Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy 381
eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"
In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
For bonus points, do all this faster and with less memory than Internet Explorer 7 takes.
This is a fairly modest list but if they fixed all of that, Internet Explorer would be a joy to develop against. Hell, I might even consider replacing Firefox as my default browser on Windows. However, as much as we can collectively dream, you know they'll rejig the interface slightly, crank up the version number by one and call it a day.
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows.
As a program Internet Explorer is simply trash. I simply hate it. Actually I fucking despise it. It is a big ball of shit [codinghorror.com]. It's the ugly building in the middle of a city that everyone wants torn down but it just sits there damaging the community's spirit.
I once joked with a colleague that Internet Explorer has probably wiped billions off pounds off the world economy. I laughed, paused for a moment, and realised it's probably completely true. What could the world have done with all those countless hours hacking their CSS to support the trash that is Internet Explorer?
Doesn't it make you depressed?
Simon
Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough (Score:5, Interesting)
My prediction is that IE 8 will have exactly the same rendering capabilities, but it will have some sort of annoying new UI, plus maybe a few extremely annoying security features that everyone will turn off immediately.
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Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
My point was really, there needs to be some innovation. HTML & CSS have grown stagnant and are not keeping up with what modern web applications are asking it to do. W3C is an ineffective standards body and is incapable of delivering something to meet these new demands. The only way I can see innovation now is if browser makers roll their own. Hell, even firefox has those -x-rounded-corner things. Gee. Maybe people want rounded corners huh? Why isn't this getting added to a formal standard?
The important thing though is to make sure you meet all the baseline standards first before adding cool crap on top. IE doesn't meet the baseline yet, so they aren't in a place to do cool new stuff.
At least, this is my opinion.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
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How about a 2 column layout with a fixed column and a background that extends the page? Is that useless or obscure?
"I've never understood" (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is this completely missing the point (people want 3 column layout, and they HAVE to implement them anyway with tedious gesticulations), but you're posting on a site with a 3 column layout, for fuck's sake!
Navigation on the right, content and comments in the middle, links and tools on the right. No, that's not a newspaper layout (which have more than 3 columns, in case you've never opened one!), and it makes at least some fucking sense.
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You are assuming that the GP and everyone else doesn't take advantage of Preferences to get rid of that useless right column, which I did years ago and don't remember what the settings were. Perhaps the GP also surfs
(Personally, I think 3 columns for a SI
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the IFRAME. You think that little fairly useful tag came from the W3C? Look at all the other tags you've got in HTML. How many of them were dreamed up by the eggheads at the W3C? I'm no historian, but I'd wager most of the useful bits of HTML and possibly CSS we have today is not because of the W3C, but a byproduct of the IE vs. Netscape wars of way back when. Shit, we even have the useful BLINK tag!!
The W3C is horrible at cranking out useful standards - those guys seem more interested in hearing themselves talk. They want you to give up tables for a grid layout (which is a good move) but provide no direct replacement. Yes you can rid yourself of tables, but you do so with a hack. Hell, wasn't the TABLE tag something from Netscape?
Bottom line? The only way we will evolve on the web is with another bloody tag war.
At least, in my opinion. I could be wrong you know
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WinXP = about 100$
VMWare Fusion = about 80$
2GB of RAM for the Mac mini = about 200$
With shipping, taxes and everything, this means I had to pay around 300$ just so I can test and make custom CSS for a browser that still can't correctly render a website according to CSS specs.
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I'd say that $100 was wasted, VMWare has the capability to convert VirtualPC images. (dunno whether it might want to reactivate because of the changed virtual machine hardware though)
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Now, why don't they change the engine in IE while keeping both versions for backward compatibility? Thats the more interesting question.
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The same reason why they didn't break all backward compatibility for Vista and use a sandboxed WinXP emulator for older applications.
MSFT managers won't think out side the box.
