Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy

eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"

90%?? Maybe in the 90's...

[Foofoobar]

um... hate to tell you this but they haven't been 90% for a LONG time. In fact alot of studies are showing Firefox with 20-35% marketshare, Opera with 5-8%, Safari with 3-5%. Even if you take those lowest figures, the combination of all versions of IE would only have approx. 72% market share... 52% at worse.

Re:In a perfect world

[bunratty]

First, the OP is referring to XHTML, where an error message on malformed XML is required. Second, if IE gave an error for a web page, web developers would surely fix it before the users had a chance to complain much. Fixing legitimate XML errors would be easier than the contortions web developers already go through just to make pages look good in the current version of IE.

Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough

[baadger]

My prediction is that IE 8 will have exactly the same rendering capabilities, but it will have some sort of annoying new UI, plus maybe a few extremely annoying security features that everyone will turn off immediately.

This is a perfect description of IE 7. There were only *bug fixes* to the rendering capabilities of IE6.

Re: More like 80%

[bunratty]

IE usage is closer to 80% [upsdell.com], but it is still dropping [wikipedia.org]. Give it a few more years, and it'll be down to 70%.

Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself

[miffo.swe]

"It's an amazing world we live in where roughly a year after Vista was released it has 90 million users"

No it has not in any way, shape or form 90 million users. Microsoft has sold 90 million Windows Vista/XP/NT/2000 licenses in total. The funny thing is, any windows license sold by Microsoft since Vista was released is counted as a Windows Vista license.

If you have a fortune 500 company and buy a million licenses to deploy XP they will count as Windows Vista license no matter how you buy them. Then we have all the home users that come to me with their new computer with Vista installed wanting me to install XP and delete Vista from their computers.

Vista is a lame duck considering it was 6 years since XP and there is a pent up want for a new OS. Six years of anticipation and vaporware turned into only minor improvement and in many cases regression.

Re:Why can't I find anything on IE from Google?

[The boojum]

It is offtopic, but I'll answer anyway.

Normally, Google's form uses q as the field for the search term, not searchQ. And btnI is the name of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The link actually has nothing to do with IE 8. It's really just equivalent to an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for contactlognet, for which Google immediately shoots back a redirect to that site. That site in turn sends you yet another redirect.

Re:In a perfect world

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll assume you accidentlay got that backwards. To be as bad as you claim, and still #1 by a huge margin is obviously text book market success.

"Market failure" means "the market has failed", not "Microsoft has failed in the marketplace". In a hypothetical perfect free market, the product that was #1 would be the product that delivered the optimum combination of quality and price. Windows + Internet Explorer is the lowest-quality solution and the most expensive solution, so (the argument goes) clearly the real-world market has somehow failed to deliver its theoretical promise.

Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough

[sh33333p]

Just for clarification, Opera was the first browser that featured tabs. I was using that back when it was still supported with an ad pane built-in, and blocking those ads with Outpost Pro or Zonealarm. I use Firefox now because of NoScript. There are many other great extensions, but nothing as important IMHO.

Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough

[bunratty]

Just to clarify your clarification, there was at least one browser that had tabs before Opera [wikipedia.org].

Re:In a perfect world

[BenoitRen]

HTML is presentational.

Absolute bullshit. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It describes its contents. It describes the semantics. Being semantic is its very nature.