The $10,000 Internet Explorer 8 Promo: Follow clues laid down @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter, to find “a cleverly concealed webpage that only Internet Explorer 8 can view.” Seems straightforward enough, except the promo makes sure to ask you to “Ditch the web browser you’re using. If you try to find the $10,000 with Firefox, you’ll get nowhere.” The promo details are here.

Screenshot of Promo Page

Hopefully Microsoft is trying to promote how well IE8 properly displays web pages, being so faithful to existing web standards that it can reveal what competing browsers can’t. This so-called hidden website had better not be dependent on any special web rendering functionality available only through IE8. That would validate critics’ long-time assertions that Microsoft refuses to play the web standards game just to maintain their dominance of the browser market.

Case in point: Internet Explorer 6. The browser, still the most widely used today, continues to give web designers nightmares, thanks to the non-standard methods Microsoft insisted on using to display web pages.

So what do you get from the collective wisdom of hackers bunched within the same area? Why, tips on safer computing of course! Software security engineer Jeff Forristal asked people during the last pwn2own what your average user can do to better protect Internet Explorer from hacker activities. Here’s what they came up with. Read more

I don’t really care if Microsoft decides to drop Internet Explorer or not. As a frustrated web designer, all I ask is that the company make future browsers even more compliant with the standards established by the W3C. Read more

Amazingly, for all the web design nightmares it causes, Internet Explorer 6 has proven pretty resilient. Despite being the oldest version of Microsoft’s maligned web browser, over 40% of web users used it, according to web analytics firm Omniture (as of December 2007).

It’s as if those pesky customers refused to update to a more advanced browser (heck, even IE7 would’ve provided a better and more secure browsing environment). Thus, it seemed that companies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, having to publicly announce that they would no longer bother making future and current projects work properly on IE6, an application that was released way back in 2001. Read more