OpenIDYou mean there IS an IE team?
Robert Scoble went to lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team—yes, they still exist, despite having released nothing but security patches for over two years.
Robert says that the team is looking to work with community members to improve Internet Explorer.
If this means dialogue, or even some feedback on what they’re up to, this is a very good thing. Less promising is Robert’s follow-up comment on the topic of improved CSS and PNG support (by far the most requested developer feature):
Another thing that the commenters generally aren’t thinking of is “how to get adoption.” I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn’t be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don’t care about those issues and won’t download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.
Believe us, we know. That’s why we want these issues to be fixed as soon as possible—so we can deploy sites that take advantages of these standards before the oil runs out and human civilisation disintegrates in to a mass of warring tribes more interested in canibalism than visually appealing web sites.
consumers (and companies) [..] won't download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues
Don't make me laugh.
Microsoft marketing "spin doctors" know absolutely how to create the need of change. Consumers always buy Win95-98-ME-XP because it's the latest version, even if it brings them nothing new. I'm sure they can apply their method to insinuate into usual consumer's mind "you need last update, you need to download the latest version, latest is cool, latest is happiness, downloading makes you a better man..."
On an other hand, calling CSS and PNG support "one or two issues" is quite irrelevant. Conforming to the web standards is in my opinion one of the top priority of browser engineering, don't you think?
Bruno Bord - 15th January 2004 14:06 - #
"... a mass of warring tribes more interested in canibalism than visually appealing web sites" -- LOL
And dang, that's a good chunk of comment spam ya got there. Someone isn't reading about your redirection script. :)
Xian - 15th January 2004 16:59 - #
Right, like there aren't ever any patches or bug fixes or service packs or critical updates released for Windows that they could insert the patches in for CSS/PNG.
There's just no financial incentive for them to do it (from MS' point of view).
TG - 15th January 2004 17:00 - #
Don't forget that fixing "one or two issues" will put IE on the same rendering level as its concurent, so what ? Well, everybody could then realize the obsolecence in term of features of IE compared to Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, ...
The "... a mass of warring tribes ..." comment is gorgeous ^__^
P01 - 15th January 2004 19:58 - #
Note that IE is still the far more the best browser out there, even though they didn't update it very often. Only Firebird just recently came to the levels of IE and surpassed it in many areas. However, I see so many issues that is not well supported in Mozilla. For web design and simple stuff, Firebird is better, but not too much better. Also so far other browsers like Safari and Opera didn't catch up with IE at all. Not the Mac IE of course.
I don't like the fact that Microsoft doesn't update its browser and fixes these important issues, but I don't have the urge to rant about it and bash Microsoft mindlessly. I would like to think that there is a reasonable explanation to it, which I don't know. But people should definitely pressure Microsoft to release a new version as soon as possible, however this is not going to be done by bunch of people who like to do nothing but Microsoft bashing. We need real businessmen and real world workers to get Microsoft to do what we want them to do. Bashing Microsoft makes your opinions less valuable I think, cause you need to differentiate yourself from Slashdot at one point.
Sergio - 29th January 2004 12:45 - #
Someone - 30th January 2004 05:52 - #
Peter - 30th March 2004 23:36 - #