Microsoft Paying Bloggers to Write about Internet Explorer (opens in new tab)

I'm upvoting you for clever parody. I think [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Whatever Microsoft is paying you, it is not enough.

IE is also very useful for installing Chrome.

I hope this is comedy. If it isn't, give me a break :)

Excuse the vent - I just spent two hours fixing some shit just for IE...

Seriously. I spent a LOT of my time in front of IE and this is the real story:

The built in search determination is awful. Half the time, valid web sites are sent straight to bing. It's worse than Safari and Chrome by miles. The only hope is hit Ctrl+E to force it to search. It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Pinnable sites are just bookmarks outside the browser. This isn't really all that useful. I have never seen a person use it, ever.

As for multitasking, it supposedly no longer crashes the entire browser if a tab goes. That is total trash. Many a time have I lost the entire thing after a tab crashed. As for security, the recent unpatched hole for several days says how the privsep implementation DOESN'T work well (mandatory integrity control). It's half arsed at best.

As for Windows Phone, I owned one (Lumia 820 w/ WP8). The IE version is abysmal. It crashes regularly, renders text in crazy sizes randomly all over the place and hardly works at all across the web. Why? Because people don't use it so no one cares about it. Perhaps that isn't Microsoft's problem but even Microsoft's web site doesn't work properly (MSDN subs+Azure management portal) The browsing story on my Moto G is an order of magnitude better than WP ever was for me.

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for? The XBox is a horrible abomination. Most of the games whinge and moan if you're not plugged into the Internet, even if you want a single player campaign. It's painful. The whole thing is obstructive and painful. The browser on my 360 is slow, unreliable as well and doesn't render half of the sites anywhere near how they should be rendered.

The big one for me really is that Microsoft can't even make their OneDrive versions of Excel work properly with IE11. Half the time (on several different machines) the spreadsheet display gets corrupted around the currently selected cell.

Then we come to the dev story:

1. The entire back end of IE is a shit crock. The dev tools have no idea what is happening on the wire. They have no idea if the HTTP runtime got the file from cache or the wire meaning we have to use proxies. What's the point of it then?

2. The console is useless, even on IE11. Half the time it doesn't work and the code inspector lies a lot about the state of the DOM. The same with the object inspector.

3. The icons and UI is horrible. Until you've been using it for a bit, it's unusable. Try it on a laptop as well - the left bar is unusable. The only hope is undock it from the browser and Alt-Tab. Some idiot thought that the Azure management portal looked cool and lets change everything to make it look like that.

4. The debugger JS regularly crashes the entire browser and doesn't always hit breakpoints.

5. Compatibility mode. This is a royal PITA for us. It has cost us a shit ton of money. First we got told by MS that this thing was Jesus' sandals. Now we have 2000 users with random distribution of forced compatibility view and no way to turn it off. Inevitably that means we now have 2x the number of test cases to execute.

Just no. Seriously. They can go hang. I've had to put up with 15 years of this crap.

You forgot #IEbloggers

Funny. As a fan of Microsoft that uses their development tools and happily owns a Windows Phone, the best thing Microsoft could do is create a fork of Chromium and call it Internet Explorer 12. They seriously just need to start over completely. I've read all the advantages of IE11 but Chrome and Firefox just blow it away in speed and lack of hassle. They'd probably go back to 90% browser share if they built in a fork of Chromium to the OS that they didn't modify in any significant way (ex: don't try to make it support ActiveX, just let that technology die).

Oh look, the blogs are leaking.

You are paid for advertising IE too.

If it's so good, then they don't need to pay for astro-turfing now? That strategy comes from a position of weakness, not strength.

At least try to make is sound like a real comment rather than copy and pasted marketing verbiage. Unless this is satire...

That's because IE development is typically around 2 years behind the others. So they can only "brag" about stuff others have already had for a while, but try to spin the features as new.

> 1) Full Screen Browsing.

Like pressing F11? IE8 has it...

It's a nice list for search engine providers.

Perhaps DDG could low-light results that include companies that have paid-blogging programs?

"Caution: the quality of these pages might be low because $CORP pays bloggers to promote them"

I think the news is that it was sent to Arrington of all people. Plus the "Go TechCrunch" bit.

When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep. Just like Detroit would probably be forced to pay businesses to settle in their town to attract them in the first place.

I wrote a wishlist for Satya sometimes ago on Hal Berenson's blog: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

It may be the case that he gets paid, but the Surface is at least a legitimately good piece of hardware (much better in its product domain than IE)

Many have always viewed with suspicion to most positive IE reviews in the past. I like giving a honest try for IE from time to time, just like the Bing search (as a user and developer), but always it looks like almost on purpose IE team just refuses to fix most of the annoying things. I believe changing a name might be a good start.

No kidding. I also have weird IE bugs on sites that work flawlessly in other older browsers.

Windows8 to be precise.

Wouldn't want that marketing money go to waste, paying people to write about how to successfully upgrade from Windows8 to Windows7 to have a real desktop OS to work with instead of a Frankenstein Hybrid.

They don't deserve a second chance at what? Being your friend?

If Netscape had their way you'd be paying for web browsers.

The web is a pit of mediocrity held together by hacks. What browser do you use that isn't mediocre?

Advertisements masquerading as impartial opinion pieces are not evil? What is evil - strangling kittens?

It's just that Mike Arrington, whose posts on TC have been some good money printers for many startups of the fund he went on creating, likes to bash who is more naïve and less expert than he is at monetizing or rewarding Web contents. So, yes, he's probably repeating himself somehow, here.

Paying developers to port their apps is completely legitamete. It's a chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to use the platform because there are few apps, but developers don't want to write apps because there are few users. If Microsoft can spend some money to get additional apps in the store it's just a business decision. In my opinion they should have dedicated more money to that program.

This on the other hand is deceptive and I think pretty embarrassing. Completely different scenarios.

IE still represents abut 20% of Browser usage, it's still more than Firefox and a lot more than Safari.

You never know, the new direction MS is taking with regards to openness may bear its fruits. It's going to take a lot for MS to regain its past market shares, but personally, I'd prefer if it stayed around and compete with the other browsers.

I don't want Chrome to end-up being the new IE.