold of this, and gotten some judge to issue an injunction based on a combination of ip violation/unfair competition/market image tarnishing/some other frankly-my-dear-I-just-don't-give-a-damn excuse. Yeah, it'd never hold up, but nothing stopping them from just being dicks.
Instead, they took it in good fun, and did the human thing - exhibited humor. Yes, they're still evil, blah blah. But this has that WWI 1914 Christmas Eve soccer-game feel. So let's acknowledge it with good cheer.
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Agreed. "Not Suing" is a fantastic gesture the precise way "not rolling up with AKs and blowing everyone away" is a touch of kindness.
No one deserves credit for not doing the wrong thing.
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Re:Human moment (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but joining in on the festivities was certainly more than anyone expected.
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Apple would have gone the "sue them" route for sure.
Actually, I am posting this Anon because Apple might sue me for using the word "Apple"
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Hey everybody! I'm announcing an iPod, iPhone, and iPad funeral service over at my house! I'll supply the food, but it's BYO dr#(^$^%*^ **NO CARRIER**
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You sound surprised... the IE team at Microsoft does stuff like this all the time. I was under the impression that they habitually send the Firefox development team congratulatory cakes upon major releases: http://www.intothefuzz.com/2008/06/17/let-them-eat-cake/ [intothefuzz.com]
Scapegoating 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think this is self-jest. Microsoft and IE team love this... the current message is "yes IE6 is broken, you should upgrade to IE8/9 because it's much better". Except that it isn't. So the funeral flowers serve them well, because they can pretend the real problem is with IE6, where in fact the problem is with them.
Microsoft has been using this "network admins don't upgrade from IE6, it's not our fault" type of argument for too long as an excuse for the mess they keep putting web standards into.
If everybody suddenly upgraded to the latest and greatest IE8/9 we would still be in the same place regarding IE not following web standards. We would be free of "IE6 doesn't have a clue about the box model". But we would be at "IE8 doesn't support canvas (or proper event bubble)". Just so 9 years from now they will be sending flowers to the IE8 funeral and saying sorry for not supporting canvas...
A proper solution for Microsoft now would be to completely ditch IE backend, use one of the current available libraries like Webkit, and put in place an IE frontend that can have IE6/7/8 tabs and a proper standard backend (defaulting to the proper backend). Any other move on this area coming from Microsoft seems to be either evilness or PR (which I think it's the case).
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From Microsoft's point of view (and the point of view of most web designers), IE7 and IE8 ARE better than IE6. The only people who dont think that IE7 and IE8 are better are the idiot managers in large IT companies who refuse to authorize the work necessary to upgrade the ONE remaining corporate intranet website that doesn't work right in IE7 or IE8.
IE Heaven? (Score:3, Insightful)
I seriously doubt the existence of IE Heaven. But I hope it's there, because that would mean that IE6 is now rotting in IE Hell.
Word of the day. (Score:2)
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obJoke, and clarification:
Luck is finding a needle in a haystack.
Serendipity is finding the farmer's daughter.
"Thanks for the good times IE6" (Score:2)
"I think there were three."
Send all IE users a fish ion a news paper (Score:2)
"IE 6 sleeps with the fishes"
You know you've been a bad boy... (Score:2)
On a note for a similar funeral: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070211 [userfriendly.org]
(Unfortunately posted by a zombie, would someone please talk to my IT people?)
If you want the results... (Score:2)
Just wait. (Score:2)
Just wait till IE6 rolls around in its grave and becomes IE9.
It just became a ZombIE (Score:2)
Now that it is officially deceased all the thousands of instances still around are to be considered undead.
That's kinda cute (Score:2)
It's funny, I never thought I'd live to see the day when Microsoft became the plucky underdog and Apple became the evil empire but that seems to be exactly what's taken place . . . Sure, it's not true of the Desktop OS market, but by pretty much any other metric . . .
Was the card w3c compliant? (Score:2)
The good times? (Score:2)
Must be the Russian cracker teams who actually sent the flowers.
Or some marketing dudes who just love advertising. ;)
Oh... wait...
they even copied apples idea for a funeral (OS9) (Score:2)
Apple WWDC 2002-The Death Of Mac OS 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7xQ8i3fc0 [youtube.com]
Re:they even copied apples idea for a funeral (OS9 (Score:2)
BOO! (Score:2)
I was giving it some thought as to why we haven't upgraded at work... what do the bosses not want employees to do? One answer is surf the internet all day. How do you prevent that but maintain internet connection so the intranet still is accessible as well as any other networked programs.. use IE6! Web pages have slowly stopped working correctly the past year or two.
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also, try chopping off your balls. i hear it huts real nice.
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What is it about IE6's interface that you like so much? The lack of tabs? The bizarre rendering?
Incidentally, I recently needed IE6 to test a website for a customer that's somewhat stuck in the past. So I install VMWare Fusion, Win XP, and discover this particular copy of WinXP already comes with IE8. After a bit of googling I find a couple of ways to uninstall IE8, and one of those seemed to work. Unlike promised, however, it didn't free up a hidden IE6. Instead, I had no IE at all. So I got the IE6 instal
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Probably misses the file, edit, view.. across the top. Tools-->toolbars-->menu bar puts those back.
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yes ... which puts the menus UNDERNEATH the back arrows and the address bar. wow, it looks like crap, and is annoying to use.
Then, they added the shortcut buttons (home, page, tools, RSS, etc) to the right of where the tabs go. What's the use of adding tab support if you're going to cut the tab space in half?
And, one more thing while I'm ranting - what's up with the "call home" connecting that IE 7 and 8 do when they start up? I expect to be able to use my browser as soon as it opens, not be locked out wh
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