I make it no secret that I generally dislike Microsoft. I believe as a corporation, Microsoft’s M.O. is simply to dominate—not to make good products, or to help people work better or enjoy life more. And like most web designers, I despise the Internet Explorer browser. Despite Microsoft’s membership in standards-creating organizations, Microsoft rarely follows accepted and agreed-upon standards, and wastes tons of everyone’s time and resources. Having said all that, each time Microsoft upgrades IE, it gets a little less bad. And I’m glad when Microsoft encourages users to update their browser. But, I recently saw this alert on a windows setup I use for browser testing, which is currently running IE7:
This is an invitation to upgrade to IE8. But it’s strangely deceptive. It reads ‘Welcome to Internet Explorer 8’ as if I’ve already installed it. It wants me to click a radio button reading ‘I want to help improve Internet Explorer’. Uh, what? Am I going to be participating in some sort of beta testing group? At least the submit buttons are labeled ‘Install’ or ‘Don’t Install’.
Not surprisingly, Firefox has a simpler, clearer approach:
It’s encouraging me to upgrade, but there’s no question that the action I’m agreeing to is downloading a new version. In my opinion, Microsoft might have done something like this:
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