Slashdot Mirror


Microsoft's Lack of Nightly Builds For IE

Ricky writes "Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer — or at least something more frequent than months-to-years. Ars talks with Microsoft's general manager for IE, who says the IE9 development cycle will look much the same as previous versions. Not a great idea."

9 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Obvious... by hansamurai · · Score: 3, Informative

    The nightlies of Microsoft Bob basically killed all positive hype for the program.

  2. Agile??? WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Nightly builds has absolutely nothing to do with that retarded buzzword 'Agile'.

    Nightly builds is just that, nightly builds. Trying to assert that nightly builds are 'agile' is like some cheeseburger and curly fries stained Star Trek tshirt wearing bearded GNU freak trying to claim releasing source code is 'GNU'.

  3. Re:Obvious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, meh.

  4. Re:Security Updates? by spartin92 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I guess Konqueror should have it's own update system, the OS update system isn't good enough?

    Its, not it is.

  5. Re:Security Updates? by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Touché

    Also, I’m = I’m.

    Okay, I’ll shut up... and damn slashcode for not letting me use the … character code.

    Wait a second... oh my god... did they really fix Unicode?
    “Touché.”
    It looks right in the preview. Just my luck it’ll screw it up as soon as I post.

    It still doesn’t allow arbitrary characters, though... just certain ones. The ellipsis just melts into oblivion...

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  6. Re:Normal by dingen · · Score: 4, Informative

    WTF? Most companies don't release nightly builds of their software.

    Not when it comes to web browsers. You can get nightlies from every single other major browser, except for IE.

    --
    Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
  7. They DO do nightlies... by White+Shade · · Score: 2, Informative

    From what I've gleaned from various Microsoft blogs, they DO release nightly builds, internally to all their own testers and employees.

    That way, as far as I can tell, they get all the benefit of nightly builds, with absolutely zero of the downsides in terms of company image and dealing with buggy software in the wild.

    --
    ìì!
  8. Re:Maybe it takes more than a day to build it? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Informative

    Given how tied into the operating system that MSIE is, I suppose that a build of MSIE would require a significant build of Windows as well.

    I find it highly unlikely. In the end, IE lives in its own library, and any OS services that may need it call through that via stabilized COM interfaces. There's no reason why Windows can't be build against precompiled IE binaries and .idl files describing the interface, and similarly no reason why IE can't be built against the most up-to-date Windows SDK headers.

  9. Re:Obvious... by praseodym · · Score: 2, Informative

    In recent interviews, the IE team explained that they run many testsets (W3C sets, Acid3, CSS3.info) themselves anyway. They have also contributed a lot of new tests to W3C (e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/01/27/microsoft-submits-thousands-more-css-2-1-tests-to-the-w3c.aspx). They ask for feedback about their tests. The only thing we can do to improve IE is to make sure there's enough test coverage.