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Quiz Microsoft's IE Team Leader
About as timely an interview as you can get: Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 last week, and today we're gathering questions for IE team general manager Dean Hachamovitch. As usual, please follow Slashdot interview rules when posting or moderating questions. We'll publish Dean's answers verbatim as soon as he replies.
Would you like to make available IE on other operating systems?
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Why did you go half way implementing CSS instead of fully supporting standards all other browsers have for some time now.
As someone who has developed for multiple browsers, it really seems like there is a secret ploy at Microsoft to keep IE relatively incompatible with other browsers.
Is this purposeful? If not, what is the reason?
More
Is it your goal to render a standards compliant website correctly in all cases, or are you just aiming to implement those parts of the spec that are used by the majority of your customers? Naturally, I can understand prioritizing the things that are hitting your customers above those that are rarely used in the real world, but part of the reason the some of them aren't used in the real world is down to lack of browser support. I find it incredibly frustrating that some of my site layouts have to be butchered just to get them to work in the commonly used browsers. If IE fails to render a compliant page according to the spec, can you commit to actively tracking it as a bug with a view to fixing it in a future release of IE, even if it only affects a handful of people?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It has been widly know that IE, Firefox, and others all behave differently when it comes to CSS compliance/compatibility. Since new incompatabilities are found every day, how will microsoft respond to these incompatibilities? Will it be possible to get updates weekly to address these issues for us developers that like to play by the rules of CSS and HTML and prefer strict mode vs quirky?
Would you like to see a universal architecture so that all rendering engines* worked in all web browsers, and all plugins** worked with all rendering engines? *Gecko, mshtml etc **Free and non-free - flash, mplayer and the like
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
The new version of IE makes it much harder to work with certain critical aspects of the browser. While I like some aspects of the new browser, some of the interface changes make it much more difficult to work with, and this will keep me firmly in the Firefox camp for now. For example, bookmarks now require many more clicks to access, especially if you use links nested in folders. Also, most interface elements can not be moved around as was previously possible (and is currently possible in Firefox.) The menu bar itself is hidden, and when exposed, appears in the middle of the browser controls! Why go to so much trouble to make essential elements of the program difficult for users to access?
How important is it to Microsoft to ensure that IE passes acknowledged tests of compliane (i.e. Acid2) at the cost of sacrificing newer and possibly more exciting/efficient proprietary technologies?
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
What are the best features of IE7 that sets it above the competition, what features are perhaps lacking and are you currently working on adding these?
Well, I can't think of a real Slashdot-headed question to ask, so I'll go for the entertaining rather than socially relevant:
Presumably, throughout this development process for IE7, your team has had their nose to the grind-wheel, so to speak. What sort of things did you do to chill out and relax? Were there any in-office perks, like pool tables or whatnot? And were you actually all in the same office, or did some members of the team have to telecommute from far-off lands, like Oregon?
Why did IE7 take such a long time to release after IE6?
One of the stated purposes of IE7 was to better support the W3C standards, and (presumably) to increase compatibility among W3C-compliant browsers. Yet despite multiple requests for DOM 2 Events support, the IE team decided to overlook this support. Currently, IE is the only major browser lacking DOM Events support. Which is a major issue, as IE's attachEvent() design means that special code must be written for IE compatibility.
As someone who's been forced into using runtime patches (example) to increase IE's compatibility with DHTML code, I feel compelled to ask: Why has the IE team ignored this critical standard?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
IE has a dominating command of the market, although Firefox is slowly making inroads, due to innovations such as tabbed browsing that IE has had to incorporate to maintain that command. But where are the IE innovations? Why can't the IE team get ahead of the curve on Firefox? Is there anything you consider an innovation that is unique to IE that would plausibly be something the browser market would have to incorporate to stay competitive?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
There is a workaround that involves editing the registry to get the menu bar in the correct place but why is this not implemented as part of toolbar customisation?
What do you make of all this pro-Firefox, anti-IE digital jihadism?
Why haven't you guys hacked IE7 to run on Win2k minus the WinXP SP2-dependant security features?
It's not like it'd be any less secure than IE6 on Win2k.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
As I recall, Microsoft licensed SpyGlass browser code as the basis for Internet Explorer. Is there any of it left, or have you finally rewritten all the IE code?
The base of Open Source software is constantly rising.
A software company can either decide to add value to that base of software,
or fight the tide and compete directly with it.
Will Microsoft, at some point decide to open source a few things, like IE, that have been equalled or surpased by open source?