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So even your company intranet should be untrusted (Restricted Sites), and not allowed to use ANY plugins or Javascript? Ya, great plan. Lets not forget how useless many other sites would be.
I once joked with a colleague that Internet Explorer has probably wiped billions off pounds off the world economy. I laughed, paused for a moment, and realised it's probably completely true. What could the world have done with all
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Interesting)
While superficially correct, this is a case of the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org]. The money spent working around IE bugs could be spent better elsewhere (for instance, QA, usability, etc.).
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That's a strawman. A security model comparable to Firefox or Opera is what I was referring to. In a large corporation I'd expect the security threat would be more hostile than the open Internet. The vast majority of attacks on the Internet are indiscriminate and are just focused on finding anybody to to attack. In th
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
6. Look for a new job because they fired me.
MS doesn't want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can't compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE's modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties.
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Trusted zone - Windows Update, various MS IT sites that I use for Software downloads, my Bank, etc
Intranet zone - internal websites, limited scripting, but downloading is supported
Internet zon
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't really complain about this enough. You drop a semicolon or parenthesis in C or Java, your compiler lets you know about it, and doesn't proceed until you feed it something that makes sense. Same generally applies for scripting languages. Why browser writers in the early days of the web decided otherwise boggles the mind, and we're still paying for that decision today. You can't just cut out "quirks mode" et al. without breaking large swaths of the web.
I see the W3C's specification of well-formedness on XHTML as the way forward, the light at the end of the tunnel. Since it only applies to the fairly recent XHTML, there's really no need to sweat about the effects on legacy documents. If someone's got noncompliant XHTML floating around and doesn't care to fix it, nuts to them. On the subject of uncooperative ad servers, if you as a developer can't get them to serve you compliant XHTML, just drop them. It's not as if there's really a shortage of advertising services out there. This won't have to go on very long before every company will fall into line.
Of course this all only applies if well-formedness is actually enforced by all browsers, and only if XHTML actually catches on. Similar strictness on the part of HTML 5, if it ever arrives and becomes dominant, could perform the same function too.
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That puts it in the ad company's best interests to make it work.
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Very, very few pages are served this way, it's usually text/html.
Xhtml is suppose to break!
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they're fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world's web sites didn't work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft's biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn't the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn't spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
We've been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I'm integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can't blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's not a bad thing.
Our PCs would be a lot safer, too. Call that a bonus.
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Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a web developer myself, the solution is never so simple as to say "screw IE." The customer you are building the site for wants a page that works in all browsers. Since IE is widely used (*gag*), unfortunately, we have to obey our customers. And if I don't do it, my competition will, and I've lost a customer. Granted, I don't want those customers, but 99% of them are like that, so I don't really have a choice in the matter. There's no way we can all unite together in some kind of revolt -- some developers
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually, the difference between various browsers' error-recovery algorithms is a fairly big part of the problem... but only in the sense that the browsers are being used by the developers for debuggin
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Yes it is quite feasible. So there will be errors for the short term. Then the errors will be fixed by sites that care. Sites that don't care will wither and die off. That is the good result of error checking --- errors tend to be fixed.
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I hear bricks falling upstairs (Score:2)
You can forgive anything from a manager except an inability to communicate. Hachamovitch broke rule #1, expect to see him kicked as soon as IE8 is released. Too late perhaps, but then maybe the top dogs were a little too hands-off?
A
Of course (Score:5, Funny)
Truncated (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you've done serious web development, you have no idea how frustrating it is to target IE. Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
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I bet it's really hard to manage a project when you post an incidental blog entry about an icon change and you get 300 puerile comments about how you should be working on OMG CSS OMG STANDARDS when the roadmap for the product and what it would support based
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I read almost all the comments from both blog entries. Aside from a few slashdotty tin-foil-hat EVIL M$ posts, I felt most were fairly well thought out. I don't think anybody was dissing the developers or managers, but more of "hey guys! we are all feeling neglected here" kind of deal.
