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Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy
eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"
They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
For bonus points, do all this faster and with less memory than Internet Explorer 7 takes.
This is a fairly modest list but if they fixed all of that, Internet Explorer would be a joy to develop against. Hell, I might even consider replacing Firefox as my default browser on Windows. However, as much as we can collectively dream, you know they'll rejig the interface slightly, crank up the version number by one and call it a day.
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows.
As a program Internet Explorer is simply trash. I simply hate it. Actually I fucking despise it. It is a big ball of shit. It's the ugly building in the middle of a city that everyone wants torn down but it just sits there damaging the community's spirit.
I once joked with a colleague that Internet Explorer has probably wiped billions off pounds off the world economy. I laughed, paused for a moment, and realised it's probably completely true. What could the world have done with all those countless hours hacking their CSS to support the trash that is Internet Explorer?
Doesn't it make you depressed?
Simon
You can forgive anything from a manager except an inability to communicate. Hachamovitch broke rule #1, expect to see him kicked as soon as IE8 is released. Too late perhaps, but then maybe the top dogs were a little too hands-off?
Agile development is ok, total cowboy development on something this important is not.
Or perhaps the Microsoft Development Framework has been dumped? Sometimes people escape to waterfall development in order to have documents to hide behind. I would expect some scary people sitting in on the next few meetings, whatever it was.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
That quote was incomplete, it's really: "I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE. *cackle*"
"We're not doing anything."
The IE team is tired of all the adolescent crap that gets posted in their blog. I know I would.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Sounds like Microsoft has gotten far too enormous to be manageable by most people if Bill Gates has no clue what's going on any more. Vista barely got out the door, it's a lame duck OS, and now at least one of the major software development teams has gone into seclusion, and no one important noticed. Wouldn't be surprised if more problematic tripwires and land mines were hiding under rocks at Redmond. MS needs new management, it's silly that the founders of a tiny itsy-bitsy Microsoft are still in control of one of the largest, sprawling corporations in the world.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
For a year or more now Microsoft has been getting tighter and tighter about what information about their plans and dates can get out. It has been really bad getting info even when you are on one of their TAP programs. Date for the RTM? Hell - you won't even get a date for the next Beta version most of the time. What's in? What's out? Not a chance - you'll get it when you get it. It is so bad now that they need a Minster of Truth to determine what to tell people - http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071207/director-windows-disclosure/.
Maybe he just doesn't want to talk to anyone because you've all hurt his feelings? After trying so hard to get IE7 out of Firefox's shadow and still ending up getting shit from the community for not doing a good enough job he's probably just crying in a corner somewhere, plotting revenge at any cost.
before Opera 9.5/FF3 are released and they have new ideas to copy?
Yeah, well he didn't think there was anything secret going on - but maybe they just didn't tell him either!
... when you have 90% browser market share, I guess thier feeling is "who cares?"
...
It certainly seems that way.
You only need to look at the mess they made of the GUI in ie7 to understand just how far off course the internet explorer team have sailed.
It's a damn pain to develop for.
Then again, so was ie6 - hmm, and ie5 and yeah, even ie4
The problem is, you can't ignore 90% market share - catch 22.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Who am I kidding, Microsoft wouldn't dare make a product that conforms to standards.
If Vista has taught us anything, it's that Microsoft is laser-focused on superficial and eye-candy improvements, while caring very little about improving (or even fixing) the underlying technologies. From my (thankfully VERY brief) experience with Vista, it looks like the only thing they even remotely attempted to fix or improve was security, and that... well, heh, it reminded me of a maxim I once heard: "Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it--badly."
My prediction is that IE 8 will have exactly the same rendering capabilities, but it will have some sort of annoying new UI, plus maybe a few extremely annoying security features that everyone will turn off immediately.
"To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE"
:)
As Bill begins to leave the company, the heralded Microsoft development teams start to act like your normal "joe IT" shop... First Vista... now IE...
Your powers are weak, old man...
He, like, totally sounds like a Silicon Valley girl.
At my company we've had to just drop IE for now, and push out Firefox on all clients.
