Although Firefox did make it personal, what Microsoft just did by starting another Get the Facts campaign is shamelessly full of lies.
Claim 1: Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.
Personally I enjoy protection built into Firefox . As far as I know it’s provided by Google, and it works great.
Claim 2: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.
Chrome doesn’t have this? What about Chrome’s anonymous browsing?
Claim 3: Features like Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Suggestions make Internet Explorer 8 easiest to use.
Accelerators are annoying me: I select the text I read to concentrate easier. Web Slices don’t work for me. And what the hell are Visual Search Suggestions?
Claim 4: It’s a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.
It’s nowhere near a tie. You’re getting there, IE, but don’t lie.
Claim 5: Of course Internet Explorer 8 wins this one. There’s no need to install tools separately, and it offers better features like JavaScript profiling.
Yes, yes, Microsoft, interesting. Now how do I see AJAX requests and how do I run YSlow? Nobody approached Firebug with this. And nobody can claim that their browser is superior because it’s shipping developer tools built-in because nothing can approach Firebug here. And besides, Mozilla could just bundle Firebug and solve their problem.
Claim 6: Only Internet Explorer 8 has both tab isolation and crash recovery features; Firefox and Chrome have one or the other.
Chrome restores my pages very well, thank you very much.
Claim 7: Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.
Why does Chrome have a tick for customizability? It’s not customizable, period. And again, addons are addons and if IE’s got stuff out of the box … then those are not addons, they’re built in stuff.
Claim 8: Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.
[citation needed] In other words — “what you say?” (somebody set us up the bomb, perhaps?)
Claim 9: Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools. That’s just not nice.
Don’t provide guidance? Perhaps they don’t need guidance. Enterprise tools? What the frakk? Define enterprise tools and why does home user need them.
Claim 10: Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.
Performance of browser is not the same as time needed to achieve stuff with the browser. That said, my personal experience says IE8 can’t measure even closely to Firefox 3, and the distance to Chrome, Opera 9, Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 is even greater. No, Microsoft, it’s not a tie. FF and Chrome deserve a tick, but IE does not.
Now their MythBusters section:
That’s why our Accelerator, Web Slice, Smart Address Bar, and Visual Search features make it faster, safer, and easier than ever for you to do what you need to do on the Web, giving you an overall better experience.
As already said Accelerators are annoying, Web Slices don’t work for me at all, Smart Address Bar — do they mean what Chrome did perfectly, and Firefox almost perfectly, and what IE is just poorly emulating? And again, what the hell is Visual Search?
Are they honestly trying to push all those suboptimal solutions as superior solutions?
My 0.02 cents (that is, 0.0002 EUR) that contribute to the hell that is the intarwebz.