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Microsoft Responds to IE Criticism
darthcamaro writes "Looks like there was an online free-for-all on Microsoft's chat servers yesterday with Internet Explorer engineers. Several interesting things come out in the story including the fact that the IE big wig thinks that all of his engineers should have other browsers installed to see what they can do and, catch this...he thinks they're the underdog. 'I've worked at Microsoft for 14 years and I have always felt like the underdog,' said Hachamovitch. 'Maybe the road behind us looks easy, but at the time going it wasn't. I welcome the feedback today. Getting informed is the only way I know to get better. The day we don't get heated feedback I'll be concerned.'" Reader nkodengar notes that "Microsoft has posted an article on MSDN listing everything that will be affected by the the updates to Internet Explorer in Service Pack 2. This will be particularly important to developers who use ActiveX controls, pop-up windows and file download counters in their websites..."
The default setting in IE will be to block popups.
This pretty much means that the popup window will be officially dead in a year's time.
tcd004
The point is that it a user can't expect to just sit on their ass and have someone else inform them about all their choices.
It's called personal responsibility. If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Get informed. Use your brain. Own up to the fact that you have to actually make your own choices.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
My mom certainly has no clue that there even IS anything other than IE to use. Most of our mothers probably don't even realize that IE is not "the Internet".
This would indicate to me that if Microsoft didn't ship with IE as "The Internet" (tm), the vast majority of mothers would never even have the opportunity to use the internet. Maybe this isn't quite as bad for everyone as most of us think...
I think there is a common misconception that non computer experts are completely clueless. Now before you give me cupholder stories, peep this. A while ago I visited my mother who is in no way a computer expert. To my surprise, I saw a Mozilla icon on the desktop. I asked her if she used it and she said yes. She had downloaded it after hearing on the news how insecure IE was. She did the install (next, next, next, finish) and started using it no problem.
Now she doesn't do all the power user stuff but the point is that with a basic understanding of computer usage she was able to kick the IE habit.
Don't underestimate the ability of the average user to see the problems that IE has and to move away from it. Apathy however can be powerful and I think that's the main culprit.
Blaze a trail to the New World
In the actual discussion, their reply to any question about concrete features -- including standards support, CSS2, CSS2.1, CSS3, tabbed browsing, and PNG alpha transparency -- was, "We can't at this time commit to implementing xxx but we will look at it carefully."
They seemed evasive and unwilling to say anything except marketing-speak. What's the point of chatting to the community if you aren't allowed to talk about the product?
Which, frankly, sucks because there are so many features on Firefox that I like, but it's so slow that I can't use it for everyday browsing.
My question is this: Are we so anti-Microsoft that we'll settle for clunkier software without complaint, just because it's not made by Microsoft? Where is the hue and cry for a faster, more responsive Firefox? Why do we accept things without complaint just because we admire the politics of the developers?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Yep, I once found a bug in Access and dialled the support line to check. Turned out that yes, it was a genuine bug, and yes, that was one of my alloted support calls used up.
What a great scheme - I pay for debugging their software.
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
I've had lengthy discussions with a number of different 'Softies about this.
Keep in mind that Microsoft has a very consistent and very strong corporate culture. Everyone there thinks the way Gates wants them to.
The people over there truly believe that they are somehow "saving the world" with their software, and that they are the only ones capable of doing so.
It's truly bizarre.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
My point is that it's not Ford's problem if someone keeps buying their lower-quality vehicles. They could easily walk further down the street to the Toyota dealership and get a better-made car. But they don't bother taking the personal responsibility to get informed.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
One can say that of Windows and IE. But Office, where Microsoft makes its money, won out in a crowded field. Gates once said, of how Office began, "We asked developers to develop for Windows, and they said no. So we asked Microsoft's Application Division, and they didn't have that option." Many of Microsoft's competitors in office-type programs stayed with DOS too long. Lotus (of Lotus 1-2-3, not Notes) was bigger than Microsoft until the early 1990s.
Today, Office is where Microsoft makes its big money. Windows makes some money, and everything else (XBox, MSN, tools. etc. loses money). The real threat to Microsoft is not Linux. It's OpenOffice.
I agree that they are taking advantage of their ill informed users, but the fact that the users remain ill-informed is not all Microsoft's fault. It just so happens that users are lazy, and microsoft pretends that they are trying to spoon feed them. They, of course, aren't, becuase they can profit from lazy users. Being a support guy, I know how people intentionally don't learn how to use computers effectively becuase they can always just bug someone like me when I come over for dinner about those annoying popups. I've stopped helping people fix their machines over dinner, but that won't make them look any harder, the kid next door who 'knows all about computers' is just as likely to embolden their laziness in attempt to make himself look smart. He'll learn someday, but there's always another one to pick it up later...
Speak for yourself.
MS does not try to create innovate products for customers. All MS does is look at where it is losing market share, then quickly hack a barely functional product that will keep customers from leaving. The world went GUI, a year later MS had a GUI. The Internet happened, a year later MS had a browser. Customer started putting servers on commodity hardware, much later MS had server software. This has been the case with media players, music services, nearly everything. Even the wonderful Excel was based on other popular products.
MS needs to give up the browser. It was a ill thought out reaction to the fear of losing market share, and all the problems result from the bad engineering that occurs when people are in a hurry. IE makes a fine application frontend, and they should concentrate on promoting it for that use. Data servers on the back end, the local IE rendering the GUI.
This will not happen because MS quality cannot compete in the open marketplace, and though many will continue to use IE due to the tight integration with other MS products, others will use the change as an opportunity to move to more reliable solutions.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Of course!
This is a fundamental part of the culture at MS. They nuture the "underdog feeling" there in order to remain so fiercely competitive -- even when the product is a near-monopoly.
I saw this when I was an intern on the Excel team some 10 years ago -- the team leaders took pride in obsessing over what the competition was doing, and acting almost as if the company were going to go out of business in 3 months if they didn't.
If this applies to the marketing/legal departments too, that would explain a lot of MS's behavior.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
What the crap have they been doing for the last THREE years? Playing Halo?
Check out some of these release dates:
6.0 --> 31-Dec-2001
6.0 SP1 --> 28-Aug-2002
I thought IE on the Mac was dead... judging by their release schedule, IE on the PC has been dead for years. Any other software company that waited *years* to release their next version of internet software (or an operating system, no less) would be dead in the water.
What really makes me mad is they drove other browsers into the ground during the war, only to sit on their haunches and enjoy the elimination of their competition. Thank goodness for Mozilla, or we'd all be in real trouble.
Get to work MS.
--J
notice how they kept side-stepping the questions about being W3C compliant!
Obviously if they were 100% compliant then web developers would stick to the standards, and any compliant browser would work and IE would start to lose market share.
Notice that his responses kept repeating the "needing to support current customer configs". What he really means is "ensuring continued customer lock-in to IE and Windows".
I bet they had PR coaches sitting right next to them the whole time the chat was going on.
Hilarious!
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
I think it's a good development. For one, it means that not everyone will go over to firefox. I wouldn't want everyone on firefox, just as I don't want everyone on internet explorer. I want there to be some sort of balance.
I'm fine with a vast majority of people using IE once this service pack comes through for XP. If it does what they want it to, and they aren't putting themselves at risk, then I'm all for it.
My concern is for the users on legacy operating systems, who will never get an internet explorer update. They will still be vulnerable to exploitation. As they still comprise a surprising amount of internet users, this is some cause for concern. Any news on if Microsoft will be releasing the updates to IE as a standalone upgrade? Or are these things specific to the operating system?
The conspiratorial part of me wonders if Microsoft was planning this all along. To leave the browser abandoned so people get scared about security issues, and then release the fix for many security issues as a Windows XP only service pack.
Part of the reason MS thinks of itself as an underdog is their inability to really innovate. They've never been first in any software category - they're good enough to be the last man standing, but that requires competence and persistence, not innovation.
