Internet Explorer 8 Delayed Until 2009

Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 8 will not be officially released until 2009. According to a blog posting on the Internet Explorer 8 development site, a release candidate of the browser will be released in the first quarter of next year, to be followed by a final release at an unspecified date. This news comes on the same day that Google is considering bundling its Chrome browser with new PCs. Will the IE delay and Google's tactics help to steer users in Chrome's direction?"

Comments

how

[ionix5891]

does a company with so much cash and resources is unable to release a good browser is beyond me

must be all the bureaucracy or some sort of internal politics

IE does so much harm to microsoft's image, are they just blind in the Death Star to notice the bad will being generated?

Re:how

[kandela]

Yeah, how long will it take before Google gets it right?

Re:how

[ionix5891]

google are a marketing company they dont have to get it "right" technically, they just have to make it appear that they got it right

Re:how

[cp.tar]

Yeah, how long will it take before Google gets it right?

Dunno. How long before Gmail gets out of beta?

Re:how

[jellomizer]

They give it away from free and still have a huge majority of the market share.
So...
1. They don't have any financial motives to make it excellent just to keep it from being left behind.
2. As long as they keep the majority in market share developers will still develop and test with it.

All the changes and features are basically keep up features with some easy to program "innovative" stuff just to keep it on the radar. If you have done any software development you need to realize it is difficult to have a clean timeline of code especially with scope that Microsoft needs to have (Works for all Systems, Business and Personal Use, Good Security, Huge Flexibility...) In general Microsoft hates saying no to its customer so they often end up creating applications that meet all the customer request but fail to do what the customers want.

This is part of the Apple popularly surge. Apple likes to say no to a lot of good features. As they realize if it is implemented the majority may suffer to make the minority a little bit happier.

Re:how

[lukas84]

You're not looking at the whole picture.

IE does a lot of things right, which no other browser does.

Centrally managing IE in a Windows Environment is a breeze - everything can be configured using Group Policies, a powerful tool that automates application customization.

Deploying and upgrading IE is also easy, as it utilizes the same Windows Update infrastructure that is already in place - using the free WSUS product in small businesses, or WSUS/SCCM in larger businesses.

IE also allows powerful intranet applications and custom security zones that can also be configured centrally - yes, this feature has been the source of many a security problem, but businesses don't buy computers because they're secure, but because they solve business problems.

Firefox, Opera and Chrome seem to have little to no interest in being used in corporate IT environments, where automated deployment and central management is key.

Re:how

[mfh]

must be all the bureaucracy or some sort of internal politics

It's definitely part of the recipe for these kinds of projects. The main thing we see in big projects that are beyond a first or third iteration (like IE) is that most of the original team is gone and most of the original vision has changed, either for political reasons or for necessary course corrections, and both of which must be true for IE. Nobody on the IE team shares the exact same vision for IE. Many fragments of the IE userbase have likely caused conflicts between team members from design to production. Conflicts cause issues in every aspect of development, but also they cause turnover.

We know people were promoted out of the IE team, and promoted out of the company. In a case like Microsoft, it's been years since the first iteration, and IE has gone through so many revisions that there is a high likelihood for spaghetti code and feature creep to crush project fluidity. They have rewritten the whole thing, how many times now?

While team members wielding political weapons must be crushed on sight by worthy adversaries, it doesn't happen enough because people are afraid of repercussions. Unless you are Steve Ballmer, then you throw a chair and hit the wrong person.

Re:how

[RAMMS EIN]

Having a lot of money isn't necessarily going to speed up development. Developing complex software (which MS Internet Explorer is) takes time. You can use money to hire more developers, and that can speed things up, but, after a certain point, having more programmers will actually slow down development. You can use money to hire better programmers, but that has its limits, too. The same goes for buying faster hardware and better development tools. At some point, you just can't make things go faster, no matter how much money you have.

Re:how

[kandela]

Ok, modded as a troll it is. However, not so long ago we were calling microsoft evil for the way in which they proliferated their O/S and browser by having it bundled with new PCs. Now that Google is doing this it is suddenly ok? For me their priority should have been perfecting their browser (and it isn't as good as its competition yet) before engaging in the "evil" aggressive marketing tactics of its competitor. That is what I call 'getting it right'.

And I also agree with someone else who pointed out 2009 is only 6 weeks away. That's not so long for the successor to a browser that is still very competitive. Microsoft 'have it right' in this instance: make sure the successor is air tight before replacing a solid product.

Re:how

[poetmatt]

There's a difference here. Putting chrome on a PC that automatically has IE (thanks, microsoft) means you have a choice. If we included firefox and safari, even moreso. It is at this point people can then say that they want IE completely removed from a PC. It may not be the same as selling PCs that don't have windows bundled but it is a step in the right direction.

