Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft and MSN even stay in business with some of the horrible products that they put out. If the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, or any other organization that doesn't have 95% of the desktop OS market released such garbage, they'd pay for it. How Microsoft gets away with it, I have no clue.

Rishi: by force. Look at how Microsoft bundles and cripples whatever it needs to ensure it's products get priority.

Don't you mean "MSN's tabbed browsing is an embarrassment" (sic)?

After all, this isn't from IE or the IE team.

they should buy maxthon and give it.

Asa,

MSN's tabbed hack is just a stopgap until IE7 is released. This is for people who love IE and don't want to use firefox (yes, there are people like that). Once IE7 is out, all these issues will disappear and these people will be happy.

I, for one, don't see why you need to put down a competitor's product. You have a good product that can stand on its own merit. You don't become great by making others smaller.

Jim, seriously, they shouldn't use IE even if version 7 is out. A swish cheese will stay as a swish cheese.

to be honest the Hotmail and MSN/Passport service is also .....

Oh, that's pretty harsh language. It can't be *that* bad. Let's watch it out a bit, you never know when it comes back to you.

But "crash at will"? Well, that's funny...

If IE7 as *SWISH* as cheese I'd use it

I find the software released by MSN often to be lackluster with Messenger being the exception (probably because it's more important and money making). Not sure why they seem unable to make nice software but they are unable to make nice looking websites (the new passport signin page excepted) it's not that much of a surprise.

Oh course you can crash it. It's pre-alpha for god sakes. It may be questionable if they claimed it was alpha or beta, but pre-alpha?! i doubt even big mouthed Asa could produce software that didn't crash in pre-alpha. I'm no fan of MS or IE, but this is just Asa gobbing off again to make waves, as per usual.

Asa, I'll try to be more constructive in this comment than the one I posted in your other IE-tab ran.

If I would be the product manager of firefox, I would be embarrassed to have delivered a 1.0 product with a progress bar missing borders on win9x/winNT/win2k and winXP/2k3 with classic theme. I would be embarrassed to turn down a patch that fix this problem. Hope it'll be fixed in your 1.1 product.

That being said, you should start to look at thunderbird a bit. I thought the UI of 1.0 was, in some regards, qui embarrassing too. It's inconsistent with Firefox and within itself. Do we see anything changing for 1.1 ? Have a look at the option window of thunderbird 1.1a1 and firefox 1.1a1 ... ... Is it because the thunderbird team doesnt use firefox or that the teams doesnt speak that much each other? Why simple things like the section tabs can't look the same?

Open the new "Filter Rules" window. Check the button on the upper-right corner of the window touching the titlebar. Is that sooo hard to have a quality check went it comes to UI in thunderbird? How come in the main window and address book window you will use vertical line separators in the toolbar and you will put some spaces separators in the "Write Message" window?

'Import...' item will be found under 'File' in firefox and under 'Tools' in thunderbird? Why?

Those are just things I remember from testing tb1.1a1 last week. I really hope it made you feel better to speak about the MSN-tab thing but please realise that very _basic_ work, consistency checks, etc. needs to be done to your products. Well all know the poor state of IE, don't forget to improve yours.

Kam,

It's not pre-alpha. It's a final, finished, released product. Asa is questioning how the hell they could call this a final product when it's clearly in pre-alpha _state_.

Try to keep up, mkay?

"I would be embarrassed to have delivered a 1.0 product with a progress bar missing borders"

Say what?

Yep, clearly a hack. There's not even a context-menu including tab options when right-clicking a link. And the flickering is annoying to say the least. My guess is that there are actually one window for each tab, and the MSN toolbar hides/shows them depending on the tab chosen.

Asa strikes again...

Joe is right. This isn't "IE's tabbed browsing", it's MSN's. It may well be an embarrassment, but not for the IE team.

Quit being an asshole and worry about your own browser.

I have installed the toolbar for IE with the tabbed browsing feature and I hate it. This is a way that Microsoft can steal Google Desktop Users.

Heh. Firefox isn't exactly new anymore Alex... After what, four updates?

"they should buy maxthon and give it."

Yeah, they will... Internet Exlorer 7 is coming around the way.

How long are you going to cry about this MSN crap, Asa?

The lack of other posts in your blog is disturbing. :-/

I remember the old days when there wasn't Firefox news, we saw other things like space news.

It's funny reading the trackbacks on this series. My favorite was the one that took Asa to task for writing it off after only 15 minutes, then posted an update several hours later saying basically, "Having tried it myself, he was right."

<sarcasm>But obviously it's all Asa's bias, because we ALL know Asa can't have an opinion that isn't horribly skewed by his connection to Firefox.</sarcasm>

Yeah, I think we get the point. The car's wrapped around a telephone pole and there's blood all over the pavement. Stop rubbernecking and move on. You'll be glad you did.

