Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 at the height of cynicism

Also, turns out one of Microsoft's updates to IE8 actually breaks this contest from working: <a href="http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090617/internet-explorer-8-treasure-hunt-microsoft-australia-hides-10000/" rel="nofollow">http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090617/internet-explorer-...</a> I can't reiterate enough how absolutely hilarious that is.

So the author is complaining that Microsoft is restricting a contest designed to get users to download IE8 to, uh, users of IE8?<p>If they _didn't_ do that, why would they run a contest at all? Would having a Firefox user win the contest justify the marketing expense?<p>I agree that the promo is pretty thoughtless, but I'm not sure there was any thought put into this criticism either.

We need someone to win the contest using Firefox (changing their user agent) and just viewing source when appropriate (to avoid IE "compatibility" bugs that hide things).

"It's not as stupid as it sounds." - Lol.<p>IE8 isn't <i>that</i> bad. Sure it's slow, but most everything you'd need is implemented. I don't like the haughty tone of the contest, but meh. Firefox fans have run similar campaigns, e.g. <a href="http://wedontsupportie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://wedontsupportie.com/</a>

To be fair they encourage people to upgrade from MSIE 6 and 7 too, and if they can achieve that, I'm willing to consider that a <i>good</i> thing.

"First, my memory isn’t so short as to have forgotten that it was Microsoft and their browser (Internet Explorer 6) that held back the web for so many years."<p>That's bullshit. IE6 may have sucked, but it didn't hold anything back. As Firefox proved, anyone could have come along and built a better browser and started sucking up enough market share to make it an industry again.