The 11% for IE11 challenge(blogs.windows.com) |
The 11% for IE11 challenge(blogs.windows.com) |
For instance, the blog entry says: "If you can get 11% better page load performance from your site, we'll send you and your team some 11 goodness." I'm no lawyer, but that sounds like a valid unilateral contract to me.
Similarly, the landing page says: "Show us how you got 11% better page load performance in your organization's home web page and we'll send you all this goodness."
But in the fine print, it says: "The first 11 organizations that meet the qualifications above will each receive the following: 11 pizzas (in the form of a $120 gift card), 11 year-long subscriptions to BrowserStack (ARV $240 each), and 11 copies of Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac (ARV $79 each)."
There's a heck of a big difference between "If you do this, we'll give you this" and "If you're one of the first 11 people to do this, we'll give you this."
The fact that there will be only 11 prize winners should be made more clear. After all, there is PIZZA on the line. And there's nothing like a pizza bait-and-switch to get developers angry at you.
A little more feedback, which I hope you'll take as constructive:
As I said above, there's quite a difference between "if you do this, you'll win this" and "if you're one of the first 11 people in the United States to do this, you'll win this."
As I see it, if I have any chance of winning the prize, I've got to drop everything right now and scramble to complete the challenge, and even then, who knows how many other people are doing the same thing?
So, my incentive has just dropped from, "This is exciting! I have a decent shot at getting pizza!" to "It's extremely unlikely that I'll win. Why bother?"
I would therefore suggest that you look for ways to increase the value proposition to developers. I'm not saying you have to spend millions -- but maybe find some creative ways to reward developers outside of the first 11, such as by featuring some of the success stories on your blog.
http://blogs.windows.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver...
http://blogs.windows.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver...
PNG grabbed from actual site: 19,764 bytes:
http://f.cl.ly/items/3w3k2O3n0y0v2W0L1p40/lossless.png
About the same size, much better looking.
Pure incompetence.
It would be nice if Microsoft would fix the issues with IE11. Like all the sites that work with IE10, that don't work anymore with IE11. Their solution was to issue an IE11 upgrade blocker with a shitty manual install routine.
As far as I'm concerned, we as developers need to make a concerted effort to force Microsoft to either adopt WebKit or release a version of IE that is 100% standards compliant.
> has been and continues to be hostile to the web
I'm going to have to dispute "continues to be": http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+11,firefox+25,chrome+31
You have to scroll down quite a ways before you find feature differences between the browsers, and it's not quite clear which (except maybe Chrome) is the best. If we remove feature drafts, it's a good deal closer.
Now, regarding has been: http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+6,ie+7,ie+8,ie+11
Well, there's no contest there. IE8 being the last supported browser on XP is a harsh reality for web developers. :(
I know my team had to make an adjustment due to the user agent changes, initially our site loaded in IE11 by stating the user needs IE7 or greater.
30% then what competitive browser?
/works at Microsoft, but not on IE
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/07/29/debugging-and-...
In fact, I'm lucky if they're on IE9.
I'm not loyal at all to any browser. I swop and change (used to use IE, then went to Opera, then Firefox and now to Chrome), but when I hear obvious lies such as IE is 30% faster than any other browser I all of a sudden want to permanently leave IE alone
Now, with regards to IE11, you may be right. And I hope you are. I SINCERELY hope you are!
But with every subsequent release since IE7 I've heard people say something to the effect of, "Its so much better than [insert previous version of IE]" and they were right. Except that; a) the previous version was so beyond bad that fixing one bug would've been a marked improvement and b) the new version STILL paled in comparison to all the other browsers out there.
So if history is any indication, IE11 will be incrementally better but it will still make my job unnecessarily hard and it will still prove itself to be hostile to the web.
no it has not. IE9/IE10/IE11 dont even render the same page the same way , dont even get me started on CSS3 support.
You want things to get better ? let Microsoft drop the version number.and update its browsers automatically all the way back to IE8...
Oh , but why should they do that , they make money by making their os obsolete ... /sarcasm.
One could argue this is because each version is better than the previous. "Better" being relative here.
> they make money by making their os obsolete
This touches on a possible source of the problem. Their insistence on tying browser upgrades to major releases of Windows proves they care more about the revenue from the OS sales than they do about not breaking the web.
I'm encouraged that they have automatic updates now but the jury is out as to whether they'll make use of it in the way Chrome and Firefox have.
