IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team

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.

The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[192939495969798999]

but they didn't have time, seeing how they were too busy building a better browser! Good night, everybody!

Re:The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[mnmn]

Isnt it obvious? They since they just released IE7 they want a cake back.
Only to include a file in it for the developers at Redmond.

But the question is...

[Yvanhoe]

... did they accept the cookie ?

Re:But the question is...

[stunt_penguin]

Well since it was free...... as in cake I guess they did :D

Re:The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[LifesABeach]

"Beware of Geeks, Bearing Gifts" - Casandra

Re:The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[NuclearDog]

"Beware of geeks, bare in GIFs."

Re:The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[Atilla]

How can Firefox be a better browser? It's only version 2! IE is like, version 7 already!

*g*

Re:The firefox team was gonna send a cake too...

[Red Alastor]

Now that it's released and they have some free time, they should send one to the IE team on their deployment day (next patch Tuesday if I'm not mistaken). But in the spirit of open source, they should include the recipe.

itsatrap

[Kuciwalker]

I think this is the poster child for the "itsatrap" tag.

Re:

[SilentChris]

Great. Now I have a mental image of a fish jumping out of a cake burned into my head. Thanks a lot you bastard.

Re:itsatrap

[nacturation]

Most controversial stories get tagged either "food" or "notfood".
 

Re:

[jZnat]

Pretty much every Microsoft story that involves someone outside of Microsoft as well has been tagged "itsatrap". I've been keeping track: all but one of the itsatrap articles have been Microsoft-related.

Re:itsatrap

[shadowcode]

Don't believe this guy, itsatrap!

Re:itsatrap

[dr_dank]

Focus your fire on that strawberry shortcake. May the frosting be with us all.

That they know of anyway.

[SydShamino]

It secretly contained chopped-up bits of the IE source code. Having ingested it, the entire Firefox team is now legally disqualified from working on open source competitors.

Or something like that. It's early still.

The cake is a lie!!!!!

[Pharmboy]

Quick, before someone sees me! Go to my secret website [aperturescience.com] and type LOGIN. Then use my login, Pharmboy. My password is "portal" (without the quotes). At the prompt, type "thecakeisalie" at the prompt without the quotes to activate the hidden camera inside Microsoft! The cake is a lie and this proves it!!!1!

;)

The Browser Wars

[BRUTICUS]

...just got a whole lot friendlier

Re:The Browser Wars

[the_humeister]

It's a lot better than in the past when we had drive-bys from the IE and Firefox gangs.

Re:

[theMerovingian]

Yeah, I was really glad when Microsoft's hit man got busted [nwsource.com] and all those shootings came to an end.

Re:The Browser Wars

[forgetmenot]

Obviously, you didn't read the part where a naked Ballmer jumped out of the cake throwing gobs of it at everyone and screaming "I'll f***** destroy You!"

Re:The Browser Wars

[Mr. Bad Example]

> Obviously, you didn't read the part where a naked Ballmer jumped out of the cake throwing gobs
> of it at everyone and screaming "I'll f***** destroy You!" ...followed by five minutes of him jumping around screaming "Confectioners! Confectioners! Confectioners! Confectioners! Confectioners!".

Re:EULA under the cake

[Psykechan]

Underneath the cake is the EULA that starts with:

By consuming this cake, you agree to the following terms in the cake end user license agreement (EULA)...

Re:The Browser Wars

[AlecLyons]

Browser Wars 2: This time it's amicable

Re:The Browser Wars

[Kelson]

Browser Wars 2: This time it's amicable

Would that make it a "civil" war?

What I want to know is...

[Kelson]

Did Opera send them a singing telegram?

Re:

[mikek3332002]

I think the IE team just appreciates the competition.Having a browser war really does drive innovation.

Probably they sent it as thanks because they could code something other then security holes/fixes.

Something like they did to Netscape?

[E IS mC(Square)]

Reminds me of the prank [sfgate.com] they pulled on the Netscape team long time back. Not that this is another prank, but well...