Please don't miss the point guys. This is not about bashing a competitor, nor about denying the fact that Firefox has bugs. That MSN toolbar was purely and simply /nowhere/ near ready for public release. It's a disgrace that Microsoft decided to release such buggy piece of tosh, their (talented, for the most part) developers /can/ do better than that!

Furthermore, I found a bug in Desktop Search the very first time I've used it, lol. I tried to search for "Belle & Sebastian" --> No result. Then I just tried "Belle" and got a list of "Belle Sebastian".

My conspiracy theory:
M$ want's to show users that *tabs suck* and convince them that they don't wan't them.

A: "Get (Firefox|Opera), it has tabbed browsing!"
B: "No, thanks. I've seen tabbed browsing and it sucks"

lol yes it's by all standards an insult to tabbed browsing. Let's see how and when they manage to update that 8MB stuff.

Lets see here, a firefox developer putting down someone else's browser. That right off the bat should tell people not to take this blog seriously.

Embarrassment?? That's funny because I haven't had any problems with it. I don't use the whole toolbar suite, I use this feature called customize that lets me take out most of the options and leave only the tabbed browsing in it. And that little search box thats left over, I move that up and off the side so its almost out of view. I think this tabbed browsing for IE works just fine for what it does, gives IE tabs. Its been quite handy for me at work. As a user of firefox I'm embarrassed to use it now since you made such a snide, uncalled for remark.

Perhaps if you used the tabs specifically what they were meant for, like tabbing, you wouldn't have such a hard time figuring out such a simple program. So now I ask you, what exactly did you not like about the tabs? All I read was blah blah embarrassment blah blah with no substance. I expected more from you, especially as someone who represents the mozilla foundation. You are only hurting yourself and your company with this kind of talk without backing it up.

Looking forward to some real content soon,
Anonymous

I do agree that the tab browsing is weak compared to Firefox and Opera, but it is a step in the right direction for them. Sometimes we HAVE to use IE, and I am glad to have it, even if it is a bit ... um, weak.

I find it weird how MSN is used as a preview for future MIcrosoft products. That toolbar is used as a preview to IE7. the MSN Explorer Dashboard is used as a preview of Longhorn dashboard, the MSN Desktop sqearch is now part of Windows Search and so on.

How is Firefox considered a final product? It crashes on me at least once a day.

"If I would be the product manager of firefox, I would be embarrassed to have delivered a 1.0 product with a progress bar missing borders on win9x/winNT/win2k and winXP/2k3 with classic theme. I would be embarrassed to turn down a patch that fix this problem. Hope it'll be fixed in your 1.1 product."

Okay, I see that problem but I'm wondering why you brought it up in this discussion. It's a stupid mistake, it can't even be called a bug really. There are worse things wrong with both browsers than the fact that "borders are missing" on the progress bar.

"Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft and MSN even stay in business with some of the horrible products that they put out"???

Hey, with MSFT I wonder every day, never any good though,
very tired to bitch any longer...

TK: Any program has bugs, even operating systems and software that you buy, that can cause it to freeze or crash. To be perfectly honest, Fx on my computer has crashed maybe 3-4 times since I've been using it (1-1 1/2 years) - not counting the times I've been working on bugfixes or trying to reproduce a certain bug.

Asa,

I don't know you. I don’t know if I want to. I found your site during a badly worded search on Google.

But, I have to say this. It is very unprofessional to, using your word, crap on a competitor when you represent an organization like the Mozilla Foundation.

Steve Jobs may hate Microsoft. He may call them names or accuse them of stealing. But, you will never see or hear a professional like him act the way you have in this post. And, Mr. Jobs has FAR more right to do it then you do if he ever wanted to.

It is great to be enthusiastic. But, when you work for or are a representitive for something as big as the Mozilla Foundation, there are rules. If you can't play by them in the big boys game, then get out of the game before you are thrown out.

Talk about embarrassment. If I were the Mozilla Foundation, I would muzzle you quick before you become an embarrassment.

David Naylor, says anyone who claims so hard their products is for all platforms (and versions of those platforms) when they clearly show they don't really make _basic_ checks with their product except on that machine they are developping.

You probably, like the developers, either use linux or win9x/2k3 with luna theme and you probably, like the developers, dont really give a shit about it. Fine, your not the product manager.

coke, ... that kind of bug is okey for a 0.x product... not a 1.0 (imo). They knew it since 0.8 or 0.9 I think (I reported it at that time). I was very surprised to see them delivering a product that leaves the user using software update window not really knowing their relative percentage of that task down (or sending a message using thunderbird which is even worse; why do they have this stupid popup window anyway)

imo again, flickering and dataloss for a pre-alpha product is acceptable. Lets go a get that phoenix pre alpha.

