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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."
I am happy (and proud) to say that only 58% of the visitors to my various websites use IE. That is, in the last 60 days. The various Gecko-based browsers share 32%.
I don't believe 97 percent was ever achieved by IE, but I could be wrong.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
> I don't believe 97 percent was ever achieved by IE, but I could be wrong.
r owsers
It's pretty close, from what I've read.
Just googled this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_b
it's in that ball park (frequently around 90-95%).
My point remains - it could only be 50% and it's doing well (on paper!)
Because they don't want to suddenly have a broken codebase and have to re-write the entire app when the next version of .NET and its development tools come out?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Probably the same reason that Open is the first option when you right-click on an icon.
Also, it's possible to change the default click action. In that case, having open in the list makes more sense.
Or alt-D
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
PM stands for project manager and I would imagine a project the size of IE would have at least half a dozen.
is of course the end-user. No matter how nice and secure IE7 might be (and from using the beta, its miles ahead of IE6 already) its not going to make the end user any more intelligent. I think too many people are expecting the impossible of microsoft (or any software company for that matter). I find myself fixing other peoples computers, who are running firefox, yet are still bogged down in spyware/adware. Why? Because the largest and most efficient security measure is an intelligent and informed end-user, not a nice browser and/or anti-spyware software. No matter how great your software is, if you click yes on the box, you still end up with 'unwanted' spyware.
Why cannot MS write anything themselves? IE is only a newer version of the Spyglass browser. They ditched the in-house version 1.x and made Spyglass IE 2.0. Not even the name is a MS invention, they bought the name "Internet Explorer" for a lot of cash some years ago.
Microsoft shouldn't have any problems starting a second Internet Explorer project to rewrite the entire codebase in C#.
The "Javagator" project - a parallel project at Netscape to completely rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java - is one commonly cited reason why Netscape failed.
There's some notes about that on this page.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
At my non-technology-related weblog (about learning Japanese), my stats are roughly 60%-30%-15% for Firefox, IE, and Safari. I've heard similar stats from other blog writers. Maybe the AOL crowd was 97% IE at one point, but the web-savvy blog-surfing crowd is not.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
current native code which has hooks deep into the OS.
Ok, a lot of people keep saying this, and I think there is some big misconception here.
IE taps into the HTML rendering DLLs of Windows. However EVERY application that runs on Windows taps into the FONT rending DLLs or the BITMAP rendering DLLs, but no one makes this claim about them. Nor other applications that use features from the HTML rendeing functions of Windows.
So to keep asserting that IE is somehow 'hooked' into Windows on a level above a NORMAL application is not entirely correct. It would be like saying FireFox also has deep hooks into Windows because it uses the Windows DLLs for FONTS and IMAGES...
defintitely the same reason - when you right click, you get a list of commands you can perform on the document. If Open wasn't one of them, then you couldn't open it :-)
.reg files - leftclick them and I get notepad with the text inside it. Also, for dlls, leftclick and I get dependancy walker. Similarly, when I click a cpp file, it loads in Visual Studio. If left-click was hard-coded to open, none of these things would work.
You can change the default action to something else instead of open.
Left-click is just a shorthand way of right-clicking and selecting the default.
The reason its done this way is that's much better (a more OO way) of associating commands with a file type. You can add a new command, change the default to that, and then left-click the file performs the new command! I do this for
If you want to know more, read about Shell Extensions in MSDN.
It's a shame that web developers have LET IE define the standard.
As touted by MS dev, the IE7 is supposed to "fix" the IE layout fixed positioning. But as posted on the IE NG, sites such as :
htpp://www.aide.info/assistance/ that are using fixed positioning to feature an "elastic layout" clearly show that IE is buggy on fixed layout ! This site is working on Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. An MS conditional comment for IE version less than 7 was put to enable a "CSS layout fix" that is perfectly working on IE 5.5 and IE 6. Not only IE 7 latest beta is ignoring conditional comments (that is the MS recomandation to handle the IE "legacy") but evey if "disabled" the page is baddly rendered !
Dean Edwards has proved fixing the CSS on IE is doable with simple ECMAScript. So please, MS do not tell us it is not possible because of blahblahblah and will be done on next version of IE. Dean has fixed most CSS bugs with Guys this was done by one guy in a few days !!! C'm'on MS stop fuding and fix IE now !
Website:
You:
It's an amalgamated mess of about half of CSS 2.1, some proprietary stuff, and a sprinkling of JavaScript expressions. It doesn't have a name, but Microsoft tend to refer to it as "CSS", despite being clearly different to CSS. cf. Embrace, extend & extinguish.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I worked for a Web development company that catered to Fortune 500 clients for 5 years between 1999 & 2005. The html development process was simple: Develop for IE, make it work in Firefox and Safari, fail gracefully if it was going to be too expensive to make it work.
In the five years I worked there, I don't believe a single developer we hired from the industry ever asked why we developed for IE first!
Stop making up stuff. The full list of .NET 2.0 breaking changes is available here; at least cite examples from those if you're going to make claims that .NET 2.0 is completely incompatible with 1.0/1.1.
C# 2.0 maintains full source compatibility regarding keywords. The new keywords (where, yield, partial) work only under certain contexts, and can still be used as variable names. For example, where and partial work only in class definitions, i.e. public partial class Blah where T : class, and yield can only exist as yield return 4. There is no legal 1.0/1.1 code like that.
Types you define in your assembly take precedence over those in other assemblies, so there's no compilation issue. If you want to use new classes that clash with yours, you can add a using SubstituteClassName = ClashingClassName and use the new substitute name.
Look at the breaking changes page and tell me which one of those impacts you severely. All the changes I see are to fix bugs or security issues, or remove extraneous functionality. New signatures are simply added as overloads and the old signature made obsolete where necessary. See next for why obsolete doesn't mean a break change.
You can find a list of obsolete APIs here. And before you respond with "see!!! all those obsolete APIs break my code!!!", they're all either obscure or unsafe parts of the API, or have been updated to take advantage of new .NET 2.0 constructs. Furthermore, they're merely marked obsolete and will only generate a warning; you can still use them if you choose.
That is likely a failing on your part. Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005 all generate solutions that reference projects with relative paths. None of that is stored in the registry; hell, I've been uploading my projects to a Subversion repository and working on them from a variety of locations for years without any path problems.
All the wizards/tools generate .NET code; you can code everything manually if you'd like, including Winforms and ASP.NET. Even the project files are XML, and in .NET 2.0, you can compile everything without even the IDE installed. What examples do you have of stuff that requires a wizard to work?
CSS3 is still a working draft, there is no point in implementing everything, as it might come changes or that behavoirs for properties change. Currently Gecko supports several CSS3 properties, especially they have implemented support for several css3 selectors.
As CSS3 is still under development mozilla use vendor-specific extentions to those properties. This is not a bad thing, it is also the correct way to implement things according to w3. You can see it is a reminder that you use those propties of your own choice and that they might change over time as they are implemented for testing purposes. Take the opacity property as an example, it was first implemented in Gecko as -moz-opacity, which took values from 0 to 100, later it changed to take values from 0.0 to 1 according to the specs. Now you can use opacity without the -moz- extention as it probably wouldn't change in the draft for css3. So I see nothing wrong in using such extentions for testing purposes, it is much better than what Microsoft does it just adds its own css-properties without any use of vendor extentions.
You cry for better support for standards yet you want them to implement the non-standard "document.all" ? You have to make up your mind ;) If you don't like it take it up with w3 not mozilla.