“Internet Explorer sucks” has been a battle cry of the internet basically since Firefox became available, and the notoriously slow to catch-up standard browser has been the bane of web users, employees of not-tech-savvy customers, and people who have had to use the computer at their parents’ house for a few years — or in web time, eons.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has borne the brunt of a lot of web elitism and for good reason. IE was sloooooow to implement tabbed browsing, remained annoyingly to be the default of some major corporate websites forcing you to open it, lacked handy functions and extensions like Ad Block for a dog’s age, and generally made you have to retreat several years in your browsing functions whenever you were confronted with mandatory IE use.
But a new IE ad campaign promises that IE sucks less, in those words, all the while sending up the culture that mocks it as basement dwelling, aging karaoke champs that are chubby and pale and like to while away the late night hours complaining about Internet Explorer.
The new ad is a video in which a typical internet comments complainer stalks the brand around the web, insulting IE on Twitter and other services. In it, the karaoke queen of Coco’s Bar and Grill in 2008 relentlessly rags on Microsoft’s browser, expounding upon its suckage and finding the reply:
“IE adopts an island of kittens and donates them all to children everywhere!!! #Kids+KittiesRULE.”
You can watch the new IE sucks less spot promoted by Microsoft below, but, as you may also notice, while the company is happy to lampshade Internet Explorer’s poor web rep in the clip, it has also disabled comments for the video.