Talk about a much-improved quote..

[T-Ranger]

The Explorer team also left a greeting card with the picture of a grumpy baby with the note: ``It's just not fair. Good people shouldn't have to feel bad. Best wishes, the IE team.'' [an error occurred while processing this directive] A helium-filled balloon taped to the logo reads, ``We love you.'' How history changes in 9 years.

Re:

[jZnat]

Yeah, it seems like only yesterday people thought the blue e was the internet and had no idea what a web browser is.

Oh wait...

Pie?

[BeeBeard]

Are they sure it wasn't just humble pie? :)

Re:Pie?

[robyannetta]

The Firefox team couldn't eat it because of all the ActiveX ingredients... [ducks]

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

ActiveX is made of ducks?

An improvement from the IE/Netscape days

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the big IE logo they left back when IE4 shipped, although the cake surely didn't provide as cool of http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/mozilla-ie-car d.jpg [snafu.de]pictures. (It is sad seeing the guy placing the marketshare number there, however.)

You have to admit

[captnitro]

That was pretty classy. (Even if ultimately it was intended as a bit of good-natured competitive ribbing, which it doesn't look like.)

I have to say, often times we're prone to think that large organizations such as Microsoft are just a big, faceless entity. As a whole, this may or may not be true, but either way, they're only made up of people. The IE team only wants to ship the best software possible given their resources, as does Mozilla.

The best to both teams -- let the competition continue!

Re:You have to admit

[waif69]

This is awesome! It shows that at least some of the team members of the IE development team have some self-respect and can appreciate quality work. This shows that just because a group of developers work for the giant doesn't mean that they are disrespectful and bad sports.

Re:You have to admit

[Random BedHead Ed]

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:

Firefox brought Microsoft back to the table, but they make no guarantees how long they'll stick around. I can't imagine why any individual--let alone an IT department--would bet on a company with a proven track record of gross abandonment.

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:

[Ed Avis]

Yeah it's surprising that Microsoft teams would send cakes... I was expecting more a Ballmer-o-gram or something.

Re:You have to admit

[eck011219]

I agree -- I have a couple of friends who work in Redmond and are just as fed up with the corporate BS as any Slashdotter. But they're working on things that deeply interest them, and they (as yet) believe that they and the other very sharp people on their teams can produce better stuff than Microsoft has in the past (besides, it's apparently a great place to work, if you can get past the corporate sellout thing that so many of us have a problem with). So I'm not at all surprised about the cake -- you have to figure that the IE folks and the Firefox folks are in contact from time to time and are watching each other carefully all the time, and the IE team at MS is going to be just as interested as Firefox in getting something cool out for the public.

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:

[EggyToast]

Yeah, exactly. A good programmer will be able to write whatever code they're told to write. To them, it's not a question of whether it presents good UI guidelines or doesn't conform to the OS; they make it work with the guidelines provided. If they're not hearing any problems, they're going to assume they're doing a good job.

It's the managers and designers who are deciding what things will look like and how functionality will work. The managers for Word will say "We need to have this integrated into I

Re:

[Miseph]

Indeed. It often strikes me that many of our colleagues in geekdom have a tendncy to get quite wrapped up in what employees of certain companies (Microsoft, Symantec, SCO, etc.) are or aren't doing, and the relative ethicality of those actions and inactions. So wrapped up, in fact, that they seemingly forget that those employee's are people too, real ones, with bills, and lives, and stomachs, and that given the choice between doing something we dislike and eviction, most people are going to suck it up and

Re:You have to admit

[CastrTroy]

I got modded troll, but I'm being serious. After 6 years of IE6, they finally release a new version. What they gave us a bunch of copied features from other browsers(firefox,opera) that have been available for years, and from what i've heard, nothing that really makes it better than the competition. And they have worse standards support than everybody else. You would think that in 6 years that they could produce something at least on par with the competition, if not many times better.