This is OK for our internal users, but impossible for any external site because of the installed base of legacy CRAP.
Microsoft need to fix:
- CSS support
- DOM support in their javascript implementation
- XHTML support
- SVG rendering
Only then will we ever look at IE again.
We also need to be clear on the patent situation surrounding technologies such as Silverlight on platforms other than Windows, before we invest any time and effort in such technologies. We don't want to end up supporting a technology that Microsoft plan on attacking on non-windows platforms.
Microsoft are making a fool of themselves with IE, and severely damaging their reputation with developers. I hope they will offer an upgrade of internet explorer for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista when they have finally sorted out their shoddy rendering library. Internet Explorer 7 was a poor attempt at improving what remains the worst web browser that is still considered current (at least by some).
um... hate to tell you this but they haven't been 90% for a LONG time. In fact alot of studies are showing Firefox with 20-35% marketshare, Opera with 5-8%, Safari with 3-5%. Even if you take those lowest figures, the combination of all versions of IE would only have approx. 72% market share... 52% at worse.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The next IE version will be like Word for the Web. Not just a browser but an editor to completely interact with content. Ok, I made it up. But the web was never intended to be for "browsing" only.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In many ways, IE7 disappointed people. Many users don't like the changed interface. It has compatibility problems with IE6-only sites & apps. (Why this surprised anyone, I don't know.) And web developers wanted it to go much further beyond IE6's capabilities than it ultimately did. So I can buy the idea that they don't want to get people's expectations up too far.
But there are many possible degrees of transparency. You don't have to take the Mozilla approach where every little change is visible to the public. Over the past year or two, Opera has managed to do a good job of keeping people aware that new stuff is coming down the pike without actually giving away the goods before their announcements.
Sure, sometimes it means that reaction is a bit underwhelmed when people build up some huge expectation over a hinted-at feature, and it turns out to be something much more mundane (Opera Link, for example -- incredibly useful, but in its current form not revolutionary). But anyone following Opera developers' blogs can tell that yes, they're working on the next version, and could pick up some vague clues as to some of the planned features and capabilities.
With IE8, no one without an NDA knew whether Microsoft had spent a year on design, a year on coding, or just took a year off. The IE8 blog asked us not to take silence for inaction, but what else should we have assumed?
From Wikipedia:
On June 16, 2006, Gates announced that he would move to a part-time role within Microsoft (leaving day-to-day operations management)[52] in July 2008 to begin a full-time career in philanthropy, but would remain as chairman.
This is not his fault, leave him alone. It pains me deeply to write this, but it is not HIM.
(typed in firefox)
IE usage is closer to 80%, but it is still dropping. Give it a few more years, and it'll be down to 70%.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This is a sincere question - wondering if anyone can answer it here. How much influence does Gates have left at MS now that he has left?
This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down...
It may not have been face-to-face, but for almost a decade, it seems that the conversation between IE devs and web devs has pretty much been...
Web devs: Fuck you!
IE devs: Fuck you!
Why does the IE team hate standards so much? It's not like they don't know how to make things work. IE5 for Mac came out in 2000 and was pretty awesome--it even supported transparent PNGs with nothing more than an <img> tag!
Dear IE team: thanks for inventing AJAX. Now please go make everything else work. kthxbye.
(Note: I know for a fact that the IE team has many talented and nice people. They (and we) are just victims of horrible decisions being made further up the chain. So this vitriol is really directed at management.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What an original name! What a surprise! Who would have guessed that after IE4 came IE5, which was replaced by IE6, and then IE7 (which followed IE6) would be replaced with IE8?!??!!
I vote that all MS products move to a numerical numbering scheme, a-la Fedora and Suse. Why don't we call the next version of Windows "7"!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Does that dork not have a cellphone and can call up the folks in charge right away to get an anwer?
Nope, and I won't go into speculatons why - just look at the Bill Gates deposition videos and you'll know. That guy has it thick or he would not be who he is by bilking...yadayadayada
It all depends on who does the study and where the study was done. Which is why I quote a broad range that that a single source because no single source will ever be correct.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Usually I find that any company wants an active dialog with its user base. It undeniably helps you make a better product.