Microsoft have nothing right or wrong in this instance, all they are doing is pushing back development as they are doing a crappy job as always.

Re:how

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. It's excellent in every way; except for rendering HTML.

Re:how

[Kent Recal]

Ehm, you confused google and microsoft there.
Microsoft is the marketing company. Google is a product company.

Google sets industry-standards with their products (search, gmail...) and people flock to them because they are better, not because google markets them anyhow. Seriously, have you seen an ad for google search or google mail ever?
Microsoft puts out crappy products and forces them down the consumers throats through their OS monopoly and aggressive marketing.

Re:how

[lysergic.acid]

also, the problem with Microsoft's bundling was that they were abusing their monopoly. they used the monopoly Windows held in the desktop OS market to gain an unfair monopoly in the browser market. this included integrating IE into Windows (making it impossible to uninstall) and forbidding OEMs from bundling competing browsers with their systems. this was a clear case of anticompetitive behavior.

there's nothing inherently wrong or illegal with bundling software with hardware. Nero does it, Apple does it, AOL does it, Microsoft certainly does it, and so do countless other companies. saying that Google is being just like MS by bundling their software is just demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the antitrust case against Microsoft.

Re:how

[lukas84]

Ehm, what exactly needs to be "centrally managed" about a friggin' Web-Browser?

For example, which extensions may or may not be installed. Or what the homepage is set to. Or, disabling the Phishing Filter or enabling the Lookup-Portion of the Phishing Filter. Enable certain privacy settings by default, or disable them.

Firefox can auto-detect the proxy server to use and updates itself over the intertubes.

A feature which requires local administrative privileges, which is not the case in a corporate IT environment.

What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?

Lot's. You've obviously never worked in one, which is perfectly fine. But don't attack me just because you don't understand a large part of the global IT economy.

Re:how

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, IE7 on Vista IS a solid product by any reasonable definition. (I don't have to cite any sources since you didn't). The halcyon days of drive by download malware are OVER with IE7 and Vista. You haven't noticed that? These days they have to get lusers to click on malware - they can't just auto-load it when you click a questionable link anymore.

Try running the new stuff before bashing it.

That said, I still do prefer Firefox (this post is written in FF 3.04) to IE7 and IE8 - mostly due to Adblock Plus. IE8 has gotten very close to FF otherwise.

Re:how

[Richard_at_work]

I beg to differ - Google is the very epitome of a marketing company, and your post is a damn good example of why. Googles products are you, not Gmail or search, you. Googles customers are its advertisers. The fact that you think Google is a product company proves that their marketing is second to none.

Re:how

[Richard_at_work]

What more do you need in your "corporate environment"?

Considerably more than auto detecting the proxy server and updating - you really seem to be missing the point.

Some very good examples are default Favourites, very helpful in a lot of corporations (have you ever got the shit job of having to add a new favourite to a thousand PCs?), default Homepage, again very helpful, default popup blocker and security settings for known good websites that you have no control over but need to use, and local browser security settings for when you don't want your employees from setting their own proxy server or otherwise mess with the browser setup.

In short, everything you need to be applied to every one (or a majority) of your desktops - you can either have your PC setup bods do it manually, or you can just ghost a new machine and let the central management server do it. I know which I would rather do.

From the sound of it, you haven't had to deal with an corporate environment with more than a dozen or so desktops. Believe me, central management becomes extremely handy when you are dealing with a thousand desktops in multiple locations (or even 100 in one).

On the other hand, Firefox does have an Active Directory GPO template available for doing many of the things corporate admins require.

Re:how

[davidbrit2]

To borrow the old emacs line:

IE is a great OS - what it needs is a decent web browser.

Re:how

[Kent Recal]

Well, nice word-games you're playing there but no, I'm not google's "product". They didn't make me.
Google's products are Gmail and Search, they created them and I am using them.

Google is using a fairly novel approach to monetize their products but I don't agree with you swapping the definition of "product" and "customer" for them.

Re:how

[lukas84]

Firefox can do it. That wasn't the point. The point was central management.

Re:how

[Kent Recal]

Well, ofcourse you have a point. The Firefox integration could be better and MSIE has better integration (obviously - it's coming from the OS vendor).

What I was trying to say is that pretty much everything you need can be done with a bit of elbow grease and it's a one-time investment.
The larger your deployment the more likely do you have the ressources to make that investment. And the more likely will you benefit from using Firefox over IE because of better security and indeed better customization options (XUL, Chrome, Addons) in the long run.

