Chris Wilson Speaks and the IEBlog Goes Dark
by Al
I am certain that some Mozilla people may get tired of my mentioning Internet Explorer and their lack of communication but I do see a real issue here for the browser landscape as a whole.
It was noted that Chris Wilson, the platform architect for IE (and who is co-chair of the HTML Working Group at the W3C) spoke at Web Directions South 2007 just the other day.
While there, Kevin Yank interviewed Chris. This interview is available online as an mp3 and I’ve enclosed a link to it here. It is worth listening to in order to both understand IE’s direction as well as Chris’ thoughts on IE’s issues. The focus on backwards compatibility in IE comes up a bit.
In the course of the conversation, Chris is asked about the IE team’s complete silence on IE8 and the future. There he basically blames the lack of communication on the need for the IE team to have complete confidence that what they say they will do will actually be done. Without that confidence, he seems to think that it is better to say nothing.
On that note, I will point out that the last blog post on the IEBlog is old enough now that comments on it have been turned off (as happens automatically). This means that there is now no mechanism, not even comments on the blog, for people to communicate their thoughts to the IE team. I find this a bit disappointing. I also find it very surprising that a non-Microsoft person can interview Chris at a conference and get him on the record on so many things but the official blog not only cannot communicate the same things, they don’t even mention the public post by Chris.
I kind of wonder who is running their blog these days. It used to be that there was one person charged, as part of their job, of working with members of the IE team to get a regular set of posts on the blog from all over the team. This guaranteed that posts happened on a regular basis and that the blog never went dark. It also helped focus what the blog was doing by making at least one individual personally responsible for it. I get the sense that no one is at the helm anymore and that the blog is being forgotten by the IE team.
I keep hoping something said here or by others will spark a response, even an e-mail, from the IE team. So far, nothing.
Comments
Microsoft is a joke. Clearly the IE must be hamstrung again. They’ve announced zilch about IE8 because they’ve been put on hold again for another 6 years.
Microsoft, you’re a disgrace. If you are going to be a monopoly, why the flip can’t you be a benevolent one like Google?
For once, just ONCE, do something for the benefit of someone other than yourselves, for no return. Improve the lives of those who are now (in many cases forced) to use your browser for so many tasks these days.
Maybe this sort of altruism might help your karma and prevent the next version of Windows from being a complete disaster like Vista has been.
I appreciate seeing your IE-related posts in the planet.mozilla.org stream; it gives me a glimpse into parts of the competitive landscape that I wouldn’t otherwise keep up with.
Wow, not sure why some commenters waste their time.
Al, please don’t personalize this as “I think”. That’s the reason why we don’t preannounce. -C
I understand why IE doesn’t preannounce. I was there for IE7 after all (most of it). That being said, perhaps you can go down the hall and find out when people plan on actually doing something with the IEBlog again? :-)
Oh, and now I see a nice backpat post on an IE7 re-release.
Still no response for the repeated questions about what the IE team has been doing this last year.
Who is running the blog, Chris? The last post read like a press release.
patience is a virtue…
the team’s behavior can be logically deduced:
1) they wouldn’t be doing nothing because of the ongoing browser wars
2) you’d rather they be busy at work than busy managing blogs, right? :-)
3) no news is good news
4) obviously, the team has already planned for post IE-7 way before they started working on it. Any feedback they get now will only serve as noise
I’d like to believe that but that is a load of crap. You forget, I worked on IE6SP2 and IE7. I know almost all of the people on the team except for newcomers.
The whole reason that the IEBlog was created (and I ran it for a year and a half so I should know) was to open communication up with the IE team. It had a huge effect on public perception of the IE team and on the interaction that the team was having with its community, especially web developers. It wasn’t perfect but people were VERY happy that there was finally a line of open communication where they could talk to members of the team and they would see responses.
No news is not good news, as you say. No news could very easily mean that the team has spent most of the last year working on Vista service pack 1 and security issues and very little working on IE8 or otherwise improving IE7. The re-release of IE7 the other day certainly does nothing to dispel that impression.
As to how much they planned for post-IE7, I can tell you it was very much heads in the clouds thinking with very little concrete when I left IE in May, 2006. There were no details at that time, just a general tendency of thought in areas that IE8 would focus on.
Any feedback now (if they gave the web something to give feedback on) would be useful. It is only noise when the only chance people have to give feedback are in Beta periods when all of the features are locked and very little to change. The earlier feedback is given, the better off it will be for the community because they might have a chance to have some effect on IE8′s development.
As to your first point, you could have said much the same after IE6 came out and they eviscerated the IE team, sending parts of it all over Microsoft.
So, you’re pretty much wrong on all accounts. Thanks for the feedback though.