“Get the Facts that We Invent”

This just in: Microsoft hires either comedians or Baghdad Bob to run their IE8: Get the facts campaign. They actually have the temerity to list IE8 as the most secure out of the choices of IE, Firefox and Chrome. What, because it greys part of the address bar? And Compatibility! They say they’re the most compatible on the web! IE, the prime driver of web developer frustrations since its inception! Just because you’re more compatible with the code out on the net that had to be intentionally broken to work with your older versions, doesn’t mean you’re the “most compatible browser”. It means only that you’ve successfully broken most of the web to work with you and you alone!

What’s even better is they claim to be “as customizable” as both browsers.

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.

Yeah, because jamming a bunch of things that SHOULD only be add-ons — like web slices or accelerators — down people’s throats means it’s customizable. And they left the check in “customizable” under Chrome, despite its lack of extensions support. Seriously. I can’t make this stuff up.

I agree that Firefox needs to get its ass in gear and put together tab isolation, though this will increase the amount of RAM that Firefox uses significantly. IE8 and Chrome both chew up RAM like it’s ribbon candy when you open as many tabs as I do generally. But that’s a small price to pay to keep your whole session from going to crap when one bad Javascript code starts running an infinite recursion or tries to spawn a never-ending series of popups (which end up never getting spawned anyway, because of Firefox’s superior blocking capabilities).

My sides ache.

If you want to throw some extensions into Firefox to make it do anything that IE and Chrome can do (save for tab isolation), check this site out. Lots of great pointers as to what extensions duplicate what features.

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“Get the Facts that We Invent”
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