Why we don't listen to Microsoft: New fud campaigns

You may remember Microsoft's "get the facts" largely biased campaign against Linux (now changed to the lower profile compare site). Well, Microsoft are back with new campaigns to lengthen the time before IE eventually dies. The site, found here, does a fantastic job of putting IE8 in a good light, with some very factual and non-biased (just checking I got the sarcasm across) arguments about how IE8 is superior to Firefox and Chrome (they don't seem to acknowledge Opera).

To briefly go through it's "facts". IE8 is the most secure browser because of its malware protection, it may have superior malware detection, but this is a comparison of web browsers, not antivirus, when it comes to exploits for browsers, most of them are for IE and the ones for the open source equivalents get fixed significantly quicker. IE8 also gets a solo tick for privacy with "in-private browsing", aka porn mode, this is something I don't understand as google chrome offers incognito mode which is effectively the same thing. The get a tick for ease of use, this is relative to the user, so I'll leave it alone. For web standards, they give all 3 browsers the tick. This is a load of crap, and they claim they deserve this tick because of their css 2.1 support, while even acknowledging that IE8 doesn't have support for new web standards such as css 3 and html 5. And seeing as html 5 uses an open source alternative to flash and silverlight, I don't think they ever will fully support it. I'll quickly go through the rest. IE8 gets a solo tick for reliability, which doesn't need arguing, sometimes IE8 won't even work on my box without the --no-addons parameter, admittedly it's probably my box, but still. They give themselves a tick for customisability, saying

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.

Once again, this does not need to be argued, they're not mac, or opera, things don't work out of the box. The one to top the lot imo is the performance comparison, where all 3 get a tick. Now, I might understand the argument against Firefox, but against Chrome, there's no competition. The excuse for fast performance is

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn't tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

Anyone who has used IE8 knows this is a load of crap, and fairly contrasts googles claim that IE7, and IE8 similar, was 23 times slower than chrome in the sunspider JavaScript benchmark.

You may have noticed in the title I say "campaigns" plural. Well heres #2. Microsoft may not have the best products, but with the amount of money at their disposal the easy to get people to use their products is to bribe them. Microsoft is offering 10 grand (of Australian dollars) to Australians to locate the 10 grand, hidden in some site. To find the site, you have to follow the clues given on twitter, and of course be using IE8. I'm not sure what I think of this, from a marketing perspective it's quite a good idea, and even though firefox users can fake the IE8 user agent, I doubt many will. If you can't view the site using firefox (many firefox users are reporting this problem, I use arch so my user agent currently reads "grand paradiso", not firefox), you can download user agent switcher and put "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" as the user agent.
Thankfully google have responded to this with their own parody site, found here. It's great to see someone fighting back against Microsofts campaigns, and google have made things a little more classy than the FSFs not all that impressive bad vista campaign.

That's all from "microwatch" (thank linux outlaws for the soundbite), I'll get around to my Arch linux review soon, feel free to leave any comments on the topic, and I mean any comments, I'd even take spam now to get some interaction :P , gl.