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.'"

Comments

Re:In a perfect world

[MrDERP]

Hate to play devils advocate but I think with ie 7 they have made much improvement, especially as far as speed and memory, Firefox is getting to the point it's to bloated, memory leaks etc, sometimes When I have 5-10 tabs open my computer crawls. too many built in "features" that should be add-ons The "Zones" for trusted sites in IE drives me nuts though, there should be 2 trusted and blocked. You should be able to choose the default out of those 2 options (to block everything not white listed or allow everything not blacklisted). The reason I use firefox (on windows)is not because it doesn't use much memory (uses more IMO and is slower) but because of Adblock Plus, and no "Zones" or Active X bs , Active X should only be used for one thing Windows Update, get rid of trusted zones. Opera has both beat with memory and speed , even built in torrent downloader (which is kind of sucky IMO.) On windows however, Opera is the fastest and uses the least memory my conscious is clear using a TPB torrented copy. Someday when I am working fulltime, done with school I will pay for it.

You did not make that up.

[Erris]

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.

The Trusted Path Must not Leak. Re:oh wow

[Erris]

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.