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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."
Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer
Um, because they never have and never will?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Your eyes... is that moisture?
What does MS offer nightly builds for??? It's just not how they work. They're a typical monolithic development house that deals only with releases and occasionally lets beta code out. There are benefits to the approach like not trying to shoot a moving target when it comes to bugs etc. People who've grown up with agile seem to think it's the only way to do quality assurance.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Umm, isn't that what Update Tuesdays are for? Constantly patching IE along with other OS updates?
Life is not for the lazy.
Although many developers may not really care much for nightlies or even point releases, it keeps them in the loop, and keeps them interested.
This confused me. Many developers don't care about them, but they do care about them... is that basically what the Ars article is saying?
I'm sure the developers have one, or maybe something that can be done ondemand. No point having one for the public imo
did you forget to take your meds?
WTF? Most companies don't release nightly builds of their software. Why on earth are we singling out Microsoft, and only one of their products at that? Infrequent releases are the norm, not the exception, and while you may argue that it should change, it's ludicrous to single out one program among thousands for following the standard practice.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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'.
"Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer."
Whoever "Many" is, they seem to always be interviewed by Ars and FoxNews.
The nightlies of Microsoft Bob basically killed all positive hype for the program. I don't want to see Microsoft Bob in nighties! It was bad enough seeing Bill Gates wiggling his ass for the cameras.
Oh, nightlies ...
I'll have to ask Clippy for linux and get back to you on that ...
Firefox, Opera, Safari - sure, these guys are in active development, frequently introducing new or improved functionality to their products. Ditto for most FOSS products.
MicroSoft, OTOH, uses a proprietary closed-source model of software as the basis for their business practices. Within that model, development on any product takes place when there's a fiscal incentive to do so; otherwise, existing (revenue-generating) products are left alone to do what they do best - generate revenue.
Is there a good business-case reason for MicroSoft to invest in continuous, nightly development of a product which is not sold directly but rather included in the purchase of another product (MS-Windows)? Is Insecure Exploder so vital a part of their OS that it will represent a deal-breaker for the huge number of enterprises which have implemented and continue to implement MicroSoft technologies?
Do you really want to be a tech support department dealing with the possibility of your users running unknown versions of Internet Explorer with the potential to be a different version every single day?
As a key product in a proprietary OS, why would you want to run nightly builds of IE? With Firefox my browser may be unstable, but at least the rest of my system stays stable, but with IE a lot of Windows components use Trident and that isn't going to be a good thing. Plus, with Firefox if you file a bug they appreciate that and generally fix it right away, even security vulnerabilities aren't promptly fixed on IE, let alone user suggestions....
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They are built at night too, and you get more or less the same security feeling.
Why is the finger always at Microsoft? I vote we embargo the use of the word Microsoft on Slashdot, say, for a month. Usually any Microsoft related post is biased and ill-spirited - getting very old. There are countless software vendors that do not release nightly builds. As much as I adore Slashdot, all the MS haters on here often make me feel as if I'm associating myself with a 'new low' of computer users (sometimes). Kinda like finding yourself in the company of a bunch of racists. It's very fashionable on \. to hate Microsoft. Don't like their stuff?...simply use something else and STFU. I do agree with the article's opinion of saying the update process Microsoft uses is broken - I think Microsoft can do better.
The Microsoft build labs has been described in many books but one thing that stood out to me was the alleged fact that most builds, like Windows, take well over 24 hours to finish. 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.
Kriston
I am not a fan of Internet Explorer at all - however I know people who are, and I can't imagine this mattering to them in the least.
Heck, I can't imagine the vast majority of Firefox or Safari/Chrome users caring about those available snapshots; and I say that as someone who has used nightly builds for both those products fairly frequently!
This just seems silly on the face of it. "Microsoft doesn't follow Firefox's development path", complains a Firefox fan.
#DeleteChrome
Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer
For some reason, that never crossed my mind. I always assumed that it just wasn't their release model.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
Can bees think? A new study indicates that no, they cannot.