Jesus freaking christ...

It isn't like Firefox or Opera are all that great. Seeing how firefox has no damn clue how to patch their browser so you have to download the entire thing all over again, which creates a new uninstall set in your add/remove programs folder.

Furthermore Firefox has tons of quirks when visiting websites. Sometimes it refuses to load images from other servers ( no that checkbox to deny images from non originating websites is not checked). Other times Firefox will decide it is still hungry and eat up whatever is left of my 4gb of ram. Such an awesome program!

IE is great except for it's intergration into the OS and its lack of standard support for CSS. Although I dont' blame them seeing how the damn box model isn't clearly drawn oout. (go read it, then have 25 other people read it, you'll find that not everyone draws the same conclusion on how exactly the width of a box is meassured).

So on that note. Here is something to think about.

Bash an MS Program and people are happy or at least understanding.
Bash an OSS Program and people hate you because you are obviously stupid or whatever other excuse/insult they can come up with to help them comprehend a point of view that doesn't match theirs.

If the community "voice" of OSS wasn't so zealotist I think you'd see a wider adoption then you see right now. No one wants to be treated like an asshole, and honestly if you have a question about how to do something (simple or otherwise) there will be at least 5 people right there to call you retarded and tell you to use google or go back to windows. (From efnet and freenode experiences while installing Woody and later BSD5.4 RC2 on an IBM T42p)

So there! :D

Doesn't the smile at the end make me seem all warm and cuddly?

Holy cow!

Asa, when did your blog start attracting, um, less friendly people?

I mean come on, he's making an accurate statement.

Yet it's his personal opinion, so leave him alone! If you don't agree, just don't read it, we live in a free world (at least when it comes to choosing which blogs we don't read)...

"You probably, like the developers, either use linux or win9x/2k3 with luna theme and you probably, like the developers, dont really give a shit about it."

Actually, I use WinXP with classic, so I should be able see that bug. I was just wanting a slightly better explanation... Do you mean the common page process bar? I really can't see anything wrong with it.

Ya know, this peeves me, I admit, M$ has had some questionable business practices, and the way they "innovate" sometimes is not allways the best way to go about things but ya know what they make an alright product.

In about 95.8% of cases its not the Operating system that causes the instability. most of the time its one of a few things:

Bad 3rd party driver (either installed or miss configured)
Bad Hardware
Bad 3rd party software
User Error
Viruses or malware targeted at the OS installed by some ignorant action of the User

Very few times is it the Operating system that caueses the problem (Well except ME). And Yes, the reason Microsoft's Windows is the target of attack for viruses and Malware and badly coded sofware is because it is the Most popular OS on the market. If MacOS was more popular or Linux (God forbid anyone tarnish the name of linux ..pfft) there would be the same problem of people targeting it.

Some would call this a pro MS FlameBait post and yea.. it probably is but, ya know what.. I dont care, I would wonder how many of the "children" here made thier pro linux flames on a Windows box?

David, Mathieu is talking about Bug 255947 which for me at least shows up when searching for updates.

Gids - ok, thanks. Hmm. Hardly a life-threatening bug that one... :-)

It doesn't look like the official IE7 tabbed implementation is going to be much better either ...

http://www.adamstiles.com/adam/2005/05/ie7_tabs_to_gor.html

Typical of Microsoft to notice tabs and think that it is the only thing that differentiates Firefox from IE.

"Yet it's his personal opinion, so leave him alone! If you don't agree, just don't read it, we live in a free world (at least when it comes to choosing which blogs we don't read)..."

The point is, Asa is a vocal representative of Mozilla, and he should try to be a bit more professional.

Let's see. Asa is one of the developers working on Firefox. He trashes IE and, more than likely hates Microsoft. He has told us what he thinks of the MSN Toolbar Tabs and relates them to IE7 development.

Some posts, here and elsewhere, claim to know the who/what/where/why/and how's of the MSN Toolbar Tabs and what is (or isn’t) going on with the development of IE7.

How about we find out from the horses mouth. We have Asa's about FF. Here is the blog at MSDN's site with IE7 developers telling us what is really happening with IE7 and the work they, individually, are doing. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie

Maybe if we all spent the time to research what is happening in the industry we love so much we could stop the idiotic speculation, misinformation, and rumors that fire people up for no reason, spreading Microsoft hate.

Microsoft is here to stay for a long time. There is nothing better coming down the pipe until Apple packages OS X and sells it at Best Buy.

Mike

Dude. It might just be an initial implementation. If everyone were to judge me by the first code I've written I should be smacked.

Years ago when I wrote the threadpool implementation in Jetspeed I was having deadlocks in production code.

