Part of Mozilla’s Manifesto:
The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
Part of Microsoft’s “Ten Grand Is Buried Here” campaign (emphasis added):
If you’re the first to locate the buried ten grand, you keep it.
How will you know if you’ve found it? It’s a cleverly concealed webpage that only Internet Explorer 8 can view. When you find it, it’ll be obvious that the $10,000 is yours.
Microsoft is still dreaming of that world of the past where the Internet was controlled by one company and accessible only from one platform, owned by that same company. Sorry, Microsoft, but I’d rather be without your ten grands and have an open web.
(Thanks to Patrick for pointing this out.)
by Mardeg
17 Jun 2009 at 18:41
I sincerely hope that when the interview the winner of this and ask them what they’ll do with it they say:
“I’m donating all of it to the Mozilla Foundation and I used IEtab in Firefox to win it!”
by mmc
17 Jun 2009 at 18:45
how do you know if only IE8 can open a page if I don’t have another browser at hand that can’t? this may turn into a marketing campaign for firefox!!
by Dan Stuart
17 Jun 2009 at 19:45
I just turned on IE Tab in my browser, and the clues showed up just fine. So much for only being viewable in IE.
by David Naylor
17 Jun 2009 at 19:57
I was almost a bit shocked by the wording of the competition instructions.
by Ken Saunders
17 Jun 2009 at 20:30
Man they just don’t get it. Who’s f’ing idea was it to use two images for the page’s content instead of that new fangled thing called TEXT!
Not too damn accessible. I shouldn’t have to use full page zoom to view just an image of text that causes me to scroll horizontally and that degrades as it gets larger.
ie8/competition/images/copy-firefox.png
by Kurt (supernova_00)
17 Jun 2009 at 20:41
Someone should sue for discrimination
by dean
18 Jun 2009 at 02:57
such fail by Microsoft…
by John Dowdell
19 Jun 2009 at 00:55
Curious… how do you reconcile this with much of the “HTML5″ sentiment to use browser-specific features on public sites?
tx, jd/adobe
by David Tenser
19 Jun 2009 at 10:46
John, if you’re referring to the Firefox 3.5 technology demos at hacks.mozilla.org, I’m sure you also know that the demos provide graceful fallbacks for browsers that haven’t implemented the future HTML5 standard yet.
We are trying to push the use of open standards, and HTML5 will of course play a key role here even though it’s not yet a final standard. Furthermore, we don’t make the web inaccessible for browsers that don’t support HTML5 yet — even in these pure technology demos on hacks.mozilla.org, we make sure that the content is still accessible in less cutting-edge browsers like IE or Firefox 3.
That’s how the web should keep moving forward: use modern, open web standards, but provide fallbacks to simpler technology for those browsers that don’t support the full web yet.