Or will Microsoft instead try to "compete" with such software via other means: legislative, marketing, proprietary lock in?
...when will you come to SVG?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
What do you consider the greatest weakness of Firefox?
A simple question: What are you planning to implement for the next IE version, be it IE 8 or IE 7.5 or whatever?
I realize, of course, that any answer you give to this question may not be valid a couple years down the road, but as of now:
Does the release of IE7 mark the beginning of a more aggressive development/release cycle for Internet Explorer? That is, we are all aware of various aspects of CSS, for example, that are not currently supported in IE (though kudos on all the progress in this direction you've made): can we expect updates to IE, either as service packs, point releases, or new versions, that will provide better standards support in the relatively near future? Or will we be limited to security fixes for the foreseeable future, as with IE6?
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Did any new Windows Vista technologies influence the development of IE7?
Besides matching some of the features in Firefox (ie. tabbed browsing), what are some others to look forward to in IE7 that an avid Firefox user such as myself would find useful?
Do you or does anyone else on the IE team run multiple versions of IE on the same machine for testing purposes? Do you use the DLL hack that's been published here or some other method?
If you had more time, is there a new feature you would have liked to include in IE7?
One of IE7's revolutionary features was supposed to be security, although it took less than 24 hours for Secunia to post an advisory about a security hole. Moreover, the bug seemed to be carried over from as early as IE5.5. What approach did you take to improve browser's security, and how come the vulnerabilities have been carried over?
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
"A better question: Are you aware that no matter what answers you give here, they will never satisfy the anti-Microsoft Slashdot crowd?"
Why do you assume that pro Open Source equates with anti-Microsoft
was Re:CSS
davecb5620@gmail.com
Let's pretend for a moment that Internet Explorer isn't the default web-browser built into Windows and instead, users are presented with a choice on first login (e.g. a message asking 'How would you like to browse the internet? MSIE, Firefox, Opera').
Would you expect IE to become as dominant as it is now if users had to specifically choose it over another?
Ignoring the slight impracticalities, if so (I'm guessing you do), on what basis would this be?
throw new NoSignatureException();
How does microsoft choose which bits of the CSS and DOM standard to implement?
While upgrading to IE7, I noticed that IE6 had to be removed before Windows could install IE7. Does this mean that Internet Explorer is not so tightly bundled into Microsoft/OS that it can not be removed in the name of competition? Also, is the complete IE7 API available for license and fee-free?
We've been told in the past that the reason that IE was so deeply embedded (to the point that it could not be removed, as we were told) in to the operating system was to improve the online experience of a Windows PC. With Web 2.0 firmly in place, the desire for a web browser integrated in to the operating system is, some would say, greater than ever.
Where do you stand on this issue? How central to the XP and Vista experience will IE7 become?
What about the client-side session and persistent storage (like in Firefox 2) ? See http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ #scs-client-side
First, thank you for the efforts the team has already put in. I'm pretty sure that the two features that will provide the biggest benefit to developers, and by extension the users, namely better CSS (hopefully some CSS3) support and moving to the W3 standard event model, will be addressed in the next version of IE. My two part question: Do you have any ETA on the next version, and is there any possibility of adding pieces to IE7 via Windows Update? I recognize changing the event model is not really an option here, but adding support for say border-radius or opacity css support seems like it would be a fairly innocuous change.
You have implemented a new GUI and new security features; these have been examined, praised, and lambasted on just about every tech site out there, so those of us "in the know" are aware of all of the changes and their implications. You also have resources like the quick reference sheet available to help new users of IE7. These are all well and good, but they'll be of no use to anyone who does not know about them or how to use them.
What I want to know is this: how will you spread word of the new changes and features to neighbor Joe or Grandma Smith -- will you rely on word-of-mouth from the technocracy, or do you trust that your features are transparent enough that they will easily understand the difference between, say, types of SSL certificates provided by sites?
http://www.tenjou.net/
What type of project management processes and structures did you impliment in order to keep the vast number of people and resources invovled with this project in line? How do you feel about those processes now that it's done, and what would you have done differently?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
There is a painful lack of support for not only the DOM 2 Events, but also for several other significant parts of the DOM specification.
s ByTagName('param') returns EVERY IN THE ENTIRE DOCUMENT, not just ones under the requested object. Yikes!
Some issues I've personally encountered, several of which I hit on a regular basis:
* Namespaces are completely absent from IE's DOM implementation (createElementNS, getAttributeNS, etc. functions simply do not exist).