Their marketing and sales force has the general public convinced they're brilliant innovators, but among their technical peers, they're behind the curve. We know it, they know it, and it gives them an inferiority complex a mile wide.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I think you really have to add a management modifier to that statement. These guys are the coders, and I am confident that they werent out at the bar celebrating when MS announced that all IE development would stop. As a techie you (and others) should know that you often have to deal with management decisions that you do not want to implement, do not think will benefit anyone, but you have to do it anyway. MS was pushing COM and Active* technologies really hard in the late 90s.
I would imagine that the developer's hands were tied in allowing it in IE in the user friendly (but insecure) way that made it such a problem. If the devs were behind it, I am guessing they did not forsee all the evil uses it could be used for that give such a headache today. Other browsers have had the luxury of seeing how bad ActiveX became and learned from its mistakes.
I consider myself a "nice" and not evil person, and I know that given an offer w/ a decent raise, I would join MS, and work in its IE department.
Direct your anger towards the corner offices, not the guys in the cubes. The guys in the cubes IMHO made a damn fast but out-of-the-box insecure browser. And unlike an open source project, I wouldnt expect these guys to deliver any scathing remarks about their boss's or MS's decisions, because im sure they like doing what they are doing, warts and all, and generally like their jobs, and would not want to jeopardize them- and what company really wants to deal with a developer who will go around in public blasting the company on one of its most high-profile products.
This creates an environment on the web browser that makes it easy to include flaw after flaw, because the developers who work on it (while totally decent), are not really good enough to encourage quality coding from the get go in such a manner that would prevent these kinds of things from occuring. ActiveX, while nice, is bloated and has far too many problems, and it is unecessary and not cross-browser compatible, along with many of the other things in IE that make it so powerful.
The simple solution is to resimplify IE, and remodularize it in such a way that there are bug fixes released for downloadable modules, and not the browser itself. There should be a default browser that doesn't have all of the BS that would enable some user to take over your computer. By disabling this, it would remove millions in cost from the people of the world, simply by not allowing as many viruses to get pushed around.
Therefore, I believe that the solution for Microsoft is simplification. That simple step would make certain items on the web incompatible for a while, but I think that the only time a commercial venture really needs to use ActiveX is when it is dealing with some for of subscribing end user or when programming in intranet type application.
Of course, windows won't do this because they are interested in aesthetics and ease of use for the end user, which also creates ease of use for the people who write viruses as well.
How often to people give heated feedback to, for example, Mozilla/Firefox? I personally find the browser to slow and clunky in many ways, which is why I use IE and a popup blocker (Google Toolbar) rather than Mozilla, for sheer speed.
Only 18 months ago Mozilla was considered a poster child for a failed free software project. It was ridiculed frequently on this forum for being slow, buggy, etc... Then along comes Firefox. How short the collective memory is! The Mozilla developers fought through it all. They deserve our highest esteeme.
an ill wind that blows no good
Imagine a browser where, when it crashed, it had a high probability of killing you and the possibility of killing someone near you. When that day happens, I'll start taking these car analogies seriously.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Its also easy to keep using fossil fuels, is it the fault of the energy companies that make money off of fossil fuels that customers are too damn lazy to look for alternatives?
Here's where Apple advertises competing browsers on APple's website:
u ti lities/
u ti lities/opera.html/ macosx/internet_uti lities/mozillafirefox.htmld ownloads/macosx/internet_uti lities/mozillacamino.htmlo wnloads/macosx/internet_uti lities/cyberduck.htmlo ads/macosx/internet_uti lities/icab.html
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_
Including:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_
http://www.apple.com/downloads
http://www.apple.com/
http://www.apple.com/d
http://www.apple.com/downl
Where's Microsoft's version of these pages?
I was trying to ignore the car analogy, but you just made me think of something. When an auto maker (or any product manufacturer), recognizes a safety problem in their product (even if it is generally caused by user ignorance). They send out postal mail to registered consumers, post notices at places where the product is sold and absorb the cost of updating and replacing the defective product. The auto company will pay for the expense of the recall.
Where would microsoft be if they were required to send a patch CD to every registered customer for every security patch (and you thought AOL CDs were annoying) and if requested pay for a technician to apply the patch or replace the product?
