today when the story broke that MSN.com shuts out non-Microsoft browsers. Their stated reason? “‘For browsers that we know don’t support those standards or that we can’t insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the’ standards.”
It seems that they’re just pushing the browser upgrade campaign, as suggested by the nice folks at the Web Standards Project.
Well it might seem like that’s what this is about. But it’s not. They’ve clearly taken on similar tactics – but wrapping themselves up in W3C standards? It’s BS. Utter bullshit.
Fact is, for all their hemming and hawing about web standards, MSN works fine in Netscape 6.1 for OS X, Omniweb, and even Netscape 4.7x (well, it displays, if only minimally). No, this isn’t about web standards. This is obviously about trying to get people to upgrade to a particular standards-compliant browser.
I’m not surprised or angry with MS though. I expect this sort of behaviour from them. But to pervert the work of people legitimately trying to support and encourage web standards? Bullshit.
