I don’t watch much commercial TV (ie advertising) but I am alarmed by Microsoft’s new ad/plug for ie8 in UK. It seems to me that they are trying to tie win7 and ie8 together as being the ‘safest’.
Is this a UK campaign or are you guys in the rest of Europe getting the same after the EU declared we should have a choice of browser?
Safest compared to their previous products maybe, which isn’t saying much.
I think FF is almost level with IE in the rest of Europe, and IE’s slide continues.
As linux users, I am sure we are all well aware of the M$ claims of ‘safest’ and their failure to mention that it relative to previous releases of windows.
Even though I am M$ ‘certified’, I have never really like ie even when my main os was windows. Always used Netscape then firefox as browser of choice.
So is this purely a European/UK campaign, or are they pushing it elsewhere?
Either way, it is worrying and probably presents a claim for misadvertisng/misrepresentation.
they can get away with it because they claim win7 paired with ie8 is safer. They never say safer than what. So by laws of omition they can say that since implied is subjective.
Usually they start in the UK and Germany first. Then, after a year or two the EC fines them for ¤ xxx.xxx,xx , harm already done, money in M$'s pockets.
IMHO this is no more than a test to see what the EC is going to do, now that mrs. Kroes has been ‘promoted’.
I tend to advize anti-linux people to install all this goodness a.s.a.p., get a couple of hotmail addresses for storage of sensitive data, and swallow all that comes from doing so as directly related to choices made.
Let’s spend the time, energy and everything else we have on improving and extending what we have established already.
whych wrote:
they also advertise because they MUST keep people using the ‘free’ IE
else they have a problem selling their web servers and web design
software which depends on “working with IE” to therefore lock in all
(say) bank customers to using Windows when they net bank…
–
palladium
Haven’t seem them yet here in Germany, but I’ll make sure I keep a good supply of rotten fruit handy to throw at the TV ;).
That’s something that have improved enormously in my country in the last couple of years. All banks I’ve had to access support firefox on linux without a hitch. Those who didn’t made the effort to comply. Most government sites also do, with a few notable exceptions (social security comes to mind). Even a health insurance company I subscribe to, that until some months ago required windows+ie+activeX/whatever now works with firefox.
Also I’ve heard a lot of non-savvy windows users saying “nah, I use firefox, I don’t want anything to do with internet explorer, it’s full of virus…” and similar things.
That’s heartening 
Now that’s certainly already a good step forward.