While I see your opinion, I think it is largely confused. That button you pressed is greyed out, as it has already been pressed.
Actually, part of the issue is that the original poster provided a deep link into the site, which maintained the user's state, viewing the download flow.
The big blue button asking you to "Select desired testing OS" was not obvious?
The button colour is grey. It doesn't change colour with a state change/hover. The button has a right arrow on it, not a down arrow. Which indicates to me that I'll be leaving the page. It's not obvious it will do a drop down.
Agree that it didn't help that it was a deep link.
(What I neglected to say, was that my first attempt failed also, in my 'reading' web browser. That eschews background images. But that's another issue. So I'd already repasted the link into a different browser before having further issues.)
I get the page now, I just had an issue when I first encountered it.
I actually think the second of my points was the more important - how do you trust the authenticity of the site?
Does it say that? It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase. It could read 'Select desired testing (host) OS'. But may aswell just read 'Select host OS', as you suggest. Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the process.
You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the form control.
Also noticed that there's no VMWare option under Linux - why would that be?
Plus the blue font isn't really dark enough to read.
Great to see some md5s though!
Another niggle, which I totally missed the first time is that if you select the wrong option navigate away from the page. And then use the back button - you are back to square one. Which is a good reason why this type of download page just doesn't really work.
> It reads 'Select Desired Testing OS', which is an odd phrase.
Right. I read that with the implied [for]. Even still, it's odd.
My workflow is: I already have a host OS. I desire to download a VM image running an OS on which to test my site in IE.
> Seems to be a classic case of Microsoft changing terminology, and just confusing everyone further down the line in the process.
I can't imagine there's any malintent here. Just some website editing by folks who are not immersed in the cross-platform virtualization terminology.
> You could spell out what a host OS is on a descriptive help text next to the form control.
Anyone doing virtualization ought to know what 'host' and 'guest' mean. Just use the standard terms, overexplaining it just confuses it. But that's just my own bias.
> Also noticed that there's no VMWare option under Linux - why would that be?
Probably they just didn't get around to testing that case specifically. The VMware images for other host OSes might work just fine.
> Great to see some md5s though!
Death to MD5! :-) SHA-2-256 FTW. Better yet, GPG and/or Authenticode sigs.
> Another niggle, which I totally missed the first time is that if you select the wrong option navigate away from the page. And then use the back button - you are back to square one. Which is a good reason why this type of download page just doesn't really work.
I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'.
(I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)
Actually, part of the issue is that the original poster provided a deep link into the site, which maintained the user's state, viewing the download flow.
The big blue button asking you to "Select desired testing OS" was not obvious?