* Prototyping of DOM elements is impossible without using proprietary HTC behaviours.
* Tables that are created dynamically will not appear unless elements are added to -- in other words, using DOM to write content does not display anything, even though is optional.
* importNode? Nope. Doesn't exist.
* getElementsByTagName('object').item(0).getElement
And one other thing the lovely DOM Level 0...
* navigator.plugins exists but is always empty. What's up with that? Either don't have the attribute at all or populate it properly, for fuck's sake.
The worst thing is that as far as I can tell, there has been NO improvement in the JavaScript engine between IE6 and IE7 (except that the Microsoft Script Debugger doesn't work anymore. Thanks, guys! Not everyone has or wants to buy and install Microsoft Office just to debug in your broken browser.)
[insert witty comment here]
Have you done any serious web design? I mean hand coding, XHTML 1.0 valid code, using CSS/Divs? You're pulling out the same excuse that all the MS funded studies about Windows being more secure because it has less vulnerabilities. It's not the amount of vulnerabilities that are acknowledges or that get fixed, it's the seriousness and size of the problems that matter. There are some very serious short-comings in the way IE5 and IE6 addressed standards, and to a large degree een IE7. They are far more serious, and far more vile in nature than the bugs that Gecko/Firefox/Mozilla, Opera, Safari etc. have.
Let's imagine for a moment that all browsers support only 50% of XHTML/CSS standards. If that's true it still isn't a real indicator of the problem, because the other 50% that IE doesn't support is where a lot of basics might be. Even then it's not to say IE's "50% support" isn't horribly broken.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Why does IE7 no longer work with the runas command? What was the thinking behind "breaking" the runas feature?
/user:domain\username cmd" to launch a command prompt and then run c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore and then browse to \\servername\sharename as my admin user. Very handy when I need to move a file from one user's area to another's.
Some background for people who aren't familiar with runas:
Sometimes I need to browse the network as an administrator while logged in as a non-admin. With IE6, I can type "runas
But after I installed IE7 final on my test machine, this no longer works. Running ie7 as an admin user, whether by right clicking on the exe and picking run as or running it from a cmd line launched as a admin user, no longer let's me browse network shares or local drives as an admin user. This is really frustrating.
Does microsoft have plans for an IE feedback form similar to what they have now for Visual Studio?
Having such a feedback form would mean that people could post things like "Support " or "Fix issue where adds an extra pixel to the border" or whatever and then the IE team could investigate them (just like the Visual Studio team does with the Visual Studio feedback) and provide feedback such as "no, we cant fix this at this time" or "we will consider this for the next release" or "we have investigated this and have a fix already" or "here is a workaround" or whatever else it is. If there was a vote system so people can vote for what they think is important, microsoft could use that information to see how many people want which features (and therefore which features it makes the most sense to implement).
Are you planning to do more regular updates (IE8/9/10/...)? maybe 1 year for between releases?
Will you release those versions for all Windows versions that have mainstream support or just the latest Windows?
Are you ging to fix the zoom in IE7. It currently hasmany bugs, some of them are a hindrence to accessible screen readers (usually used by visually impaired users). I personal reported the problem with getElementfromPoint not getting the correct element went zoomed (javascript) and actually got a reply from the Manager in charge of the unit dealing with the zoom, sayng he was on the case. That was Beta1. Since then the issue has morphed slightly, but never gone away. PLEASE fix, as it can/is causeing real problems for screen reader users, and producers. e.g. : this
Because you can - or because you should?
Given the highly negative feedback provided for the User Interface of the IE7 BETA releases why did you decide to stick with the same format for the final release?
Why should I use IE over, say, Firefox or Opera?
I'm curious about your design of the "find" window. What considerations did you have for the ease of use? How do you think it compares to having the "find" window built into the browser window (like Firefox). Did you find that users were not be able to locate the "find" text box? Adding an option for having the "find" window as part of the browser window (internet only, as opposed to the Windows explorer) might be a nice feature. This enables multiple windows or tabs to have their own search, and users can have many searches going on at the same time.
Given that you are not planning on selling IE 7 and the fact that there are already other browsers on the market which can allow Windows users to experience the web fully why is Microsoft investing so much time and effort in continuing the development of IE ?
Oh, and what was the reason behind this particular release date? Was it to beat FF2, to make it in time for some Vista requirement?
And will there be minor feature enhancements/bug fixes before the next major release? The PNG color space problem comes to mind - fixing this in a minor release shouldn't break anything else.
