On the second day of Microsoft’s MIX 2008 conference in Las Vegas for web developers and designers, Rafael Rivera – my liveblogging companion and Bryant Zadegan‘s cameraman, took the rare opportunity to stand up during question time to ask Steve Ballmer a question in the keynote with Guy Kawasaki. The response from Ballmer result shouts for itself.

Credits to Georg Holzer for taking out the camcorder and recording it on-demand without any prior notice.

Photos by Long Zheng, commentary by Rafael Riviera Rivera

12:44am: Waiting for Ballmer to start throwing chairs… These look heavy…
Johnny Cash impersonator makes a comeback tour.

12:51am: Long’s MIX ’08 restyle entry displayed on the big screen.
Realization of power saver mode and its effects on wireless signal strength… Power level 9000!!!

1:04pm: Vince Mira (15 year old) kicked off stage.

1:05pm: MIX ’09 announced and scheduled. I’m getting bribing some Microsoft guys for tickets as you read this…

1:06pm: Guy and Steve on stage, walking the runway. The cameras are going wild. Where’s Paris Hilton?

Continue reading →

So some of you might be wondering why there hasn’t been much posts from me at MIX, the hottest Microsoft conference around. There was IE8, there was Silverlight, there was DeepZoom and much more.

Simply put, my laptop died the second I arrived in Las Vegas Airport. CPR didn’t work. Mouth to mouth didn’t work. It did spring back to life for just a second when the director of Windows communications touched it, but the magic wore off pretty quickly.

As I’m typing this on Rafael’s laptop (owe him dinner or something), Daniel from Microsoft’s TSG (technical support group – geeks for geeks) is helping me install a fresh copy of Windows Seven Vista on it. In the least it means I’ll have notepad to write with, more might be pushing it.

Speaking of which, I also accidentally deleted all of my Flickr photos from this morning’s keynote because of the crappy hotel internet connection falsely not displaying any pictures. I’m now reuploading everything. Yeah, uploading 800MB of photos is pretty much the most exciting thing I’ve done in Vegas so far.

If you were looking for better MIX coverage, I encourage you to check out all these other great bloggers.

At the time of writing, the ACID2 test has completely collapsed under the weight of IE8 beta users. Couldn’t confirm this but I don’t see why it would be faked. Guess something happened between then and now.

Special thanks to Jay C. for sending this in. 

Update: Tony Chor from the IE team has explained that it’s caused by cross-domain links which are not supported by IE8 Beta 1 for the moment. If you visit the original Acid2 test on IE8 Beta 1, it works fine.

To kick things off at Microsoft’s MIX 2008 conference in Las Vegas, Ray Ozzie, Scott Gutherie and Dean Hachamovitch hosted the first of two keynotes at the event on its first day. Here’s a slideshow of pictures taken from the keynote. Due to technical difficulties, couldn’t actually do the liveblog I wanted to do. Maybe next time.

Continue reading →

After posting the screenshot of the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 toolbar yesterday, I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how wide (vertically) the toolbars have become. Understandably that was a concern to many users because a browser should devote as many pixels as it could for the content and not itself.

The assumption comes from IE8 having twice as many toolbars as IE7 did, and thus it was perfectly reasonable to come to the conclusion it took up twice as much screen real-estate. Because I had posted a resized image of the interface, it was difficult to prove if that was indeed the case.

In response, I made this original-size side-by-side comparison of the two browser interfaces.

(Left) Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 toolbar. (Right) Internet Explorer 7 toolbar with links menu enabled.

(Left) Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 toolbar. (Right) Internet Explorer 7 toolbar without links menu enabled.

As you can see, the IE8 interface is barely any larger than the IE7 interface. The exact different is only 8 pixels. The tabs too are identical at 33px high. By removing the border above the tabs and joining together the two toolbars, it really looks much more spaced out at the cost of barely anything. In my opinion, it’s well worth the difference.

Update: A few people have pointed out because IE7 doesn’t enable the links menu by default, it was not an accurate representation of the IE7 interface. I’ve now added another comparison with the links menu disabled. The difference now becomes 30 pixels. However I should add I don’t think this is fair comparison and I’m also pretty sure the links menu in IE8 can too be disabled.

Speaking of which, I took the quick opportunity to also make a comparison with Firefox 2. Granted it’s a bit of an apple vs. oranges comparison, the difference is a staggering 20 pixels.

(Left) Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 toolbar. (Right) Firefox 2 toolbar with bookmarks menu enabled.