odd_parity

Today, one of leading Croatian newspapers published an Ad for MS Internet Explorer 7. A day after the Firefox 3 release - what a coincidence! The Ad is in form of small (A6) 36-page booklet that encourages those who still haven't installed MSIE7 to do so, with the title: "Surf safer with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7". It is prominently glued to the front page of the newspaper. It is quite nice of Microsoft to remind people that there's a browser that has been released one and half a year ago, and that they really, really should switch to it.

On the front page there's a surfer surfing out of what looks like a Mac notebook. The image is blurry, but given the fact that the left side of space bar has four keys as is common on Mac laptop keyboards, and the Mac-ish outlook of that generic laptop... well, it doesn't matter. You can run MSIE 7 on Mac OS X. You can't? Oh, well... stick to Safari or Firefox, then.

On the inside of the booklet, there's a statement: "Malo je reći da je Internet Explorer najpopularniji program takve vrste, jer njega koristi gotovo 90 posto od stotina milijuna ljudi koji se služe internetom." For many of you who do not speak Croatian, here's the more or less accurate translation: "It suffice to say that IE is the most popular software of his kind, since he's been used by almost 90% of hundreds of millions of people who use the Internet." Umm, sorry - according to Wikipedia, it's 78% and falling. According to Google analytics of this site, it's about 27%, but this site is biased, as it is intended to entertain people with higher education/IQ. >:-) The percentage mentioned in the booklet was true back in 2005. Is somebody living in the past?

MSIE has antiphishing feature, marketed as the first browser to have one built-in - whole six days before Firefox 2 was released with the same feature! :-) The booklet says: "Primjerice, korisnik je uvjeren da posjećuje web stranicu svoje banke a ustvari ostavlja novac hakerima!" Translation: "For example, the user is convinced that he is visiting the web page of his bank, but in fact he's giving money to hackers!"

There's so much wrong with that statement, but I'd just like to point at misuse of the word "hacker". Thank you.

Zucker kommt zu letzt (that's German): MSIE is so advanced: "Sustav pomoći ugrađen u Internet Explorer može odgovoriti na gotovo sva pitanja koje ste oduvijek željeli postaviti a niste znali kome ih uputiti" - "Integrated help system can give you an answer on almost any question you always wanted to ask, but did not know whom to ask". - That, my friends, is marketing speak at it's best!

This is, in fact, about help system in MSIE7, the one you fire with F1 key. I tried to ask it about the meaning of life, but to no avail. Then I tried simpler question: what is the best operating system in the world? To his credit, MSIE didn't tell me that this is Windows Vista, but sheepishly gave no answer at all. Then I tried with simpler thing like 2+2, but failed again...

P.S: I left the grammar errors in Croatian originals. Whoever made that booklet shold have asked MSIE7 to do some proofreading for him...

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