[peterkelly]

While I can understand some of the concerns here, I'd encourage you to look at where Internet Explorer is now; it's come a long way in the past few years.

IE today offers a brand new experience with many different features. The reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.

Wherever you are, Internet Explorer is the ideal way to play games, catch up on your reading, watch videos, and browse the web, of course. Use fast and fluid Internet Explorer across all your Windows devices—tablet, Windows Phone, and TV with an Xbox with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

This program is really a great way for bloggers and HN commenters to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way. There's also opportunities for fun prizes and rewards through duration of the program.

[taspeotis]

I'm upvoting you for clever parody. I think [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

[testrun]

Whatever Microsoft is paying you, it is not enough.

[sorincos]

Seems the way to go nowadays - Putin is also officially paying bloggers to boast about Russia's prowesses.

[Cthulhu_]

Where can I get some of that moolah?

[sorincos]

Well looks like you should get in touch with some group called "Nashi" according to The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/07/hacked-emails-n... But that's hardly news, given Anonymous unveiled the scam in 2012 already. So why wouldn't Microsoft follow? They get press, you get cash, everybody's happy (well, except users and devs)

[doxcf434]

IE is also very useful for installing Chrome.

[drdaeman]

Not only that, but it also performs extremely well at downloading Firefox.

[scope]

LMAO!!!

I work at a bank (network and maintainace department) I see the case on MOST PC's where a user prefers either Firefox or Google Chrome over IE, it's NOT because the user is aware of the performance issues but they generally assume/gossip that other browsers JUST work better...

and they do :)

[nyrina]

What more can you ask for in a browser than these two points?

[blueskin_]

Firefox, I think you meant.

[pling]

I hope this is comedy. If it isn't, give me a break :)

Excuse the vent - I just spent two hours fixing some shit just for IE...

Seriously. I spent a LOT of my time in front of IE and this is the real story:

The built in search determination is awful. Half the time, valid web sites are sent straight to bing. It's worse than Safari and Chrome by miles. The only hope is hit Ctrl+E to force it to search. It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Pinnable sites are just bookmarks outside the browser. This isn't really all that useful. I have never seen a person use it, ever.

As for multitasking, it supposedly no longer crashes the entire browser if a tab goes. That is total trash. Many a time have I lost the entire thing after a tab crashed. As for security, the recent unpatched hole for several days says how the privsep implementation DOESN'T work well (mandatory integrity control). It's half arsed at best.

As for Windows Phone, I owned one (Lumia 820 w/ WP8). The IE version is abysmal. It crashes regularly, renders text in crazy sizes randomly all over the place and hardly works at all across the web. Why? Because people don't use it so no one cares about it. Perhaps that isn't Microsoft's problem but even Microsoft's web site doesn't work properly (MSDN subs+Azure management portal) The browsing story on my Moto G is an order of magnitude better than WP ever was for me.

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for? The XBox is a horrible abomination. Most of the games whinge and moan if you're not plugged into the Internet, even if you want a single player campaign. It's painful. The whole thing is obstructive and painful. The browser on my 360 is slow, unreliable as well and doesn't render half of the sites anywhere near how they should be rendered.

The big one for me really is that Microsoft can't even make their OneDrive versions of Excel work properly with IE11. Half the time (on several different machines) the spreadsheet display gets corrupted around the currently selected cell.

Then we come to the dev story:

1. The entire back end of IE is a shit crock. The dev tools have no idea what is happening on the wire. They have no idea if the HTTP runtime got the file from cache or the wire meaning we have to use proxies. What's the point of it then?

2. The console is useless, even on IE11. Half the time it doesn't work and the code inspector lies a lot about the state of the DOM. The same with the object inspector.

3. The icons and UI is horrible. Until you've been using it for a bit, it's unusable. Try it on a laptop as well - the left bar is unusable. The only hope is undock it from the browser and Alt-Tab. Some idiot thought that the Azure management portal looked cool and lets change everything to make it look like that.

4. The debugger JS regularly crashes the entire browser and doesn't always hit breakpoints.

5. Compatibility mode. This is a royal PITA for us. It has cost us a shit ton of money. First we got told by MS that this thing was Jesus' sandals. Now we have 2000 users with random distribution of forced compatibility view and no way to turn it off. Inevitably that means we now have 2x the number of test cases to execute.

Just no. Seriously. They can go hang. I've had to put up with 15 years of this crap.

[ern]

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for?

Since earlier this month, you don't need to pay for an XBox Live Gold subscription to use apps like Hulu+, Youtube, Netflix and IE (!). Although I can't see the point of IE on the XBox.

[GhotiFish]

its parody, here's another post of his: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857458

[tagrun]

Maybe he was paid by Microsoft to defend IE :)

[madaxe_again]

It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Oi! Don't be hating on lobotomized monkeys! After all, they made a web browser....

[btian]

You forgot #IEbloggers

[300bps]

Funny. As a fan of Microsoft that uses their development tools and happily owns a Windows Phone, the best thing Microsoft could do is create a fork of Chromium and call it Internet Explorer 12. They seriously just need to start over completely. I've read all the advantages of IE11 but Chrome and Firefox just blow it away in speed and lack of hassle. They'd probably go back to 90% browser share if they built in a fork of Chromium to the OS that they didn't modify in any significant way (ex: don't try to make it support ActiveX, just let that technology die).

[blueskin_]

Oh look, the blogs are leaking.

[cokleisli]

You are paid for advertising IE too.

[higherpurpose]

If it's so good, then they don't need to pay for astro-turfing now? That strategy comes from a position of weakness, not strength.

[venomsnake]

The OP was sarcastic.

[jedmeyers]

This claim is not proven :)

[officialjunk]

At least try to make is sound like a real comment rather than copy and pasted marketing verbiage. Unless this is satire...

[m_mueller]

You must be one of these people who complain about Onion articles not being truthful.

[gbog]

But this is not the Onion, this is HN and if we let too many parody comment on the top of the discussion, I fear it will become boring. Downvoted the GGP

[netcan]

I fear that if we let complaints about comments, concern about comment quality and long threads going back and forward defending the legitimacy of parody comments in comments, humour, humourless responses and expressions of concern about the complaints dominating the discussion, HN will become boring.

[jasonlotito]

This is the correct attitude. If you disapprove of a comment, down vote it. Dignifying it with a response means one of two things:

1. Your comment is equally worthless, and should be downvoted. Your comment contributes nothing as the original comment contributed nothing. Downvote and move on.

2. Your comment is worthwhile, and therefore, the parent comment is worthwhile as it sparked good conversation and comments.

A comment that complains about a parent comment adds nothing worthwhile to the conversation as a whole. If anything it does nothing more than add clutter.

[officialjunk]

you guys are right. it was my knee-jerk reaction to a comment i thought was trying to market on microsoft's behalf, and telling how i thought their effort could be improved, but then also not being sure if it was parody or not at the time.