Pardon me Microsoft Windows 7, your Firefox is showing

by David M Williams

Friday, 07 November 2008

Tim Sneath, passionate Microsoft Windows client evangelist, spoke today at the “Power to Developers” rally in Sydney, Australia, promoting Windows 7. Yet, the camera caught more than just Microsoft software on his laptop, with Mozilla Firefox plain to see.

Sneath was in Sydney to give still one of the first public Windows 7 demonstrations, and followed on from Steve Ballmer’s keynote explanation of Windows Azure and Gianpaolo Carraro’s talk on programming for Azure.

You can view the whole kebang online at www.microsoft.com/australia/powertodevelopers. And be sure to zoom to the two hours, 19 minute mark.

By this point, Tim had waxed enthusiastically about the new Windows 7 taskbar and how you could easily drag-and-drop items from the Start menu there. He illustrated by pulling WordPad off the Start menu.

In so doing, another recently-used program dutifully popped onto the Start menu to fill the space now vacant. It was none other than Mozilla Firefox! And here’s the pictorial evidence – sorry it’s fuzzy, it was either this clip of the streaming webcast or the photo from my iPhone while sitting out in the audience. Check out the bottom program on the Start menu.

I quizzed Tim about this afterward. Now, during the keynote Steve Ballmer had noted Internet Explorer 8 was going to be fully standards compliant. Later, while exhorting developers to prepare for Windows Azure and Windows 7, the advice was given to ensure websites constructed are standards-compliant.

So, I was pretty much prepared for, and expecting, the answer to be he was merely testing that websites rendered the same in both browsers. After all, it’s not uncommon to check web sites this way, making sure they render properly across a range of browsers including Safari.

Humorously, Tim told me the actual truth was he had a particular web site he needed to visit and the pre-beta version of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 he was using crashed when he visited that site.

Thus, he had to install – and depend upon – Firefox to help him out on this occasion.

This wasn’t the only gaffe of the day: several demonstrations failed to perform as expected, and a website that logged visitor’s browsers recorded many more audience members were wielding Apple iPhones than Windows Mobile devices.

Still, fun was had by all, and you can read my coverage of Steve’s talk – just what Azure is – here.