When that dialog does not occur usually it is because the product team are overloaded in terms of the features they have to implement in the time frame that they've been allocated. Sometimes you just don't have time to engage with external entities to the degree that you'd like, or at all. On a product as significant as IE has proven to be in influencing defacto standards, that is quite dangerous.
When questioned further, Gates claimed that "When I said we'd be more transparent, I just meant we'd use more alpha-blending. You know, like Vista."
Aww, you added the dollar sign to your sig now. How cute.
On the day Microsoft decides to put their next release of Windows on SourceForge (or some other OSS server), I will start to believe some of what they say. Until then it's all FUD and lies to me.
Sorry Bill, we all know you're incredibly smart, unfortunately you're still not using your powers for the right goals. Stop greed and stop thinking about how to earn the next 100 Million Dollars (believe me, you don't need them to become happy, you already have enough of that money stuff, the next millions just make you sick or less happy). Start thinking about how to make the world a better place. We're here, waiting for you. Don't make us wait forever! Tomorrow might be too late, and I would be sad about that!
Lu zi han.
Agile development is ok, total cowboy development on something this important is not.
If it's that important, no single company should have control of it. If you want it to work well, it should not have owners. The failings of IE7 are failings of non free software. The owners have a fundamental conflict with user's interests and will never deliver what the users want.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
There is good reason not to code first for IE. For one thing, IE is forgiving of some code problems that will cause standards-compliant browsers to render incorrectly. If you check it first in IE, you won't know why it doesn't work in Firefox and Opera. If you check it in Firefox first, it will probably work in IE.
In other cases, where IE doesn't render correct code correctly, you may be able to throw it off with an alternate block of code, or let it ignore something it doesn't understand. But you're treating IE as the exception, because it IS the exception to established standards. If you code for IE first, you're pretending that all those Mac (and iPhone) users out there and all those Firefox users don't exist.
WARNING: Nobody click on that -- it does the goatse thing.
Now, can somebody explain how this link works? The href is http://www.google.com/search?searchQ=msie+version+8&q=contactlog.net&btnI
How the hell does this link bring up goatse? What's the hack here?
An explanation here would probably be [narrowly] on topic, given the discussion of browser behavior.
Thanks.
They may just not want to say "we're waiting to see what the next version of safari/firefox/etc. does that IE7 doesn't do, so we can copy it in an impractical but whiz-bang way".
stuff |
Bill Gates is spotted rummaging thru trash cans at the back of an IBM corp building.
If you consider the 50/50 split, you end up with some sites where no single version of IE matches FF. Oh yeah, that's a developer site and it kind of shows you where this is all going.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
From past information of Bill Gates' management style (remember Alex St. John?), things are not going to be fun over on the IE team. He has no problem ripping even senior management a new one.
The razor needs to be adjusted...
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence -- unless there is a history of malice.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I still think this is sad that no one would TRY something before saying it's impossible. Impossible, sometimes, is possible, just need some thinking and some guts. /sigh
MSFT managers won't think out side the box. Unfortunately it seems that a hell of a lot of people cannot think outside the box. Developers, managers, builders,Of Code And Men
If you enter a URL into google, it redirects you to that URL. In this case, the GET parameter ("q") is set to "contactlog.net" which must have a goatse (I'm not going to look so I can't verify). The "searchQ=" parameter is a red herring and does nothing. It's only there to trick you. Google's search parameter is always called "q".
The next IE version will be like Word for the Web. Not just a browser but an editor to completely interact with content. Ok, I made it up.
You got it from WebTV adverts.
Considering M$'s recent experience with blogs, the next version of IE will not let developers edit M$'s web site.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's interesting how both accounts use the same writing style, do the same "M$" thing and even misspell the same words consistently.
Are you posting to Slashdot with two accounts? Is that even allowed?
"I have updated to Office 12 due to its greater security"
Well, there's the equivalent of 6-8 years of OSX upgrades right there...