Re:You have to admit

[cnettel]

Well, the previous IE team was basically disbanded, with people going to work on Office, Visual Studio and WPF/Avalon/XAML. Two of these are very popular and can, in their own way, surely be considered on par or superior to the competition. (Visual Studio is a nice IDE even for non-Windows development.) It's not a matter of trying for six years and failing, but rather starting quite late, with a team that's still smaller than it was when Trident was first developed. This of course only shifts the blame within MS, from developer incompetence to management incompetence, or arrogance.

Re:

[PenguinGuy]

And why did it take 6 years to get a new version of IE? Because MS had "won" the browser war so they didn't have to upgrade anything..

The joys of Microsoft and the campaign to control all of computing.

The link

[Klaidas]

Shouldn't it be http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-wi th-love/ [fredericiana.com] ?

Re:The link

[Evro]

Looks like it should have really been http://www.flickr.com/photos/jollyjake/278562314/ [flickr.com] - their server is apparently better equipped to handle the load.

Yum, Cake

[GiggidyGiggidy]

When the cake was opened, the Firefox team found it was not quiet finished and full of bugs.

Re:Yum, Cake

[StevoJ]

and it only worked with one particular fork

Re:Yum, Cake

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"When the cake was opened, the Firefox team found it was not quiet finished and full of bugs."

The FireFox team decided to return the favor and make them a cake to congratulate them on their recent release of Internet Explorer 7. It is expected to be completed in about four years and have some of the same details in the icing that Opera's cake had already.

Re:Yum, Cake

[Chris_Jefferson]

The firefox team sent back a plain sponge with a note saying "If you would perfer a more exciting cake, there are a large number of extensions you can get."

Re:Yum, Cake

[Epeeist]

Unfortunately the cake they sent had red icing in a large square over the top of it with a black and yellow stripe and a few other bits of coloured icing scattered here and there.

The cake itself was pretty acid too.

Of course it wasn't poisoned

[roystgnr]

If it wasn't for the Firefox team, we'd all still be stuck with IE6 and the Internet Explorer team would have had to look for new jobs.

Re:Of course it wasn't poisoned

[IdahoEv]

The best comment I heard was "Yeah, but did the IE team include the recipe?"

New cake; old ingredients

[spookymonster]

While the IE team touted the cake as 'new and innovative', after further investigation, the Firefox team discovered that Microsoft had used ingredients that originally appeared in Mozilla cakes several years earlier.

It takes time.. Give it another year or two

[iOsiris]

Then the FF team will slowly start disappearing from mysterious causes

Cake, or a free trip to Australia?

[spookymonster]

I heard Microsoft was originally going to book the entire Firefox dev team on Oceanic flight 815....

Re:Cake, or a free trip to Australia?

[bloobloo]

Cakes on a Plane?

And she said...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let them eat cake."

Happy to have a job again!

[EggyToast]

Remember, Microsoft disbanded the IE team shortly after 6 was released. The IE team sends a cake not just for a "birthday," but as thanks for giving them jobs!

Re:

[onion2k]

They still had jobs, just not working on IE. You don't get rid of developers just because the project finishes. Similarly, you don't keep a team together when they've got nothing to do. That would be a waste of some valuable assets. They'd just gone to other parts of Microsoft.

I would do the same

[javilon]

Should mozilla not exist, there would be no IE7 team. The IE7 team must be glad that mozilla keeps releasing new versions so they can keep their jobs. Without competitive pressure M$ left 5 years pass without a IE release.

giving back

[jmyers]

Who says Microsoft does not give back to the open source community?

Re:giving back

[Reverend528]

Unfortunately, the license forbids the firefox team from redistributing the cake.

Re:giving back

[dominator]

Like it or not, they'll be distributing "derivative works" of the cake in the next few hours...

*ducks*

Re:giving back

[lostboy2]

Heh. Doesn't that qualify as reverse engineering?

Re:

[numbsafari]

Only if they've been drinking heavily or have the flu.