Filed under "weirdest story ever to appear on /."
Next week we can discuss the outrage that stems from Microsoft's refusal to offer free back massages on the New York subway.
They probably can't do it easily - IE is so tied to the internal of Windows that installing a nightly IE you are touching too many internals that could break easily. And it replaces your current IE install. That's why I never test IE beta/RC releases.
Now we can see how stupid it was to tie IE so strongly to the rest of the system. If Windows was a reasonably designed piece of software, Microsoft could several versions of IE at the same time. You could try a nigthly IE9 build without deleting the stable version.
It' not like IE is open for people to download the nightly builds. I'm sure that Microsoft and its employees compile IE many times even though it might not be on the "nightly build" schedule in the most official sense.
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!
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but development of IE7 and IE8 have not been tied to a specific OS at all. IE7 was released before Vista and installs on XP, and IE8 well before Win 7 and that installs on Vista and XP. Microsoft has said that IE9 will be released in 2010, while Windows 8 is set for 2012. IE and Office are both on different development timetables than Windows -- although Office is almost always released 6 to 8 months after a desktop Windows release. Sure, they're linked in some senses because each product has a target platform, but otherwise there is no specific tie-in.
Microsoft's fiscal incentive is to maintain market dominance and some semblance of standards compliance. If they lose too much market share, developers may not create websites to handle IE quirks any longer. Then IE will falter, and MS will not be able to develop web apps only for IE, which is part of their strategy to lock-in users to Windows.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
A long release schedule ensures that Microsoft has to find and squash every bug themselves to make a single presentable product that will have a better reputation than your average nightly build. It ensures developers see only a stable standard and worry that this year's version will have different quirks than last year's version and that they won't find out until it is too late to do anything except hack workarounds for the browser bugs into their site. What harm would nightly releases cause Microsoft [elided] that the standard alpha/beta/release schedule does not?
FTFY.
The whole point of nightly builds is so that the developer community can check early and often to see how browser changes will affect them. By the time a public beta comes out, the software is baked and only critical bugs are likely to get fixed. Browser vendors have limited testing resources and cannot practically test every website. Nightly builds allow developers to test their sites, spot places where a browser deviates from W3C-compliant behavior, and file bugs early enough that they actually stand some chance of being fixed instead of having to hack around the browser's bugs for an entire release cycle (and often for years after that since many people don't bother to upgrade their browsers). And when a browser is rolling out new features like HTML5 and CSS3 bits, nightly builds provide invaluable feedback from real-world testers trying to integrate the functionality into their own projects. Sometimes they find bugs, but quite often they find problems with the specification itself that need to be addressed across all browsers. That's something that doesn't work nearly as well without the rapid feedback of a nightly build program. Significant flaws in the specification will almost certainly never get fixed at all if the browser that first introduces those features doesn't bother to show them to web developers until the features are mostly baked.
Basically, web browsers are just a giant public API, and need to be handled in the same way as any other API review. When you create a new API, you get an initial review, then you get other folks to dogfood the API within your company, then you seed it to developers really early and often so that they can test and experiment with the API more broadly, then a couple years later, you publish the final API and make it publicly available. Nightly builds are the seed phase, just with broader distribution because the developer base (web developers) and the installed software base (web sites) are both at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger, and more frequent because the rate of developer-critical changes in a browser tends to be much more rapid than the rate of change in any single OS-level API.
Also, nightly builds keep you honest. They reduce the risk of multi-month delays in getting out a usable release by forcing developers to keep preliminary code cleanly compartmentalized so that it can be easily disabled. This ensures that you don't have long periods of time in which the nightly builds don't build, don't function usably, etc., thus shortening your bake cycles considerably.
So there are a lot of ways that nightly builds would be beneficial, not just for web developers, but for Microsoft as well.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Moreover I tried to sign up for the IE bug feedback system.