I'm talking a bit tongue in cheek here as I know that stuff first-hand (having supported large deployments and knowing a few people in the biz of *really* large deployments). Reality is that indeed, many large enterprise deployments use MSIE. Not because it is in any way superior but rather because IT is outsourced to a MS-contractor...

Re:how

[David Gerard]

No, he's quite correct. Google get money from their advertisers. What they sell the advertisers is your attention.

Search and Gmail are not the "products" that Google actually sell* - they're bait to lure in the products that they sell.

* OK, they do sell Gmail for your domain as a product. But the vast majority of their income is selling your eyeballs to advertisers.

Re:how

[Richard_at_work]

The basic fact of the matter is that Googles income is not being made off of the users of their tools such as Gmail or search, but is instead being made off of services being sold to third parties which will be exposed via those tools.

Its not a word game, its the basic truth - you, the end user of Gmail or search, are not a direct contributer to Googles income, but you are infact an indirect contributor. Google is selling exposure to *you* to third parties.

They just use nice shiny offerings to entice you to play ball.

The minute you stop paying directly for the services, and start paying indirectly for the services, is the minute you become the product - if Google was not relying on income from advertisers, Google would otherwise be charging *you* for usage.

I also wouldn't call it a fairly novel approach - people have been doing it for years.

Re:how

[LingNoi]

Just because a product is free doesn't mean you're not a customer.

Re:how

[drei0003019]

It's not that bad with him, that I had to hide FF behind the blue "e", but yes, I already did that in hopeless cases when doing tech support for 200 not quite computer literate social workers 2 years ago :-)

But I have serious doubts that there are many people out there who would start up a new PC for the first time, look at the bizarre parade of a compass, an "e", an "o", an earth-cuddling fox-like creature and a multicolored ball and think: "Ah, feels good to have the choice!".

Re:how

[Richard_at_work]

Ok, now you are just taking it way way too far and essentially just making stuff up - I said you were a product, and I proved that. I never ascribed any moral stance to it, and I certainly never gave any 'selling souls' speech (I have no issues at all with what Google are doing, I use Gmail freely myself as you can tell from my email address).

Re:how

[Richard_at_work]

From Websters -
Product Prod"uct\, n. [L. productus, p. pr. of producere. See Produce.] 1. Anything that is produced, whether as the result of generation, growth, labor, or thought, or by the operation of involuntary causes; as, the products of the season, or of the farm; the products of manufactures; the products of the brain.

The only thing my definition doesn't seem to fit is your narrow one that you are trying to foist on other people to win your own perceived 'argument'.

Get over it - the user is the product Google sells to advertisers through exposure to adverts. Google creates that product by offering other things to users - the specific userbase for its advertising service is a result of Google specifically engineering it into existence, hence it is a product of Googles labors.

Ummm....

[jellomizer]

This is not massive news as it is Late November in 2008. Meaning if IE 8 was release it would have to be released within 6 weeks. Heck it would need at least that much time in the RC levels just to make sure things are kinda going smooth.

Re:Ummm....

[jellomizer]

I would say IE8.

Internet Explorer tends to be released slightly before the OS is. Remember integrated browser. That means in order to make sure all the new features of the OS are completely integrated they need to make sure the browser works first.

Nothing new

[Monoman]

This is how MS marketing operates.

1. Hype what you are working on like it is coming out any day now in hopes to avoid customers switching to a competitor.
2. Delay
3. Back to #1 until product is ready for testing
4. Release :-)

Chevy is doing the first two steps with the Volt because they can't compete with hybrids ... or is it out now. Oh wait, gas prices are down now so people don't care about fuel efficiency right now.

Delay means very little

[sleeponthemic]

Chances are, if you're an internet explorer user you're not on the edge of your seat about the next version coming out - because you have no knowledge about it. Furthermore, you've never heard of chrome. Some people in the office go on about Firefox but your browser works just fine - infact, you consider the browser you used in 2002 to be no different than the one you use now.

IE8 in 09?

[OffTheLip]

This seems to be keeping with previous Microsoft release schedules. It's an off by one problem, sort of like buffer overflows.

Google not serious about browser

[BountyX]

I suspect that google is not serious about chrome. Specifically, google does not see chrome as a long term product. They are simply chomping at microsoft's market share by introducing another browser into the market. The more browsers that are in the market, the more important standards become (ie's biggest weakness) and the less market share ie will have. If google really wanted to see their browser as a top dog, they would cut their 85 million dollar annual firefox donation. They are not playing to win, they are playing to have MS lose. Futhermore, if IE starts to decline, live services and ms advertising will also decline proportionally. In the end, google can care less about it's chrome, its just a UI slapped onto webkit anyways. The true agenda is to get people to question their browser and try different ones. With lower IE market share, they will see bigger ad revenues. That's more money to invent random stuff with hehe. If microsoft can keep up, then they win again, by creating a better standards complaint expirience. Standards are the opposite of vendor lock-ins ;). Oh google, you must be bored.