You actually develop to standards with FF/Safari/Opera/whatever supports standards, then throw in the tweaks to get it to render properly in the various versions of IE. That way you don't inadvertently do something stupid like use a proprietary feature of IE to render something in a peculiar (wrong) way that will take forever to break in a standards compliant browser.
And yes, I have done development for a site that supported everything from Netscape 4.7+, IE 4.02+, Opera 7+ and Safari because anything representing even 1% of your potential revenue stream is important, especially when the profit from 1% will easily pay for 10 developers with change left over.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It is offtopic, but I'll answer anyway.
Normally, Google's form uses q as the field for the search term, not searchQ. And btnI is the name of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The link actually has nothing to do with IE 8. It's really just equivalent to an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for contactlognet, for which Google immediately shoots back a redirect to that site. That site in turn sends you yet another redirect.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Does anyone else find it odd that Bill Gates didn't know this? I'd like to hear (off the record) from Molly on whether she believes him. Putting my tinfoil hat aside for a minute, it just seems obvious that the silence, which has engendered so much hatred and negativity from the development community, must surely be a part of some type of strategy. And shouldn't Bill be aware of that strategy?
Even if they haven't committed on certain features or levels of compliancy, this surely does not mean complete silence. Disappointment about delivery of features can be expected, but usually it's tempered with some amount of understanding in the face of transparency and intentions.
So to me, the silence is a strategy. The choices are:
- they're not planning on implementing the standards that people expect (CSS, DOM, SVG, XHTML) so they want to avoid fact-based criticism for as long as possible. The longer they wait, the more people may fall in love with Silverlight?
- they're planning on implementing standards and they want to surprise the hell out of the developers (to have them come rushing and gushing back to the fold).
Ok, so I'm foolishly hoping it's the latter strategy (I've heard they do have a new layout engine they're working on). But the longer they wait, the more people will expect.
It must be fairly obvious to them by now that most developers realize just how far behind standards compliancy IE is. Seriously, they are the _ONLY_ major browser out there with: its own DOM, its own event handling, its own vector graphics (VML/Silverlight) and woefully behind CSS implementation. EVERY other browser gives a shot at supporting SVG - where are they with that? They haven't even TOUCHED the spec yet!
Something Witty Goes Here
It uses the "I'm feeling lucky" feature in Google. The "&btnI" part of the querystring is activates the "I'm feeling lucky" feature and you are redirected to the first hit.
This pretty much explains everything. They're going to do what they did with IE7 to IE8, they're going to F*** -it up!
-goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Not only is this completely missing the point (people want 3 column layout, and they HAVE to implement them anyway with tedious gesticulations), but you're posting on a site with a 3 column layout, for fuck's sake!
Navigation on the right, content and comments in the middle, links and tools on the right. No, that's not a newspaper layout (which have more than 3 columns, in case you've never opened one!), and it makes at least some fucking sense.
The above comment is brought to you by the GNAA/AntiSlash alliance botnet. Is that ever allowed?
It's possible/likely that Bill Gates knows exactly what the initial planned feature list for IE 8 was, what is currently done, what might need to be cut to make the release target, and what's already slipped to IE 9. What is lacking is communicating any of these various bits of info to anyone outside of Microsoft.
"I'll have to ask" != "I will ask"
BINGO!
DRM... on the browser? What?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It's not filed with other fallacies because it is not a rhetorical device, unlike "strawman argument" for example; it is more akin to a logical paradox. And even if it were not as universal as some thought, it is still perfectly valid in this instance.
...so nobody informed him about the new secrecy policy of Microsoft.
I can tell you why nobody has heard anything from MS about IE 8 lately - THEY AREN'T DEVELOPING IT. It doesn't make them any money.
Remember, after IE 6 came out they virtually stopped development and let it become a cesspool for spyware, malware, and viruses. They only redecorated and slapped a "7" on it when Firefox started kicking them in the butt. This has happened before and is what is happening again now.
Personally I wish people would just shut up and forget about IE 8. It isn't happening any time soon. Just... get... Firefox! (Or Safari or Opera or anything else if you prefer)
Yes, it depends. Worldwide, IE usage is about 80% overall. In Europe and on tech-heavy sites, IE usage is significantly lower.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh please, what a joke, MS is simply trying to play like Apple and try to get people excited which is such a joke. It's a crappy browser and it always has been. I would shave my head if MS actually came out with something actually intuitive or standards based for their next browser, itll simply be more of the same, going it alone and trying to force developers and users to use their junky implementation of some well known web standard.
I thought Gates was leaving MS to that apey guy to run, while Gates concentrated on "giving away" all that money. What's he doing meeting with developers and demanding to know what the hell is going on like the rest of us?
--
make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First off, you could make that claim about any single transaction. Let's arbitrarily say 20% of web developer money goes into accomodating IE bugs. Why do you think the web developers are *less* likely to hoard than the customers that spent that money? All you *can* say is that 20% of the money spent on web development today is pissed away not towards progress. Note that economics doesn't care much about progress, so while economically its neutral that the money is pissed away on bugs vs. spent on other things, more broadly speaking it means resources are being spent without correlating to meaningful progress. The broken window fallacy is part of every
Secondly, hoarding currency doesn't mean a black hole, one way or another, the currency (or at least the buying power it is meant to represent) will be used again. If truly hoarding for eternity, the value of the rest of the currency increases to compensate. If the currency system collapses without some savings account being exhausted, eventually the buying power that represented will be reflected in another way (maybe unfairly moved to another party, but still...). Wikipedia even contains a response to your argument, that it's either spent directly (the common explanation), or, in the case of sitting in a vault, saved for future economic investment. If 99% of money were put into a vault and nobody was borrowing, you can bet some sort of correction would occur.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The graph isn't linear, though a small enough slice may look linear. It's one of those S-shaped titration curves. Firefox 3 will push us a bit further...
Sure, this news is relevant to nerds, but wouldn't it fit better in YRO?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Whether Microsoft realizes it or not, they've pretty much lost this round of the browser wars. I don't know what their statistics are these days but even if they were still at 90% it wouldn't matter, because they've lost almost 100% of the mind share that actually matters - the developers. And oddly enough, it has very little to do with their awful support of standards. There was a time not long ago when it made financial sense to develop only for IE. IE was 90% of the market, and an average dev team could cut enough time off of their launch schedule that it more than made up for the number of users that you might lose by not fully supporting other browsers. Their buggy and nonstandard rendering wasn't a big deal, because you could still do reasonably well as a developer coding to the bugs and ignoring the standards.
.NET developer, I have zero motivation to even install Silverlight, much less develop against it.)
Where Microsoft completely missed the boat was on the developer tools. First the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox and now Firebug. The IE web developer toolbar is an utter joke. The script debugger is awful. Debugging through Visual Studio is pretty nice (if you have it) but it's not nearly as convenient as Firebug's integrated debugger, or even Venkman. It's been two years since I knew a web developer that used IE as their primary development platform. Even when working on sites that only have to target IE (the site that I am writing now will only be used on IE6 - ouch) we still develop on Firefox first and then fix it in IE once it works in Firefox.
Even if IE8 regains 95% of the market, they still won't have the same control over the web that they had with IE6 unless they drastically improve the developer experience. With IE6 one could argue that it made financial sense to ignore other browsers. As long as it's either to develop in other browsers than it is in IE, Microsoft will never achieve that kind of dominance again.
(I also have to agree with the poster quoted on the front page the other day. As long as Microsoft shows this level of neglect for IE developers, why in the world would we consider using any of their other technologies. Even as a
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
- - CSS support - Hmm, will an integrated Silverlight plugin do for much improved web site dynamics and visual effects over CSS? No, CSS is an established and published standard. If you want to see what CSS and SVG can do visit http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/ . Make sure you have a Safari 3 beta browser ready if you can. - - DOM support in their javascript implementation - Hmm, will a .NET interface for a vastly improved integration with scripting languages do?