How about this. Are the comments you read on those two posts of the same nature as, say, those from the infamous "Digg Rebellion"?
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Huh, and here I thought "outpouring pent up rage" would be considered very unprofessional.
Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
If you're targeting IE (and there's no reason not to), I'd expect you'd learn how to do things the IE way, and then tweak to work in IE and FF. IE is the lar
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Why code for the exceptions? (Score:2)
There is good reason not to code first for IE. For one thing, IE is forgiving of some code problems that will cause standards-compliant browsers to render incorrectly. If you check it first in IE, you won't know why it doesn't work in Firefox and Opera. If you check it in Firefox first, it will probably work in IE.
In other cases, where IE doesn't render correct c
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If you've done *serious* web development then you consider yourself a *professional*. And as a professional, you no longer have the luxury afforded to the "my CSS is art" drama-queens.
As a professional, you should be more concerned with the viability of your design to meet your clients goals: most often to sell something, support something already sold, or strengthen the brand they use to sell things. Which means you should be focusing on nothing more than making your
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Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:4, Insightful)
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it's silly that the founders of a tiny itsy-bitsy Microsoft are still in control of one of the largest, sprawling corporations in the world.
Part of that is because those guys MADE IT into one of the largest, sprawling corporations in the world. We laugh and joke about the "failure" that Vista is and such, and yeah, I hate it, and most of their software sucks, but they know how to work the market.
It's hard to argue about the business since of a company that is still bringing in profits on the order of billions of dollars per year.
And to some degree, it's understandable why they are how they are. I don't mean the issue of software quality, I m
Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Different managers are required for different stages of a corporation's existence. Sure, they made the corporation what it is today, but they also mismanaged it into a crippled, bloated, low-growth, living entirely off of prior achievements, slug. It's an axiom that after a certain point, the best thing the founders of a corporation can do for their creation is leave, and I don't think Microsoft has proven to be an exception. Microsoft should have re-invented itself at some point during the 95/NT4 era, and instead calcified into the Microsoft of today. Perhaps the DOJ inquisition had a lot to do with that, but a corporation is forced to live under the regime it finds itself subject to.
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It's hard to argue about the business since of a company...
Since refers to passage of time.
Sense refers to sound practical judgment.
Now you know; and knowing is half the battle! GI JOE!
Sorry for the nitpick, but this really bugged me for some reason.
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They could be bringing in many more billions of dollars per year if they would split their corporation into a group of smaller corporations.
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Look, I dislike IE as well, I've been using Firefox since it was a sub-1.0 release, but let's save hyperbole for a more appropriate context.
Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:4, Informative)
No it has not in any way, shape or form 90 million users. Microsoft has sold 90 million Windows Vista/XP/NT/2000 licenses in total. The funny thing is, any windows license sold by Microsoft since Vista was released is counted as a Windows Vista license.
If you have a fortune 500 company and buy a million licenses to deploy XP they will count as Windows Vista license no matter how you buy them. Then we have all the home users that come to me with their new computer with Vista installed wanting me to install XP and delete Vista from their computers.
Vista is a lame duck considering it was 6 years since XP and there is a pent up want for a new OS. Six years of anticipation and vaporware turned into only minor improvement and in many cases regression.
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Their recent quarterly results show that Vista sales are disappointing.
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Windows Vista's sales numbers to people with computers that can run it but already run XP are low, and that's what's being discussed.
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However, this has limited impact on Microsoft's bottom line because most consumer hardware vendors deploy one kind of MS OS or another and Microsoft gets paid and enterprise IT shops have subscri
In other news... (Score:2)
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Having had some dealings with Microsoft recently, I think it's only fair to point out that their various divisions are already run more like distinct businesses. They're encouraged to think like small businesses, to the point that they actively discourage people from having any relations whatsoever with people of different divisions.
