The One With Microsoft Paying Users

You probably do not know what's happened today at about UTC lunch time. It has been just a quick twit from John Resig, that at least every follower instantly noticed the next Microsoft campaign pro Internet Explorer 8.

The Fact

Microsoft Australia launched a sort of "competition", called Ten Grand. Apparently, starting from Friday 19th, a twit will be released each N hours, creating a sort of one day investigation to discover where the price is (in my opinion somewhere in the same page where the contest begins, assumption created by my idea about M$ "fantasy").

The Problem

That Web Page literally insults other web browsers, even discarding, probably on purpose, Opera one. In few words, that game is only for Internet Explorer 8 Users. OK, OK, they are apparently desperate enough to pay users in order to have more market share, fair enough, but what is all this "fun" about others?

  • You'll never find it using old Firefox

  • You'll never find it using boring Safari

  • You'll never find it using tarnished Chrome



The Old Firefox

Growing up, day after day and biting points to IE market share, Firefox has always been an advanced browser, specially compared with Internet Explorer. Easy for everyone, powerful for developers, Firefox supports, for example, still in draft HTML 5 elements and W3 standards ... since ages!
Internet Explorer 7 by the time was still suffering standards events, CSS 2 problems, and slow general responsiveness, over missed possibility for developers to debug properly. From Firefox, Internet Explorer 8 tried to copy a wonderful tool, Firebug, without having sames possibilities. Internet Explorer 8, compared with Firefox, has still W3 standards compatibility problems, a 5 times slower JavaScript engine, and lack of plug-ins to develop or simply surf more free.

The Boring Safari

When you catalog a browser with such adjective, boring, it means you do not have arguments at all and you have been swallowed in the kiddish gne, gne, gne twister unable to admit that "the boring one", is 2 laps around the world in front of you. The pioneer of CSS 3 transitions, effects, text properties, animations, one of the first to implement via WebKit guys (Gosh, I forgot to test WebKit there!!!) the new Squirrel Fish Engine, now Extreme in Safari 4, which is about 20 times faster than Internet Explorer ... but I forgot, boring is Safari because I guess boring is Mac OSX right? The Operating System famous for its native fluid user friendly special effects? Tha company that made iPhone, iPod, iWhatever, a must for everyone? Ooooohhhh Yes, that's boring!

The Tarnished Chrome

... wait a second, it's probably me .... let me think ... "tarnished Chrome ... rome ... ome ... om". To be honest, when I read that, I though the creator of this Chrome dedicated version smoked a truly powerful drug, one of those drugs they write: use carefully in open spaces to avoid poisoning, but he rolled up the chemical stuff and that's the slogan: Avoid The Tarnished Chrome (The One With All Colorful Logo, Right?)
I am sure this is the adjective about Google in Microsoft corridors, but still, only assumption. A browser that in few months is already between the third and the fourth position, rich of plugins, innovative ideas, is open source and again, it has a proper JavaScript engine, the V8 one, able to destroy in performance all Internet Explorers togheter!
Which part is tarnished? Google is a "neverendingmoving" company, which rather than block Web Development for at least 5 years is putting effort every day to make the Web a better, evoluted place (Silverlight possibly excluded, personal opinion).

The Smell Of 90s Competition Page

Seriously, a competition which aim is to ask people to use Internet Explorer, rather than a website created only for Internet Explorer with, for example, @font-face instead of those old style images over hidden text ... I mean, what the hell is that, a web page? I think all bad practices found a single page to be presented. Bad quality png, maybe this is for IE6, disproportionate use of images to make the page size about 140Kb, insults that only old IE8 users will appreciate for Who knows which reason (wake up guys), and a logic, a server side control, SO EFFICIENT, that simply using a userAgent switcher Firefox plugin I was able to emulate IE8 without receiving insults. Is this what you are looking for, a winner with Firebug, a plug-in to emulate Internet Explorer 8? What will happen if for some reason the winner will not use IE8? I am the author of vice-versa, for example, even emulate IE8 JScript is not a problem, with a more powerful browser, isn't it?

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