Microsoft Internet Explorer Team Sends New Cake for Mozilla Firefox 3 LaunchWednesday June 18th, 2008The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft sent Mozilla a cake to mark the release of Mozilla Firefox 3. Mozilla Corporation employee Al Billings, who used to be a project manager for the IE team, posted some photographs of the cake, which features a large Internet Explorer 'e' logo and the message, "Congratulations on Shipping! Love, The IE Team". This isn't the first cake Mozilla has received from Redmond: in 2006, the IE team sent another cake to congratulate Mozilla on the release of Firefox 2. Mozilla Creative Director John Slater took a photograph of the Firefox 3 cake next to the last piece of the Firefox 2 cake, which has apparently been sitting in a freezer for the past twenty months. Relations between Microsoft and rival browser manufacturers haven't always been so cordial: in 1997 when Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, Microsoft dumped a giant metal IE logo on Netscape's front lawn. Netscape employees responded by tipping over the prop and spray-painting "Netscape Now!" (a slogan used by the browser maker to encourage users to download) on its side. They then placed a statue of Netscape's green Mozilla mascot — described in contemporary reports as being either seven feet (2.1 metres) or twelve feet (3.7 metres) tall — on top of it and adorned it with a placard reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18", a reference to the market shares of the two leading browser vendors at the time. I guess it would be poor form to send MSIE people a cake when they finally ship 8 saying "Congratulations on Slipping" So why did the IE team send a cake? ...till you run out of cake. And the science gets done and you make a [neat browser] for the people who are still alive. ^_^ The Firefox team should send them back a tasty slice of humble pie. a placard reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18", a reference to the market shares of the two leading browser vendors at the time. those were the days...yeah. sniff. Mozilla should just keep on fighting and yes, the internet is much larger than it used to be. |