How Microsoft Plays Its Cards
Microsoft is limiting downloads of Internet Explorer 7 to Windows users who validate their licence with Windows Genuine Advantage. What they hope happens is that they’ll sell more licences or get more people to upgrade to Vista. I hope people know better and adopt the Firefox web browser.
No matter the reasons for the slow adoption of Internet Explorer 7 I can’t help but feel bad for users who don’t know any better and stick with such a sloppy mess that is version 6. It hurts us web developers too because we can’t put in practice all the newer stuff because of numerous browser crashes. We also have to put so much work in making things work.
As a fellow web developer remarked even the hotmail home page has all kinds of hacks to make IE6 work:
<div id="contentMinWidthPlaceHolderWithOutSkyScraper">
<!-- ensure the min width in IE -->
It’s pretty easy to break IE6. A simple line of Javascript does the trick and it’s not only limited to scripting. CSS can also crash the browser rather easily.
If every web developer pissed at Microsoft slowing the adoption of IE7 added this piece of code to their blog/personal projects we’d see more users grab a hold of Firefox or Microsoft changing their tune because they’d look bad.
<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}
But of course that would be unethical… almost as much as abusing your monopoly.
on September 27th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Hum, thinking about putting that js line on some of my sites.
What does it do ?
on September 28th, 2007 at 9:30 am
It crahes really old version unpatched versions of IE.