No, because dotNet is a broken attempt to implement Java, which is a broken attempt to implement Smalltalk so it looks like C++. dotNet doesn't run on very many platforms and is way too heavy as well.
- - XHTML support
- Hmm, will rather supporting HTML 5.0 with Microsoft Extensions do?
No, because there is already a standard for XHTWL. Why go further from the standard with "Microsoft Extensions" that don't work on very many platforms when there's a standard that does?
- - SVG rendering
- Hmm, the Windows Presentation Foundation already supports vector graphics as part of Silverlight, so I don't understand this demand.
See my comment on CSS to see what SVG can do. Check out the radial engine demo and the rotated window in particular.
What the hell did you expect him to say?
"Yes, we're actively conspiring to not tell anyone anything"
who gives a shit what he thinks? ballmer and gates toilet paper print in gimp and wipe with satisfaction
Nobody talks about IE8!
Have gnu, will travel.
DRM... on the browser? What?
Sure, why not? Can you tell me the difference in intent between restrictions on a movie and restrictions on a newspaper? M$ has already tried to sell self destructing email. It seem ludicrous for web pages but the web is already full of language about "this may not be reproduced, distributed or copied in any way." M$ has been at war with simple standards forever. The end game is control they can sell.
Candidates for implementation of the M$ interweb are their fancy new jpeg format, Silverlight and Word. It's all part of the trusted path. Those without a "trusted" browser will not be served anymore than those without a trusted OS will be allowed to watch DVDs. Yes, it's stupid but you can see where they are going. If they did not want to exercise control, they would have adopted the same formats everone else did long ago. They are, after all, free to implement.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Maybe IE8 will be just a rebranding of Firefox? They're probably busy picking the default theme.
If it isn't, then it should be...
CSS is one end of a dichotomy and the other is constraint-based programming. I think the latter could use some airing out in the tag-world that has been missing so far.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.
aka:
"We're not doing squat with IE until we work out this Vista debacle."
I hope someone develops a browser that has a modular CSS enguine and leave the hooks open for anyone to use so you can plug in the CSS engine that you like. Then, CSS support can develop asynchronous from teh HTML engine and movement can accelerate on supporting the standards.
The reason they do not post as much as they used to is because no matter what they posted they got 100 MS haters tolling the comments for every person that actually wanted to give them any form of reasonable feedback.
Pretty much the same as the comments on slashdot. 99% trash, 1% worth reading. Why bother?
I would tell you all to F-off too if I got some of the comments they get on their blog.
"They seem to have lost the transparency that they had."
It took them 10 years to finally get PNGs working properly and now they're going to be broken again?
1) Create a simple way to turn off that annoying clicking sound everytime a tab is launched!
And no, you don't go into Control Panel / Sound. There's really no option this time!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Someone refresh me on the history of this.
In what order was the phrase "Broken (MS) Windows" consciously linked to the Broken Window Fallacy? That's a phenomenal mnemonic.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
well dean, what the hell is going on with... fire explorer ... i mean internet fox... errrr i mean, damnit dean, what the hell are we stealing today?
(yeah, sell them a song for that Rolling Stones, bugger off)
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
More and more applications work via a browser. The fact that the world depends on whims of an obscure programmer or a businessman becomes ridiculous and dangerous.
Millions of hours of working time are lost on workarounds of the browser bugs.
Something should be done on this. I think it is a high time for the UN conference on "browser wars". There should be international enforceable guidelines on browser development.
For all I know this IE8 team leader may be an instable man who plays games with billions people's working time.
And we just have to accept whatever he offers.
It looks especially dangerous when one thinks of browsers and simultaneously of the OS and drivers' lock up.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
The real reason we haven't heard anything from them lately is because they tried to re-open the gateway to hell they used to bring about IE 4, and all the developers got sucked in.
I simply had to read a "-1 Interesting" post :)
Well, I guess some mods are too coward to call somebody a troll or flamebat.
Rethinking email
Dear IE team: thanks for inventing AJAX. Now please go make everything else work. kthxbye.
Can we stop with this lie already?
The IE team did not invent AJAX. The XMLHttpRequest call (which Microsoft did create) was merely a shorthand for something developers had been doing for years: targeting an invisible iframe with an HTTP request, and then inspecting the contents of that iframe for data. I did at least a year before MS released XMLHttpRequest support, and *I* stole it from somebody else who had written a JS library to support it.
Microsoft did create a nice shorthand for it. That's nice. BUT THEY DID NOT INVENT AJAX!
Sorry for the rant. I just hate that Microsoft gets more credit than they deserve. (The did *not* create the personal computer revolution. Apple and Commodore did that long before MS purchased DOS for $10k from a gullible Seattle developer. Etc.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
That's your opinion. It may not be spent at all.
Did you even read the whole Wikipedia article? It addresses this. What happens to money that isn't spent? It usually gets placed into a bank account or investment account. What happens to it then? Financial institutions, such as banks, then use the cash to invest, usually prudently, in new economic activities, that wouldn't be possible if that money had been spent already. In other words, guys like YOU and ME who go get a bank loan when we decide to try start our own businesses (and/or when we buy the products of such businesses) - we BENEFIT from what would otherwise be idle capital. This is where 'interest' comes from, by the way.
People who are not regular computer users and sites who pander to people who are not regular web users, will have higher IE usage and sites who pander to people who ARE regular web users will see just the opposite.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Most of the people I hear griping about IE are web designers. So here's some news for you dudes and dudettes: Most of us don't give a flying fuck about rounded corners, alpha transparency, HTML 4.0 and whatever it is you're crying about.
You ladies and gentlemen have been screwing up the web much worse than IE for longer than I can remember. It took us five years to convince you that pretty animations done in Flash are an impediment to using a website and not a cool feature. Now that knowledge has mostly managed to enter your thick skulls so instead you are trying to make stuff on our web pages move using JavaScript and dynamic HTML. I hope there's a special circle of Hell reserved for you.
Instead we, the real users, care only about two things:
1. Security, 'cause we actually check our bank accounts using the browser.
2. Handling bookmarks and snippets, cause there's so much interesting stuff on the web that we want to save for later.
When it comes to security IE is still lousy, although that thing where they remove all the fun security tokens on startup is pretty good and I wish FireFox would do it because it is also pretty insecure.
When it comes to handling bookmarks and snippets all the web browsers are still a steaming pile of shit. It's been - what? - 13 years since Netscape introduced bookmarks and nobody has presented a saner way to organize information even though the number of web sites has grown from 2,738 in '94 to over 100 million today.
Amazing.
Dejan
http://www.iht.com/bin/3-col.php?id=8630144
Hi Yvan, I saw on your website you were looking for Adlib Gold 1000 Card, programs or drivers. If I am right, let me know. I have one of theses card with is original box and 3.5" disks. Have a nice day
you don't even read what you post anymore, fucktard.
Cool, so not only do you make up tripe about what they don't do, now you're dreaming up tripe about things they haven't done.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
please die, fucktard
Isn't it funny that the best GUI ever invented is now part of history?
NeWS was not only networked like the X-Window system, but it also had its own postscript-like programming language that it allowed programs to be transmitted to the display server for execution...which means that heavy stuff like CAD drawings could be really fast.
NeWS was very beautiful; it had very nice UI elements, fonts and colors, and it was even animated. During my service in the navy, I once saw the UI of a tactical system, and it was all in NeWS. Extremely rich UI, very responsive, very impressive...
Of the posts about Vista on Slashdot, approximately half are to the the effect that "Vista is bad because all it is is superficial and eye-candy improvements to XP, with very little improvement to the underlying technologies".
The other half are to the effect that "Vista is bad because they completely rewrote a lot of the underlying technologies from scratch, leading to unprecedented performance and compatibility problems. If they'd just made some UI improvements to XP, it would have been much better".
Obviously, reality is somewhere in between the two; but I suppose that makes for a much less pithy soundbites.
I know this is Slashdot, but can we please have a slightly more informed discussion here? To get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_networking_technologies
And, of course,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.