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
The filename extension is just metadata, like the name, size and creation date. There's no real reason why it has to form part of the filename. That's just how DOS was designed.
Hiding the filename extension is Win95's (and its successors') way of emulating the Classic MacOS approach of storing the filetype in a separate metadata field. In DOS, it essentially was a separate metadata field (char filename[8], char type[3], if you like) but long filenames made that a bit hazy.
The point I'm riding at is that while storing it somewhere is good for usability, there's no good reason to put it in the filename. UNIX traditionally doesn't store this meta-data at all, and the user is left to just "know" what each file is. That's bad. MacOS's approach (storing the type as separate filesystem meta-data) is, I think, a good approach.
Microsoft engineers users' perception such that they are led to believe that IE is the only web browser.
It's not a matter of being too lazy to download Firefox, it's a matter of not knowing it exists because Microsoft's marketing has conditioned them to think IE = The Internet.
This is not a bad thing in general. This is what every company's marketing department dreams of: making their product synonomous with the service. Kleenex and Band-Aid are both other companies that have done this successfully.
Why do users equate IE with the Internet? Where did Microsoft go wrong here? What were they supposed to do? Not include a browser with the OS? Have links to competing browsers on the desktop?
I don't think the number of IE-only sites are the reason for Microsoft's browser dominance. They are the result of them.
IE is a fast and effective browser that for a time was the best available. Now users are starting to realize that it is no longer the best and hasn't been for some time now. Consumers use whatever is the best for them until something better for them comes a long.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Microsoft doesn't, but my software vendors do. We are in the the process of moving part of our customer management system to a new web-based software system that is built on J2EE, SQL and XML
The problem? It requires MSXML 3.0 because they use data islands to populate the web forms. Therefore, (for that application, at least) we have to use IE on Windows. Period.
Why switch to such an app? The other half of the software (the back-end) is the best in the industry - it runs on IBM UniData on NT/2K or AIX and requires only telnet on ANY platform. The integration between the two was compelling enough to make all the other requirements inconsequential.
They're good people though, and the IE requirement is actually a little weird considering that the document generation engine uses Apache FOP's XSL:FO renderer to generate PDFs, so they aren't opposed to non-MS software, I just think they really wanted to use data islands.
I keep working them on this, but the truth is, this is why MS pushes so hard for the attention of developers.
P.S. Why can't someone just write an MSXML 3.0 -compatable data island extension for FF?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Suppose you buy an ink pen, and using that ink pen as it was intended will get ink all over your clothes every single time you use it. Buy a replacement pen - ink all over your clothes. Get the upgraded version of the pen - ink all over your clothes.
Now, if that ink pen cost you $100-$250 and it wasn't usable as an ink pen, I trust you would want your money back.
That's not a big stretch from where we stand with Microsoft Windows. The Internet Explorer internet browser is integrated into the operating system in such a way that we must conclude that using the internet is one of the primary functions of their operating system. What happens if you put a fresh installation of Windows XP on the internet? Anyone? You get a virus and the box WILL become inoperative.
Microsoft sells a defective operating system. There are no two ways about it. The whole "Pop-up blocker" industry exists to fix a flaw in Microsoft's product. There is no analogous industry -ANYWHERE-. Sure, there are mechanics, but there is no "Lemon Automobile Repair" industry. There are lots of service repair industries, but there are no other industries that fix the fundamental flaws of someone else's product.
Suppose Boeing 747s simply didn't fly and it took a 3rd party to make them functional airplanes. Suppose Sony TVs didn't display viewable pictures and it took a 3rd party to fix every last single unit that came off the Sony production line. Imagine if Dockers pants -always- fell off and you had to -always- take your pants to another company in order to get a zipper and button installed.
In all those cases, the company producing the inoperative product would go out of business - but Microsoft hasn't. Either they are extremely shrewd or there is clear evidence that they have somehow circumvented the open market economy.
Bottom line:
If any other company in any other industry tried to pull off what Microsoft does as standard operating procedure, they would be regulated to hell and back. They only get away with it because few white-haired politicians really understand computer software in terms of a standard sector of industry.