Re:

[kevin.fowler]

good luck getting them to share the recipe

I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to use Firefox 2.0 for the past few days. I never got around to using any of the release candidates, but I had kept reading that there were a lot of improvements and that it was going to be a great release.

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 ca

Re:

[Cyphertube]

I'm a big fat Firefox fanboy, and yes, it's still a memory hog. Now I do have extensions installed, and it's not so bad if I shut off Firefox occasionally, but then again, I find that shutting down my machine occasionally is good for my Windows box anyway. (Due to space issues, my Linux box is currently in the closet so haven't tested there yet.)

I loaded up IE 7 on this machine, checked out some sites that had been kludged to work in IE 6 and Firefox and Opera, etc. (standards, followed by kludge) and watc

Re:I was hoping Firefox 2.0 would bring change.

[arevos]

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'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:Leaky extensions

[bunratty]

Adblock .5

Adblock is one of the most infamous of all the memory hogging extensions. Update to Adblock 0.5.3.042 or later, or use version 0.7.0.2 or later of Adblock Plus [mozillazine.org].

Thanks for the ideas

[Anon-Admin]

Looks like Micro$oft is just thanking them for the great ideas, which they will add to the next version of IE. They always were a step behind.

Re:

[le0p]

So I guess Firefox is just going to forward the cake to Opera then?

What they didn't tell you...

[Aqua_boy17]

Developers later found that they were unable to open the box containing the cake. When attempting to do so, they kept getting a message from WGA telling them that it was attempting to verify that theirs was in fact a Genuine Windows Cake, then their connection to the server would time out.

Icing on the cake...

[Capt James McCarthy]

reads "Thank You for tabbed browsing."

Re:

[Zigg]

"...to Opera."

Re:

[gordo3000]

haven't there been entire 200 comment discussions about who first came up wtih tabbed browsing? I'm sure, in the end, we will all find out it was actually Al Gore

Secret Ingredients

[organgtool]

P.S.: No, it was not poisoned

However, it did contain the pubes of every person on the IE team. The Firefox team plans on retaliating by baking a cake using the dismembered appendages of family members of the IE team. You can thank South Park for that grisly idea. :)

Give Me A Break...

[beringreenbear]

For a change, Microsoft's IE team was showing a bit of class and acknowledging that without the competition and innovation from Mozilla Firefox, there (probably) wouldn't have been an IE 7 project. It also hints that there might be some subtle changes in Microsoft's old Cult of Bill approach. At the end of the day, software developers are just people, and political football aside, there really is no reason for animosity. Kudos to Microsoft's IE 7 team for being good sports.

Maybe It's Just a Gift?

[Secret Agent Man]

Maybe while us users squabble in our own browser war, the development teams actually don't care all that much. Maybe they truly are just glad of how everyone is advancing (as opposed to just trying to one-up each other). I'm not saying that everyone in both companies feel that way, but instead of reading stuff into this surprise present, maybe it was just a good gesture.

Overheard on IRC

[Chris Pimlott]

"But did they include the recipe?"

Need more details

[Linker3000]

Was the icing #FF6666, #6600FF or something else?

Was there a nice #FF0000 cherry on the top?

Re:Need more details

[lostboy2]

Well, it probably wasn't a <LAYER> cake.

Satan's birthday party

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it a Ferrari cake, or an Acura cake?

To be a bit cryptic...

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

The Cake Is A Lie...

Microsoft lives out an episode of The Simpsons

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

P.S.: No, it was not poisoned

Montgomery C. Gates: Look at them stuffing their faces, never knowing they're getting closer to the poisoned part of the cake... There IS poison in the cake, right?
Smithers Balmer: Uh, no sir, our lawyers said that's considered murder.
Montgomery C. Gates: Damn their oily hides!

Big Black E?

[Diamon]

Seems even the IE team knows that IE is dead.

As for the ex-lax, bugs, pubes in the cake of course none of that is true. Those things would only be possible if someone at Microsoft actually made the cake, and that's not how MS does things. They knew they couldn't make a good cake so they just went out and bought a cake from someone who already knew how to make one and then stuck their logo on it and called it theirs.

