
Internet Explorer Team Wants To Know If You Are Good Enough

IE8 beta team wants to know why you would be a great beta tester for their upcoming IE Beta 2 release. Are they serious? Though widely used stats still shows that IE has the largest browser share, the gap between IE and Firefox is too close for comfort. I won’t be surprised if FF takes the browser share lead by the next major release. Yet IE team has the audacity to cherry pick beta testers for a free product, that is going to be released soon.

When pressed about it on comments and asked why they don’t follow examples set by success full projects (read FF) and have a publicly accessible bug tracking tool; they argued that the IE users are hundreds and millions in numbers and they would easily litter bug tracking database with “stupid” bug reports. They insists that there is a problem with mozilla bug database is that it is way too easy to file a bug report. This is too funny, you have to read their reply to comments to understand how close-minded their product development process is. Sometimes I wonder how many software developers actually work on IE.
Is this going to be the last year for IE with majority of the browser market share? They should enjoy it while it lasts.
On a separate note, here is a list of top 3 browsers (different versions) comparison on standards support.
iEntry 10th Anniversary
LinuxHaxor
WindowHaxor
MacHaxor















IE commands the major share now. Firefox will over take it if they market it the way they are doing now. But IE guys can also counter it with a marketing strategy of their own. They should start their own “Download IE day, help break a world record” campaign.
“W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers. ”
Reading your own sources entirely FTW?
I would never use anything else but Firefox or Opera.
This quote from 1984 sums up how I percieve many windows users to be :
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.