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Interview with Microsoft Exec on IE7 and RSS
AvianFlugelhorn writes "BetaNews has posted an interview with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management, which touches on the changes coming in IE7, Firefox's growth, and how Microsoft will bring RSS to the mainstream. It's interesting to see Schare become more humble since a November 2004 interview, when he questioned whether Firefox could attract more than just early adopters. Now, Microsoft says: 'we respect the work that the Firefox guys have done.' Schare also admits problems with ActiveX and explains why Microsoft will revolutionize RSS." Couple of days old, but still interesting.
'Early adopters' are what marketers call the first people to use your product. Now, let's say that there's some tiny percentage of people who initially use Firefox just because they had something to do with it or they need to run a web app that works best in Firefox. This 5% of the population is known as the 'early adopters' as it doesn't really matter what your product is; they're going to use it regardless.
Now, imagine a normal curve of the population of users. The early adopters are the ones on the far left who use it right away and the ones on the right are the crusty old-there's-nothing-better-than-IE-change-is-bad people who will refuse until the bitter end. If you make it past the early adopters and into the 35%-45% of the population range on the curve, then suddenly this product can stand on its own. To hell with the competition, it can now fend for itself in the market with that kind of user base backing it.
What he meant in that quote was that it had yet to be seen if Firefox would even make it past the initial 5% that would use it regardless and into a phenomenon that could potentially be a competitor with Internet Explorer.
In most of the applications a programmer undertakes, she or he must strive to encompass more than just early adopters if it is hoped for the product to last. This usually involves clever marketing gimmicks or commercials but, thank the lord, in Firefox's case it's just been sheer security and ingenuity of the product helping it over this curve.
Not only do I think it's well on its way past the early adopter phase, but I myself have moved to be an early adopter for most open source solutions I can find out there.
My work here is dung.
Will people wave hello to the flying pigs as they fly south for the winter?
"Quite often when you see an IE patch coming out, it's not actually a patch to IE code. It's a patch to kill the ActiveX control that's no longer needed, which we've determined has a vulnerability in it. ActiveX Opt-in is designed to reduce that surface area of attack by turning off most of those controls by default and letting users only turn them on if they need them. The feature makes it not interesting for the hackers to go after this legacy code that shouldn't be exposed to the Internet in the first place."
So we've enhanced the functionality of IE by ramping up the number of programmers on the project, which is a normal function of software development at Microsoft but I can't give you specifics, to add new features to IE7... new features like... ActiveX Opt-In (tm), with ActiveX Opt-In, we've enhanced the rich browsing experience the users are used to by increasing the security model of the IE7 browser functionality through better security measures.
And these security measures are?
We turned the problematic ActiveX controls off.
But wait how this is new functionali...
Top. Men.
MS Guy: We added tabbed browsing and upped our CSS support to what was published in 2000.
Every web dev on earth: Good for you, now how about DOM2?
MS Guy: But... but... tabbed browsing!
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
"In the early days, we admit, we focused more on the power and stability than on the security."
Might wanna focus a little harder, man. =O
When telling friends about Firefox, and why to use it, I've always mentioned the tabbed browsing first, and then noted that it's more secure than IE. Sure, there's a ton of other stuff that FF "does", but those were the two things, the selling points if you will, that I wanted to show them. "Tabbed browsing, man! You'll never surf the same way again!"
But after trying IE7, I've realized there's so much more to the experience. Tabs are a given, but FF seems to do them so much better. It's faster, snappier, cleaner. I come to accept the security as a given. Even in IE7, I wouldn't go to half the sites I do in FF. IE still doesn't seem to handle popups as well as FF, I've come to rely on the the Adblock extension which makes the browsing experience so much better. Pages load faster in FF. Little things like Find-As-You-Type (why in the hell does IE still have the ctrl-F dialog box that pops up, and doesn't wrap around the page? Up or Down??). I think I'm realizing that the EXTENSIONS in FF are what makes it great. Just the handful of ones I have installed make my browsing experience that much better, and I take for granted what I can do, and I don't notice this until trying to do the same in IE7. Why can't I rearrange tabs in IE? Ctrl-tab doesn't cycle how I would like it, but what can I do? In FF, I just find an extension. Plus, IE7 is ugly. I can change the theme in FF.
I think the only thing IE7 is really going to do is get an installed base of "secure" IE out there - all the Joe Schmoes that don't care, power up their Dell nekkid to the cable modem, and check their email. Maybe this will help curb some of the stupid things that have resulted from the old IE versions. But in no way is IE7 even remotely close to the browser that Firefox is.
Well no, seeing as they've already fixed everything you mention: PNG, position: fixed, native XMLHttpRequest. Have you tried the latest beta?
Nonsense. Those lines are there to not break for any browsers that don't support native XMLHttpRequest objects. That includes quite a few versions of quite a few browsers.
Internet Explorer 7 includes a native XMLHttpRequest object so it acts exactly like all the other browsers and you don't need the extra code that Internet Explorer 6 and below does.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha