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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
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
"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...
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).
In this case, that "adolescent crap" is well deserved and hardly adolescent. It is the outpour of pent up rage from professional web developers everywhere.
Until you've done serious web development, you have no idea how frustrating it is to target IE. Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
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?
Actually I thought the perfect description of IE 7 was "response to Firefox." Seriously, I don't think IE 7 existed as a serious, active project until Firefox started claiming significant percentages of the browser market, and most of the UI additions are ripped straight from Firefox. But, in the case of IE 8, this time there isn't really anything obvious to rip from Firefox--maybe integrated spellchecker? If they try to offer an easy-to-install plugin system (I'm assuming IE 7 doesn't have one already. If it does, forgive me--I've used IE 7 a grand total of maybe 15 minutes), the results will be a security disaster.
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.
Microsoft is a business. Keeping IE non-compliant with standards makes them money. If they complied with standards then all the Web pages and applications would soon do the same, which means there would be nothing stopping companies with Web apps from migrating to something cheaper than Windows and Office. MS's strategy is called "tying" and is illegal for companies with monopoly influence in a market, but MS still makes more money breaking the law and paying off politicians than it does complying with the law, so we're screwed. IE will never be compliant with the specs unless MS loses their monopoly influence.
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
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.