You may not have any idea about this one, but I figure I'll ask anyways. In IE6, a tag was required in the html to enable standards-compliant mode (which still wasn't, but that's beside the point). Why was this not enabled by default?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Originally, Microsoft claimed that IE7 would only be available with Vista, and would not be made available for older versions of Windows.
As it turns out, the release of IE7 separately is an about-face on this matter.
While it might take away one advantage of Vista over sticking with XP, I think the choice of a free upgrade is a good thing for the user.
Can you speak to the pro and con arguments that came out in deciding to release IE7 separate from Vista?
Thanks.
Yes, IE7 fully supports PNG but there were issues with gamma in the beta and RCs, interested to hear if they fixed this for the release?
Why is it that to download and install IE7 you need to have WGA on your computer? If IE7 is the big security improvement that everyone is saying it should be then why do businesses in particular need to handle the daunting task of installing and maintaining a fairly controversial by anyones standards, piece of software?
Why is your "view source" feature so much worse than Firefox's?
rfc2782 allows for DNS servers to return a list of ips to clients with info on priorities and weights. This would allow browsers to seamlessly switch to a backup server if the primary server went down, which would greatly improve website availability. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, there are no browsers out there that support this.
Is there any possibility that IE will support this?
Well, if IE7 works under Wine, we have an interesting paradox: it just might be cheaper to upgrade from Win2k to Linux in order to be able to run all the new MS programs which can't run under Win2k.
Something seems so very wrong here...
Ignore this signature. By order.
The primary value IE6 offers over the competition is familiarity, compatibility and convenience. A typical user doesn't have to do anything to install it (installed with windows) and it will work on almost every web site (because developers slave away to make sure it does). For many users it is also familiar, they are comfortable with it. Yet the default IE7 is a substantial departure from past web browser interface designs. It seems IE7 is ignoring one of IE's primary assets. Which traditionally seems out of character for Microsoft but reflects a more recent trend. Traditionally MS products have very few changes (but many additions) from previous versions. MS Office has many aspects that haven't changed for a decade, and in my opinion many of these aspect are exceptionally convoluted e.g. styles in Word, graphing in Excel. But now we are seeing MS change old habits and start to change existing interfaces, look at IE7, Vista or Office 12.
Do you expect these changes could cost market share considering an IE6 user will feel more at home with Firefox than IE7.
this has been partly covered by other questions, but i figured a direct one just on this was important:
i'm a web developer, and need to test web sites for both IE7 and IE6. Buying another PC isn't an option, and running virtualization software is a lot of effort (in many different ways) just to have two browsers installed. With that in mind, how would you recommend I go about testing sites in both browsers? Most solutions I've seen involve hacks which aren't guaranteed not to break certain things.
Because of this issue, many sites are going to (visually) break in IE7 as soon as people update their browser. This isn't going to look good to most users, and could potentially send many of them running for an alternative which doesn't break the sites they like.
If this dual setup is not easily possible now, will it be in the (near) future? And was this something that you considered when developing, and planning the release of, IE7?
I remember back when I started web development, Netscape (3|4) was the browser everyone loved to hate. It was the one you had to bend everything to fit for (resize fix, anyone?). IE4, on the other hand, was fantastic. You could make it do all sorts of cool things really easily. I thought it was the best toy in the shop.
Today, IE is the browser that has people swearing blue murder because of the amount of effort it takes to make a page that works properly in the other browsers look correct in IE. As someone pretty high up in the dev team, does this bother you/niggle your professional pride? And perhaps more importantly, are there any plans to try to win back the affection of the web dev community?
Personally, I think IE7 is a step in the right direction, but I think Netscape had to get to 7 or 8 before I started thinking it was a decent browser again - old hatreds die hard...
Warning: May contain nuts
Or a follow up, now that Adobe has decided not to maintain their SVG viewer is there a chance of getting that code into IE mainline? I'm betting Adobe would sell it for cheap.
I do consider the lack of SVG support a critical failing of IE7. SVG is a huge step towards making the web a more beautiful place. The compeating standard is Flash, which doesn't help Microsoft. It would seem that adopting SVG would help Microsoft's design suite.
Thanks. Ted.
John C. Dvorak had some fairly pointed comments regarding Internet Explorer in his article: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1952995,00.as p
I think he makes a great argument. For what little revenue IE brings to Microsoft, it costs a fortune in reputation, much less support costs. What is the business driver behind continued development of IE?