Chris Wilson Leaves IE team (but not MSFT)
by Al
My friend, Chris Wilson, posted on his blog today that he is leaving the IE team in order to focus on the “open web platform.” He’ll be doing this from the Developer Division at Microsoft and in his role as the chair of the HTML Working Group at the W3C (according to Chris):
Luckily, I found a great team to work on – I’ll be working in the Developer Division (a first for me), on the team that works on JavaScript but also has a broader charter to help make the open web platform great.
What does this mean? From the outside, some things will certainly change – I’m no longer an appropriate person, for example, to give talks on specifically about IE – but a lot of things won’t. I still expect to attend and participate in a fair number of web conferences, and still plan to speak at a number of them – but not just about IE. I still intend to continue as HTML WG chair, at least for the time being – in fact, as part of focusing more holistically on the web platform as a whole (and defocusing on IE product delivery), I expect I’ll start participating more in a couple of other groups.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I like Chris a lot. He’s a good guy and I’ve known him for about 13 years. Part of me wishes that he’d leave Microsoft but contribute to the open web somewhere else, unencumbered by Microsoft’s issues or agenda and visibly separate from IE and its history. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Comments
It’s been argued that MS will need to switch rendering engines at some point. Perhaps this is their start to gain influence in a forked version of WebKit or Geko…
Chris Wilson’s “participation” in the HTML5 working group is laughable at best according to Ian Hickson (though Ian did say Microsoft and not Wilson, specifically). They don’t return email requests for comments, don’t show up for meetings, etc. Unless this gives Wilson more time to participate, he should drop his co-chair position (he is not NOT the chair alone) and give it to someone who will warm the seat more often.
Rob, I could repeat the comments people have made about Ian as well but I won’t. Let’s just say that everyone has a point of view. Since I’m not in the WG, I wouldn’t be speaking from first hand experience so I’m not going to go there.
JK, IE is never going to use Webkit or another engine, in my opinion. It suffers from the NIMBY problem. It’s the same reason (outside of specific technical reasons) why Firefox isn’t going to use it. Everyone thinks that their own platform is the best, especially after developing on it for years and years.
I surely hope MSFT doesn’t think it’s platform is the best (though that might explain some of their actions, politically).
Wilfried, of course they do. If they didn’t, they’d find another platform.
And therein lies the problem.