Slashdot Mirror
Interview with IE Lead Program Manager
crackman writes "Matasano Security is running an excellent interview with Christopher Vaughan, a lead PM on the IE team. Christopher has worked on every release of Internet Explorer since version 2. He discusses IE7, security lessons learned from IE6, the future of .NET managed code in IE, and more."
a relative of Protestnic Vaughan Jeltz?
..that page looks a lot better in Firefox.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
After versions 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, the man needed a vacation. Cut him some slack.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
> At Microsoft, I'm one of several Lead Program Managers on the IE team. My team and I are
> responsible for handling all of the incoming customer & security requests.
Q: Can you make it secure please?
A: Sadly, no - as I've been asleep for the last 5 years! Why else do you think nothings happened on the IE project since 2001?
I couldn't get through the second sentence without a wtf moment:
"We met while working on Windows Server 2003 at the twice daily status meeting."
Morning meeting: "I'm planning on writing some code today"
Afternoon meeting: "I had planned on writing some code, but I was busy preparing my presentation for this meeting"
This explains a lot...
Christopher has worked on every release of Internet Explorer since version 2
And he's kept his job?!?
we're trending in the right direction as a company
Did he mean 'tending', or is this some horrible fusion of trend and tend that I was previously unaware of?
A brief search reveals that I am out of touch. But everyone else is wrong, I should add.
I just opened a browser what do you think my intensions are?
Oh oh oh oh. I know this! To go to msn.com!
This guy's the limit!
Microsoft gets a bad rap here on Slashdot, but for the record I'd like to publicly thank them for one of the best, most altruistic decisions in tech history.
I'm talking about the decision to discontinue Internet Explorer for Mac. As a web developer this has made my life far easier. God knows how many man-decades of work this has saved the world's html coders.
The cloud to this silver lining is that I still spend a good proportion of my working life abusing my code so that it'll work on IE without breaking on real browsers. Multiply that up by the number of web designers / developers in the world and that's got to cost a few lives.
So, Microsoft dude, when, oh when, can the world's developers expect a joyous, fully IE-free existence?
http://savingiceland.org
Yeah, I can see that dialog box now:
"This website wants to take advantage of an unpatched buffer overflow in the browser itself, an Active-X component, or an underlying DLL. Is that OK?"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's still an extra step. I just opened a browser what do you think my intensions are?
Probably the same as everybody that opens up a new IE browser window.
Stare at the ads on the MSN and get mentally prepared to buy everything in sight.
Porn?
BTW, what *is* the IE alternative to CSS?
Open a web page with Explorer. There's your answer...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Thanks, that's pretty much exactly what I meant. Plus:
1) "We added 200 new keywords to the language which will nameclash with your code".
2) "We added 400 new classes to the library which will nameclash with your code".
3) "That function/class no longer does what it used to do".
4) "That function/class is no longer available".
5) "That function/class has been replaced by X".
6) "That function/class has been renamed to X".
7) "That function/class now takes a different number of parameters".
8) "That function/class is no longer compatible with that other function/class".
9) "We changed that parameter datatype to X".
10) "The new tool won't import your projects properly, so you have to recreate them from scratch (with absolute pathnames) (tied to the user login who created them) (and cryptically stored in the registry) (and you can't run the old tool to see what it looked like)".
11) "You can only do that with our new brain-dead wizard".
12) "The tool is smarter than you are, do it the tools way".
They've been doing this crap since the early 80s.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Well, yeah, but that's because a Slashdot interview would focus primarily on a software engineering decision made a decade ago and whether or not IE7 will support PNG transparency...
GoogleFight. Question answered.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?
I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!
#include <signature.h>