IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team 362
GDI Lord writes "The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2!
"P.S.: No, it was not poisoned" " That they know of anyway.
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IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team
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With your bare hands?!?
Something like they did to Netscape? (Score:5, Interesting)
Eww (Score:1, Interesting)
An improvement from the IE/Netscape days (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it wasn't poisoned (Score:5, Interesting)
I would do the same (Score:2, Interesting)
I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change. (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not what I've found. The memory consumption issues of Firefox 1.5.x have still not been dealt with. The Firefox process I'm using right now has been running since yesterday afternoon. Using the Task Manager, I can see that Firefox is taking up 593 MB of RAM. I've heard that this can be caused by bad extensions, so I didn't install any. Furthermore, I heard that Firefox's caching sometimes uses a lot of memory, so I completely disabled it.
I've also tried IE7, and I've been really pleased. They've gotten their act together and their product works very well. I've been using Firefox 1.0.x for a long time now, but I think I might just switch to IE7. I was hoping that I could take the Firefox 2.0 route, but based on my experiences so far, that won't be happening.
I hope the Firefox developers enjoy the cake the IE7 team sent them. They should eat it, and then get to work on fixing Firefox for 3.0. I'm hoping Firefox 3.0 finally gets around to lowering the memory consumption to a reasonable level.
Re:You have to admit (Score:5, Interesting)
Good points, but look at it this way: the IE folks owe everything to Firefox. Really. The fact that their offices no longer smell of mothballs is a direct consequence of Firefox's rise. Microsoft was able to keep an open and evolving cross-platform development platform at bay (i.e., the web), but the fact that their strategic product wasn't a profitable product kept development in the dark ages until Firefox came along. IE will always improve (and indeed, will only improve) if it has this competition. As one of the co-creators of Firefox said recently:
IE people should be very glad there's a Firefox, and pray it has staying power. And should keep sending cakes to the Mozillers.
Re:You have to admit (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with Microsoft is not bad coders. I'm sure they have some, but I bet the percentage is no different from other companies. The problem is when upper management starts making coding decisions based on shareholders' concerns, or when marketing starts making standards decisions and passing them down to coders. One of the friends at MS said that pretty much all the coders he knows would much rather be working with accepted standards instead of hackneyed MS pseudo-standards.
Anyhow, I agree completely that this was a classy move. I would still have some marketing intern taste it before the whole team digs in (lest today be remembered as the day Firefox development froze forever at 2.0!), but I think most in-the-trenches coders would be happy to pat a rival on the back for something cool.
Re:I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm always intrigued by these comments. There's barely a time at work when a Firefox window isn't open in the background, I have numerous extensions installed, and having over two dozen tabs open is not particularly unusual for me; however, Firefox has never even come close to using up that much RAM on any machine I've worked on, even when I have that amount of memory to spare. Even the huge pages the new Slashdot comment system produces doesn't raise my RAM usage very far over the 100M mark, and the majority of that is likely caching.
I wonder why Firefox seems to use up so much memory for some people, whilst others get away with relatively little. Did you have any plugins installed that might have been the cause of this problem?
Re:itsatrap (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Something like they did to Netscape? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh wait...
actually from microsoft? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can hear the phones ringing....
Mozilla secretary: Mozilla- home of Firefox and Thunderbird, how many I help you?
Microsoft secretary: This is Ursula from Microsoft's browsers division- we didn't send a cake...
*phone drops*
****DON'T EAT THE CAKE!****
Or perhaps upon closer inspection, there were flakes of white powder on the bottom of the cardboard...
I'd be wary of food items being dropped off anonymously.
Did an IE rep physically hand over the cake and show real ID?
Re:It takes time.. Give it another year or two (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.msfirefox.com/ [msfirefox.com]
Class (Score:3, Interesting)
It's how the rest of the world works. Healthy businesses acknowledge competition and inspiration. Their workers even go out for drinks with rivals now and again. $giantcorporateentity != $employee and all that.
I'm not exactly heralding the coming of a kinder, gentler MS that consistently behaves like a grownup, but baby steps like this are the beginnings of a change in corporate culture and should be encouraged.
Props to the IE 7 team, you guys showed some serious class and also delivered a great upgrade (minus a few bizarre interface choices) recently.
Now who do I have to send a cake to to get my menus back in IE without hitting alt?
I kid!
(mostly)