Re:Google not serious about browser

[Monoman]

And MS shouldn't be either. I can see them including a basic browser to get you going. Notepad and Wordpad are free but if you want something more then you get a real word processing program.

IMHO MS stays in the browser war because they are paranoid they will miss the next big thing. Ever since MS was late to get on the Internet bandwagon they have made sure they get involved with thing across the board just enough. Just enough to have something so they don't miss out on the next big thing .... whatever that might be.

Re:Google not serious about browser

[blind biker]

Google tries to reduce IE's marketshare - that's the reason they don't need to have a browser for Linux or Mac - on those platforms IE is nonexistent and irrelevant, respectively.

Funny, but not funny

[Redbaran]

I know we all like to laugh at MS for not shipping a product on time, but as a web-developer, I am not happy (nor surprised). Anything that delays the average web-surfer from having a more standards compliant browser is not a good thing. While I'm sure IE8 won't be as compliant as it should be, it's still a step in the right direction.

I'll never get back the hours and days I've wasted on browser differences and bugs, but the mirage that one day I won't have to waste that time is enough to keep me wandering through the desert with a little bit of hope.

I bet it still be

[A12m0v]

horrible at JavaScript, HTML and standard compliance With Firefox, Opera and Chrome why would a sane person even want to use IE? IE still trails almost every other browser in JavaScript performance, try it for yourself. http://nontroppo.org/timer/progressive_raytracer.html

I may dump Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

I went up to Mozilla the other day for a plugin and what do I find? A login/registration screen! WTF! I am going to have to register with them too just to get a plugin? I create phony logins, but it's the principal. I'm sick of having of this registration BS. What benefit does a website gain from it? Is it an incentive for advertisers? What? It just makes the site a bigger pain in the ass.

Registration is a pain.

Re:I may dump Firefox.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Some plugins are still in beta/alpha/eat your babies revision. They make you register to download those, so you can't bitch at them when it gobbles up all your bookmarks or something.

Non-Techie

[Midnight Thunder]

horrible at JavaScript, HTML and standard compliance With Firefox, Opera and Chrome why would a sane person even want to use IE? IE still trails almost every other browser in JavaScript performance,

While IE may be crap, the average person is probably not tech-savie and is not aware of the alternatives or simply doesn't really care if the tool does the job. Don't be surprised how conservative people can be. In many way this is no different than your KDE user using Konquerer or your Mac user using Safari, while not considering the alternatives.

Avoiding the issue

[markdowling]

Firefox has been asked for years for better corporate deployment support. The answer was some wiki pages and a Client Customisation Kit which is currently listed as supporting FF2.

Firefox still ships as an .exe, not a Mozilla branded MSI, despite one being requested in January 2004 (bug 231062). Despite being listed as P1 for FF3 there's no sign of it yet.

There is an MSI linked from Mozilla pages, but it is not a Mozilla MSI. With all respect to Frontmotion for the work they have done, if I'm bringing an MSI inside my firewall it has to say Mozilla on it.

Reaching IE's integration level would be beyond most companies but Firefox's level barely reaches baby steps.

(incidentally for those who wish to mod me down "cuz that post hatez teh firefox", this is being posted with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4)

Re:Avoiding the issue

[lukas84]

A 1000+ seat installation means you have lots of resources available. Guys dedicated to packaging software and testing it.

Now think of a 100 seat installation, where you often don't even have one full time IT employee.

Almost no resources - now create your own deployment package, and update it everytime Mozilla releases an update, and deploy that alongside an already existing webbrowser that more or less does it's job?

Why? Where's the business case? It costs hell of a lot time and money, of which you have neither, and doesn't really change all that much about the situation.

microsoft is not in a bad position, actually

[buddyglass]

People are so down on Internet Explorer, and rightly so, that if they come out with something that is "competitive" with the other offerings, even if it isn't superior, it will be perceived as a huge win for Microsoft and likely win back much of the market share they've lost.

I'm basing this on the fact that many people will choose the "standard" (IE) unless there is a compelling reason to switch to something else. Especially corporate environments, excluding companies that are expressly anti-Microsoft (Apple, Sun, IBM, Google). So Microsoft doesn't have to provide a compelling reason to use Internet Explorer; they just have to ensure there are no compelling reasons to use something else.