The problem is that even though their day-to-day operations are independent of one another, they still collude to force shitty technology out the door, and their leadership is
Actually this runs across products (Score:2, Interesting)
How can they be working on IE8... (Score:4, Funny)
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don't tell the boss (Score:3)
They don't care? (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly seems that way.
You only need to look at the mess they made of the GUI in ie7 to understand just how far off course the internet explorer team have sailed.
It's a damn pain to develop for.
Then again, so was ie6 - hmm, and ie5 and yeah, even ie4
The problem is, you can't ignore 90% market share - catch 22.
90%?? Maybe in the 90's... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: More like 80% (Score:4, Informative)
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It all depends on who does the study and where the study was done. Which is why I quote a broad range that that a single source because no single source will ever be correct.
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But then most of our customers are not very fluent with technology.
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And so it begins... (Score:5, Insightful)
As Bill begins to leave the company, the heralded Microsoft development teams start to act like your normal "joe IT" shop... First Vista... now IE...
Your powers are weak, old man...
Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
He, like, totally sounds like a Silicon Valley girl.
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That would be more true to form...
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-- like, what Bill Gates actually said
Standard compliancy is most important for next IE (Score:5, Insightful)
This is OK for our internal users, but impossible for any external site because of the installed base of legacy CRAP.
Microsoft need to fix:
- CSS support
- DOM support in their javascript implementation
- XHTML support
- SVG rendering
Only then will we ever look at IE again.
We also need to be clear on the patent situation surrounding technologies such as Silverlight on platforms other than Windows, before we invest any time and effort in such technologies. We don't want to end up supporting a technology that Microsoft plan on attacking on non-windows platforms.
Microsoft are making a fool of themselves with IE, and severely damaging their reputation with developers. I hope they will offer an upgrade of internet explorer for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista when they have finally sorted out their shoddy rendering library. Internet Explorer 7 was a poor attempt at improving what remains the worst web browser that is still considered current (at least by some).
The "Secret" (Score:2)
Expectations, Transparency, Openness (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are many possible degrees of transparency. You don't have to take the Mozilla approach where every little change is visible to the public. Over the past year or two, Opera has managed to do a good job of keeping people aware that new stuff is coming down the pike without actually giving away the goods before their announcements.
Sure, sometimes it means that reaction is a bit underwhelmed when people build up some huge expectation over a hinted-at feature, and it turns out to be something much more mundane (Opera Link, for example -- incredibly useful, but in its current form not revolutionary). But anyone following Opera developers' blogs can tell that yes, they're working on the next version, and could pick up some vague clues as to some of the planned features and capabilities.
With IE8, no one without an NDA knew whether Microsoft had spent a year on design, a year on coding, or just took a year off. The IE8 blog asked us not to take silence for inaction, but what else should we have assumed?
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Developer people like being feed little trinkets of free stuff. It makes us feel like we are being listened to and appreciated.
Bill's "Power" at MS... (Score:2)
There has been conversation? (Score:4, Funny)
It may not have been face-to-face, but for almost a decade, it seems that the conversation between IE devs and web devs has pretty much been...
Web devs: Fuck you!
IE devs: Fuck you!
Why does the IE team hate standards so much? It's not like they don't know how to make things work. IE5 for Mac came out in 2000 and was pretty awesome--it even supported transparent PNGs with nothing more than an <img> tag!
Dear IE team: thanks for inventing AJAX. Now please go make everything else work. kthxbye.
(Note: I know for a fact that the IE team has many talented and nice people. They (and we) are just victims of horrible decisions being made further up the chain. So this vitriol is really directed at management.)
Re:There has been conversation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is a business. Keeping IE non-compliant with standards makes them money. If they complied with standards then all the Web pages and applications would soon do the same, which means there would be nothing stopping companies with Web apps from migrating to something cheaper than Windows and Office. MS's strategy is called "tying" and is illegal for companies with monopoly influence in a market, but MS still makes more money breaking the law and paying off politicians than it does complying with the law, so we're screwed. IE will never be compliant with the specs unless MS loses their monopoly influence.
