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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."
Forget Opera Man, I'd love a chance for the collective to ask this guy some tough questions about past and present design decisions in IE.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Why was there no development on IE for several years? If you were on every release of IE, you must have noticed this... you're workload would have been really small ;)
http://psychicfreaks.com/
why isn't IE7 doing a better job with supporting CSS standards?
It's been a while since I read much about IE7, but last I heard they were stripping a lot of its hooks out of the OS so that it sits "on top" like other browsers do. That alone should significantly reduce the security risk it poses.
IE6 has just been around too long; the hackers have had too long to play with it and find every possible exploit there is. If Opera were still sitting at version 5 (and controlled a larger market share) it would probably have just as many security holes discovered. It's the frequent updates and relative obscurity that make other browsers apparently more secure today.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
True. If only his product wasn't riding Windows' coattails. Similarily, WordPad is essentially the world's most popular word processor!
I don't know what rock he's been sleeping under, but internet security has been a concern since long before 2000.
Oh, but not for Microsoft. That's hardly the users fault.
As I always have to point out in these discussions, when you have around 90% of the market share, you define the standard. Anything with less than 10% support in the market isn't a standard, it's just a formal specification, no matter who writes it. This may not be ideal, but it is the way this sort of market works.
If you think you can do better than CSS, and you're in business, and you have 90% market share, then you probably just go ahead and do your own thing. It doesn't matter if other browsers don't support it, because 90% of users will be fine, and of the other 10%, the vast majority will just think those other browsers are broken and load up yours instead. This is why the stubborn insistence of certain other browser development groups that they will only support W3C specs is the biggest own goal since the last World Cup.
Yes, I know, this sucks for the consumer. Yes, I know, most of us here in a geeky community would agree that the W3C specs are far more useful than IE. I'm not disputing any of this. I'm simply giving a straightforward business case, from MS' perspective, for doing their own thing regardless of what the W3C say. This is why unregulated monopolies, or near-monopolies, suck.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.