There wasn't a lot of documentation on writing Java threadpools and I was pounding my head against the wall.

It turned out to be a really embarassing bug in my own code. Something that should have been obvious but I wouldn't have learned about this issue without writing and deploying an implementation.

Microsoft writes plenty of pathetic code. Their whole OS is pretty pathetic.. .but its a bit hard to criticize if it was alpha code.

The REAL person to be criticized is the marketing team if it was pushed out.

My advice to any Microsoft developers listening is to blog LOUD about WHY this happened so that marketing is no longer allowed to push releases.

Bad things happen without light and blogs do a great job at shedding light on a dark issue.

Maybe somewhere inside Asa is a fear that as soon as something slightly bad happens with Firefox (i.e. security glitches), he and the rest of the Mozilla crew are going to be nailed for it. I know I would be if I were in his position -- Firefox has been inflated to a position of perfection, placed on the world's highest pedestal, and it's a long way down.

Just look at what happened when the first security glitches were announced -- everyone said 'oh Firefox isn't worth it because it's not perfect!'

Clever people within MSN should take note of his remarks and work harder. In fact, I would imagine, there's at least a member or two of the team who wrote the MSN toolbar who thought it wasn't ready to be released, but had marketing push them to release it sooner. Those 'clever people' will be able to take blog posts like Asa's and point to them when they yell at their marketing team for an early release.

Anyone who had the misfortune to work on Netscape dealt with this -- Netscape 4 and Mozilla 1/Netscape 5/Netscape 6 were awful, awful programs that were pushed out the door by overzealous marketing teams. Perhaps Asa was in that situation, and the MSN toolbar's early release reminds him of that.

Also, he could be having a bad week, day, month.

In any event, why nail someone for harsh but true criticism? Especially when thrown at a company whose president insists that Firefox is irrelevant because IE is just so amazing.

People's inability to take criticism and their expectation that it not be given screws up a lot of organizations, people, and governments.

I think it was a bad idea to leave comments enabled on this entry… 47 comments, and 2/3 of them could be straight out off Slashdot. Gee, people are smart.

sheesh, what a set of rants. ok, how many of you who trashed Asa for his comments bothered to try the MSIE tabbed browsing thing first to see if he was right?

Optimal Desktop offers the most advanced tabbed browser and it is built on the IE engine. Optimal Desktop lets' you group your tabs in a set of tabs called drawers (matrix browsing) and store your drawers inside of cabinet files. In this way you can bookmark hundreds of links and get to any of them very quickly. Each page also lets you browse links in differnet windows. These tabs are temporary and designed for quick browsing.

We have been working on this system for over 5 years and offer advantages that are byond what every one else is doing. If you like tab browsing give us a try. See this post on my blog to get a better idea of our system (http://optimalaccess.iuplog.com/default.asp?item=90276).

God, some of the comments on this post are ridiculous. Forget that Asa is a dev for Firefox. That's not what this post is about. I downloaded that MSN Toolbar and it is nowhere near release standard. Don't you think it's going to freak users out when their screen flickers when they switch web page? Most will probably think they've got some sort of virus. If this toolbar becomes popular, it will be very hard to persuade people of the use of tabbed browsing.

I don't see why MSN bothered. IE's done without tabs for this long, what's another few months?

"IE's done without tabs for this long, what's another few months?"

This just shows how desperate they're getting! :-)

Desperate? With an 85%+ market share? I don't think so.

Bottom line is, FF has been presented as the bee-all and end-all. But with a monster memory leak, and after a load of serious security breaches, a piss-poor 'update system', crippled performance after one 'patch' (1.0.3) which hasn't been satisfactorily fixed (the instant I start typing here my CPU usage soars) and a release schedule for _upgrades_ which is covered with Teflon, the shine on FF has gone. That's not to mention the bizarre GUI differences between FF and TB (do the devs ever talk to each other?).

And now we see Asa attacking the opposition! I haven't noticed MS taking the piss out of Firefox and Thunderbird (despite having every opportunity), so why is Asa sinking so low, when his own software needs help so much?

To sum up:

1.) Asa should have been more professional about it
2.) He was right though
3.) To compare: people are talking about big bugs in IE, and then some people are kvetching that a border is missing in FireFox. Compare the enormity of those tow.
4.) FireFox isn't perfect, IE isn't perfect, MSN isn't perfect. I'd like to ask that comments be turned off on this post because there is nothing more to say from anyone. All I read here is whining from people who have problems with borders.

"Desperate? With an 85%+ market share? I don't think so."

Then how else do you explain the all-to-early release of this msn toolbar? If they weren't desperate they'd take their time and make sure they at least had a stable product before shipping. (You could argue that MS never has done before, so why now? But that would be comparing apples and moldy apples.)