1. It required me to get a live account. I did.
2. It required me to "register" with my live account. It didn't work with Webkit so I fired up Firefox, then I did.
3. It required email confirmation of my live account. I confirmed it.
4. It asked me to register to be able to vote on issues (GOTO 2)
No wonder the feedback is minimal and useless (as in not real bug reporting). There's probably no one who cares on the other end anyway
I refer to this article.
I would assume that the Microsoft Excel team did it this way as well, since Joel mentions it in his article. But they also wrote their own compiler because everyone else's was crap, and still managed to ship on time.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Nightly builds, if they were released every time:
Bun
Bun
Bun
Bun
Meat
Meat
Bun + Meat
Bun + Meat
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour
GHERKIN!
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt++
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt+++++
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + Tomato
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + That Other Stuff
Bun + Meat + Meaty Flavour + Gherkin + Salt + That Other Slightly Better Stuff
Quarter Pounder With Cheese
As an IT Manager for one of the 100 biggest companies in the world, I couldn't give a flying f*ck about the inbetween. All I want to know is what we're getting. And if it breaks a part of our fundamental application stack, we'll complain or won't use it. If I want something in the release, I'll lobby for it. If you want to be part of the IE development cycle, sign an agreement with MS to be a part of it, then you'll get the alphas and beta.
Total non-story.
--- Band: Joey Ultra
Microsoft releases Alfas and Betas to many different communities of testers
And those releases have multiple cycles and run a long time so there is ample opportunity for developers of dependent s/w and web pages to test against the coming release and provide feedback to Microsoft. How many builds of W95 did I load...including one from floppies that took 20+ hours of feeding floppies before the first boot.
I wonder if Microsoft might just have as many in-house testers using the daily builds of IE as there are total testers for FF, Opera, Safari etc al. They are after all, one humongously huge company. And not everyone grabs the nightly build of the latest OS or browser even from developers who provide it.
In my old place of employment, we had nightly builds and the developers actually were developing on the OS for which they had submitted updates the day before. So if there was a major bug, they felt/found it first. But the release cycle was more like yearly because that is the way the customers wanted it. They were betting important things on the stability of the s/w. They certainly didn't want anything but a long release cycle in which they were heavily involved. It wasn't released until major customers signed off that it didn't break their apps. Daily builds would have distracted them from their mission...luring them into daily regression testing and taking resources from supporting their existing app release and developing for the next release.
Different goals for corporations/agencies. And so different development, customer exposure for comment and release cycles are appropriate.
Testing is a job. Asking the public to do the internal development testing doesn't work if you want to earn a living selling software (or the software ecosystem). I haven't seem many nightly builds of the Mac OS, or lots of other for sale software.
Its irresponsible as a site designer who designs sites viewable for for the masses to design sites that that make use of bleeding edge technologies in browser development. Unless your target audience is the 2% that downloads the new version of IE the same month it comes out, then what does it matter? Yes, its arguable that Microsoft has and can break even "safe" code but not so much that it generally will make a site unusable (again assuming the designer is not a complete fool).
Internet Explorer 8 was final released March 19, 2009. Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit was released with the beta March 5, 2008. So, do you really need MORE than a year to get your site together?
coolforsale issues problems did not deliver ordered a product failed to send duplicated charge credit card stolen cheat spam coolforsale complaint
(fair is fair - we don't want your spam, you don't want to be linked with negative keywords, so go away or I shall taunt you an n+1 time)
I just assumed this was just an extension of Otto von Bismarck's famous quote: "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made."
Haven't been around much, I take it?
Developing apps to use in the wild means that the end-users will find all sorts of ways to do the wrong thing. These are not things you can always test for before a release (beta, rc, whatever), unless you do double-blind usability using people who've never used your software.
I've come to expect that when I release a new version of whatever or add/change a feature, I will get immediate feedback from the field because someone will add a new URL to a list that passes my validation as a valid address but duplicates an existing URL, (e.g., example.com vs. example.com/ ), causing all amounts of havoc.
Humans are incredible at learning the most farked up procedures by rote. Until they do, however, they are like a blind beggar in an abandoned mine -- always taking the wrong turn and falling down a shaft.
Yeah, right.