And being the nerds they are...

[krell]

""The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2!"

And being the nerds they are, it was baked into the shape of Counselor Troi [ytmnd.com]. The Firefox nerds, now trendy Galactica fans, merely laughed at the nerds who were so out of it as to still love "Star Trek".

Non-slashdotted picture

[jsoderba]

The picture is hosted on flickr [flickr.com].

A cake?

[zeromorph]

Shouldn't it have been cookies?

Ok, maybe they were afraid they don't accept cookies.

Not poisoned???

[Mr2cents]

IE developer: What? The cake wasn't poisoned? But... but... then what did we just eat?!?

Sounds like an hold highschool trick.

[Lethyos]

I recall stories of cheerleaders from my highschool making brownies with laxative mixed in and sending them to the cheerleaders of a rival school. Maybe this is a similar gesture? I would hope, at least, the cake was magical [wikipedia.org].

It's only right. . .

[Iridium_Hack]

After all, Firefox has probably caused more updates and work on IE than anything else. Those IE developers are probably quite thankful seeing as their budget increased quite a bit, partially because there is now some decent competition on the field.

Firefox team sends IE a cake:

[DrugCheese]

Congratulations on fixing Internet Explorer 3!

CAKE OR DEATH!

[TerranFury]

We know the how the Firefox team answered that question.

When Microsoft runs out of cake, the Opera team will have to politely ask for the chicken.

Microsoft Strikes Again

[dahwang]

Just as they did with the Nintendo Wii and Xbox360, Microsoft is getting free publicity.

With Firefox just releasing their new version, it has eclipsed the launch of IE7. By sending a cake, which is sure to getting bloggers and slashdot to post, Microsoft directs the attention back on them. Also, it's good publicity. But we all know, no publicity is bad publicity.

SLASHDOTTERS YOU TOOK THE BAIT!

Perhaps this is common.

[LoudMusic]

Lots of comments about how the IE team is happy to be empoyed, a friendly gesture, poking fun, etc etc. But I think this sort of thing is more common place than most of us imagine. Big companies that spend a lot of their time working on similar products follow eachother's progress very closely and are aware of the same difficulties they're both having. They may not be on the same team, but they're fighting the same battle. Even physical wartime battles have been known to halt to celebrate a common holiday, together.

I know that Terminix (a client of my company) congratulated Orkin (the evil competitor) on one of their recent anniversaries. It's a way of saying "We know what you're up against, and we know it kinda sucks. Hang in there."

My wife and I watched an episode of Dharma & Greg last night (TiVo, don't know the air date) where they're entering a dancing competition. Dharma's parents were against it claiming competition makes people mean and greedy. I see that a lot in society, and it doesn't have to be that way. Competition is to make us better individuals. Without competition we'd never progress to the next level. And because of that we should thank our competitors for putting up a good measure of excellence.

Even in sports like track and cross country where you can effectively compete against yourself, where's the push to keep getting a faster mile time, higher polevault, or longer long jump if you have nothing to compare it against? At the end of high school track meets I remember walking around and shaking the hands of everyone I competed with. If it weren't for them I wouldn't have been "in the top three" regularly. I'd have just been a dude running crappy lap times on the weekend.

Here's to competition! The evolver of our modern society. Thank your competitors, for they are what bring us a better life.

If I were the FF Team...

[Siberwulf]

I would have sent a cake back to the IE team. Except I would have included the recipe on exactly how the cake was made along with it.

Class

[dr00g911]

This might be the classiest thing I've ever heard of MS doing. No in-joke, no sarcasm, here's your non-pretentious cake, you deserved it.

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)

Re:Obligatory comment

[pixelpusher220]

the real obligatory comment is:

Nice cake...but what's with all the bugs? ;-)

Re:Obligatory comment

[andphi]

Bugs are a good source of protein. They're features!