More IE Comments from Dave Massy
by Al
For those following the request that IE begin to actually speak in public again about what is being done for upcoming IE development (IE8), Dave Massy continues to speak as well on his blog on this. It is worth reading what he has to say:
I do agree though that the IE team needs to start talking to the developer community on a much more consistent basis. After the release of IE7 all online chats stopped. The online chats had been taking place every month since well before IE7 was under development. After the release of IE7 the bug reporting system was withdrawn. There have been vague promises that it was only temporary but it has now been almost a year and no replacement is in sight.
The IE team does not have to give exact details of IE8 but their complete silence shows a complete lack of respect for the developer community.
Dave also left the IE team and Microsoft after IE7 shipped so he brings both a longterm insider view and one from someone who no longer has a vested interested, just a personal one, in where things are going. Since he is also from a different discipline (not being QA), his perspective on things is also likely to be different there as well.
Updated: For those that ask why this we are even discussing IE at all, I will point out that, like it or not, Microsoft Windows still controls th VAST majority of operating system installations on a personal computer. I’ve seen numbers that show more Windows Vista users than Mac OS X users. Since IE7 is standard on Vista and likely in place for XP (unless they have IE6 SP2), what Microsoft does in the browsing space has an impact on anyone who makes a living working on the web. For that reason, getting the IE team to continue to have open communication and to move towards more standards support is very important.
Comments
Who cares about IE? It’s our web, and they don’t play the social game. They don’t even pretend to be interested in what real people want – fuck them :-) those days are over.
Anyone with 0.5 of a brain loves the fire fox.
Hey Al, hey Monk,
IE is still an important thing in a corporate scene, especially one that uses Office and needs one (1) browser for their hackers to hack upon. IMO, 7 wasn’t so great in that context, because things that worked fine before no longer worked, and most of what was added was either moving things around to seem different, or irrelevant. Anyone with 0.5 of a brain will have FF on their work machine, but IE is still going to be what integrates with work stuff. If Corporate is where IE has it’s comparative advantage, then gosh, make sure it goes easy on the Corp when the Corp upgrades. Stuff that takes longer or imposes a lot of bizarre “security” gotchas does not make live better for corporate IS people, and those who really know what they are doing will always prefer open source anyway.