I was looking around the information superhighway for some newer security test cases against the newest browsers and I came across this piece of information. Microsoft’s “get the facts” campaign is one of the poorest attempts at getting back its tarnished pride. Sure, sub-standard products like the Windows Millenium, Vista, IE6 and IE7 have done a great deal of harm, allowing the competition to get ahead.

Internet Explorer 6′s aging engine allowed Firefox and Opera to gain momentum while Windows Vista provided a kick for Apple OS X and Linux Ubuntu, the first one gaining 2% market share, jumping from 3% to 5% and well beyond.

Why do I say Microsoft’s campaign is poor? Simply because their way of getting the information distorted and against the very things users see when using the competition’s products. Let’s take the table presented by Microsoft and look through the competition:

1. Security: only IE8 gets a check for … what? Firefox and Chrome have behind them the Google search engine which scans sites and offers a huge database of “evil” sites. Chrome in particular has a great detection (sure, the version is now 4). From my experience IE8 allowed me to visit a phishing site, while Firefox warned me and Chrome downright didn’t let me go there.

2. Privacy: Sure IE8 allows for private browsing, but so does Firefox. Chrome can do that too, but both IE8 and Firefox have the option one click away while in Chrome it’s well hidden.

3. Ease of use: IE8 claims victory! Are you kidding me? The accelerators are the most annoying thing I’ve ever encountered, with the exception of Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 has come a long way, but it’s just in line with the others (if you disable those ‘features’).

4. Web Standards: IE8 isn’t better, not at all. How can IE8 claim to have invested heavily in CSS 2.1 support when it utterly fails the Acid3 test?? Seriously now, IE8 is the poorest, with 20%.

5. Developer Tools: First of all, Chrome also brings some to the game. Second, what IE8 has barely compares to what Firefox has. Throw in Firebug and IE8 has nothing.

6. Reliability: Chrome has both and it is outstanding. Each tab is a process. IE8 doesn’t have that isolation. Well, it tries to, as it can detect and close the offending tab itself, but that detection isn’t 100% accurate and does not apply when the core process fails, case in which there’s no isolation and no recovery. In Chrome all processes are independent and even when closing the initial process, the rest of the tabs remain. Firefox doesn’t have isolation, that’s true, but it has outstanding recovery. Here Chrome is the real winner.

7. Customizability: is this even a word?! First of all, how can you say that Internet Explorer 8 is customizable if it has everything right out of the box. And actually there’s a lot IE8 doesn’t have right out of the box, like an ebay tool for example. All it has are the annoying “accelerators”.

8. Manageability: what the hell are “enterprise tools” in a browser? And guidance to … what? For those unfamiliar with browsers there’s a very well written help section (especially for Chrome). Not to mention I have used IE8 for quite a while since I skipped on to Windows 7 and I haven’t see any of the “guidance” or “enterprise tools”.

9. Performance: it’s not a tie, not by a longshot. Sure, they’re right, the greatest limitation to browsing is your internet connection but there’s still a big difference once the page i ready to be rendered and rendering engines do make quite a difference. OK, it may not be relevant for 75% of the people (if it were, Microsoft would’ve been out of business a long time ago) but it’s there and it’s noticeable (see my browser speed tests – I didn’t devise the tests but I did run them and tried to keep some statistics). Of course, Microsoft does cover its weak points in the blanket of “irrelevance”.