"Basically what everyone is saying is that we have done nothing Microsoft specific that makes IE and IIS work well together. This is a huge missed opportunity."

--Bill Gates [PDF]

Microsoft is known to have essentially spammed all registered GNU/Linux users in Austria and its habit of AstroTurfing is speculation no more because there is hard evidence and admission. Now that Microsoft is pressured to unbundle the Web browser (again), the company seems to be flooding Internet users with unwanted mail.

Microsoft IE8 rolls out the astroturf

Microsoft is hawking the near-ready version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser at its staff in a desperate attempt to snatch back some of Mozilla’s growing market share.

Microsoft did the same thing for OOXML.

In other news about IE8, the company is pressing the press (in its typical fashion) to make some noise about a feature that, according to experts, is utterly useless.

IE8's Clickjacking Fix Not Much Help, Experts Say

New Microsoft technology designed to protect Internet Explorer users from a powerful new Web-based attack will not fix the problem, security experts said Tuesday.

[...]

"It's not a solution to clickjacking by any stretch of the imagination. It's a vaguely mitigating factor for the very few people who use IE8," said Robert Hansen, CEO of the SecTheory consultancy, and one of the people who first reported the issue to Microsoft. "But it's interesting that they're taking it seriously."

Performance-wise, IE8 is well behind the rest, according to a new benchmark from a Microsoft-biased news network.

IE8 still trails the opposition by an awful amount; removing Opera from the comparison would leave IE8 at almost three times slower than its nearest competitor.

There is further commentary about these results right here.

Whatever the performance of IE8 is really like, it's possible that it will not be bundled with future operating systems.

The European Commission has accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system.

Richard Waters shows his typical pro-Microsoft bias by calling it "a fresh attack." Microsoft is not facing "an attack", no more than a criminal faces an "attack" from a policeman that's chasing him. Microsoft broke many laws and it was never really punished for these. What we see here is more daemonisation of the EU Commission -- daemonisation which is typically coordinated from the top (or from dead people [1, 2, 3]). ⬆