What an original name! (Score:2)
It may have been coincidental, but a day after the Holzschlag-Gates exchange, Hachamovitch disclosed on the team's blog that the next version would be called IE8.
What an original name! What a surprise! Who would have guessed that after IE4 came IE5, which was replaced by IE6, and then IE7 (which followed IE6) would be replaced with IE8?!??!!
I vote that all MS products move to a numerical numbering scheme, a-la Fedora and Suse. Why don't we call the next version of Windows "7"!
For Chrissake! (Score:2)
Nope, and I won't go into speculatons why - just look at the Bill Gates deposition videos and you'll know. That guy has it thick or he would not be who he is by bilking...yadayadayada
Developer overload (Score:4, Insightful)
When that dialog does not occur usually it is because the product team are overloaded in terms of the features they have to implement in the time frame that they've been allocated. Sometimes you just don't have time to engage with external entities to the degree that you'd like, or at all. On a product as significant as IE has proven to be in influencing defacto standards, that is quite dangerous.
Definition of "transparency" (Score:5, Funny)
if you don't have anything nice to say... (Score:2)
Isn't This Part Of A Strategy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if they haven't committed on certain features or levels of compliancy, this surely does not mean complete silence. Disappointment about delivery of features can be expected, but usually it's tempered with some amount of understanding in the face of transparency and intentions.
So to me, the silence is a strategy. The choices are:
- they're not planning on implementing the standards that people expect (CSS, DOM, SVG, XHTML) so they want to avoid fact-based criticism for as long as possible. The longer they wait, the more people may fall in love with Silverlight?
- they're planning on implementing standards and they want to surprise the hell out of the developers (to have them come rushing and gushing back to the fold).
Ok, so I'm foolishly hoping it's the latter strategy (I've heard they do have a new layout engine they're working on). But the longer they wait, the more people will expect.
It must be fairly obvious to them by now that most developers realize just how far behind standards compliancy IE is. Seriously, they are the _ONLY_ major browser out there with: its own DOM, its own event handling, its own vector graphics (VML/Silverlight) and woefully behind CSS implementation. EVERY other browser gives a shot at supporting SVG - where are they with that? They haven't even TOUCHED the spec yet!
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IE is one of many, many projects that go one there and I doubt he keeps a detailed day to day list of what's going on.
This is no different then any other company. Hell, I would be surprised if it was even interesting to him any more.
What happened to Developers, developers...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where Microsoft completely missed the boat was on the developer tools. First the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and now Firebug. The IE web developer toolbar is an utter joke. The script debugger is awful. Debugging through Visual Studio is pretty nice (if you have it) but it's not nearly as convenient as Firebug's integrated debugger, or even Venkman. It's been two years since I knew a web developer that used IE as their primary development platform. Even when working on sites that only have to target IE (the site that I am writing now will only be used on IE6 - ouch) we still develop on Firefox first and then fix it in IE once it works in Firefox.
Even if IE8 regains 95% of the market, they still won't have the same control over the web that they had with IE6 unless they drastically improve the developer experience. With IE6 one could argue that it made financial sense to ignore other browsers. As long as it's either to develop in other browsers than it is in IE, Microsoft will never achieve that kind of dominance again.
(I also have to agree with the poster quoted on the front page the other day. As long as Microsoft shows this level of neglect for IE developers, why in the world would we consider using any of their other technologies. Even as a
Just when they had it working... (Score:5, Funny)
It took them 10 years to finally get PNGs working properly and now they're going to be broken again?
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Normally, Google's form uses q as the field for the search term, not searchQ. And btnI is the name of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The link actually has nothing to do with IE 8. It's really just equivalent to an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for contactlognet, for which Google immediately shoots back a redirect to that site. That site in turn sends you yet another redirect.