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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.'"
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.
While superficially correct, this is a case of the broken window fallacy. The money spent working around IE bugs could be spent better elsewhere (for instance, QA, usability, etc.).
As long as the baseline standards are met, who cares? Nobody sane will use proprietary tags. All it does is make the other browser maker go "those bastards! they have curvy corner tags! lets steal the thing and enhance it by add drop shadows too!". Now we've got drop shadowed DIV's with curvy corners in CSS. Each browser maker will copy the other guy's syntax, improve it a bit, and kick it back out the market.
:-)
Look at the IFRAME. You think that little fairly useful tag came from the W3C? Look at all the other tags you've got in HTML. How many of them were dreamed up by the eggheads at the W3C? I'm no historian, but I'd wager most of the useful bits of HTML and possibly CSS we have today is not because of the W3C, but a byproduct of the IE vs. Netscape wars of way back when. Shit, we even have the useful BLINK tag!!
The W3C is horrible at cranking out useful standards - those guys seem more interested in hearing themselves talk. They want you to give up tables for a grid layout (which is a good move) but provide no direct replacement. Yes you can rid yourself of tables, but you do so with a hack. Hell, wasn't the TABLE tag something from Netscape?
Bottom line? The only way we will evolve on the web is with another bloody tag war.
At least, in my opinion. I could be wrong you know
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?