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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
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*"
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
before Opera 9.5/FF3 are released and they have new ideas to copy?
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).
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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."
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.
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?
"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?