Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy 381
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.'"
In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
For bonus points, do all this faster and with less memory than Internet Explorer 7 takes.
This is a fairly modest list but if they fixed all of that, Internet Explorer would be a joy to develop against. Hell, I might even consider replacing Firefox as my default browser on Windows. However, as much as we can collectively dream, you know they'll rejig the interface slightly, crank up the version number by one and call it a day.
Microsoft is a text-book example of a market failure. Nearly every other browser has Internet Explorer boxed off in terms of functionality, security and speed. The only reason it is the world's number one browser is because it comes pre-installed with WIndows.
As a program Internet Explorer is simply trash. I simply hate it. Actually I fucking despise it. It is a big ball of shit [codinghorror.com]. It's the ugly building in the middle of a city that everyone wants torn down but it just sits there damaging the community's spirit.
I once joked with a colleague that Internet Explorer has probably wiped billions off pounds off the world economy. I laughed, paused for a moment, and realised it's probably completely true. What could the world have done with all those countless hours hacking their CSS to support the trash that is Internet Explorer?
Doesn't it make you depressed?
Simon
Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't care? (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly seems that way.
You only need to look at the mess they made of the GUI in ie7 to understand just how far off course the internet explorer team have sailed.
It's a damn pain to develop for.
Then again, so was ie6 - hmm, and ie5 and yeah, even ie4
The problem is, you can't ignore 90% market share - catch 22.
And so it begins... (Score:5, Insightful)
As Bill begins to leave the company, the heralded Microsoft development teams start to act like your normal "joe IT" shop... First Vista... now IE...
Your powers are weak, old man...
Standard compliancy is most important for next IE (Score:5, Insightful)
This is OK for our internal users, but impossible for any external site because of the installed base of legacy CRAP.
Microsoft need to fix:
- CSS support
- DOM support in their javascript implementation
- XHTML support
- SVG rendering
Only then will we ever look at IE again.
We also need to be clear on the patent situation surrounding technologies such as Silverlight on platforms other than Windows, before we invest any time and effort in such technologies. We don't want to end up supporting a technology that Microsoft plan on attacking on non-windows platforms.
Microsoft are making a fool of themselves with IE, and severely damaging their reputation with developers. I hope they will offer an upgrade of internet explorer for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista when they have finally sorted out their shoddy rendering library. Internet Explorer 7 was a poor attempt at improving what remains the worst web browser that is still considered current (at least by some).
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you've done serious web development, you have no idea how frustrating it is to target IE. Especially when you have to explain to your client why it took a day longer than you estimated because of IE.
Expectations, Transparency, Openness (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are many possible degrees of transparency. You don't have to take the Mozilla approach where every little change is visible to the public. Over the past year or two, Opera has managed to do a good job of keeping people aware that new stuff is coming down the pike without actually giving away the goods before their announcements.
Sure, sometimes it means that reaction is a bit underwhelmed when people build up some huge expectation over a hinted-at feature, and it turns out to be something much more mundane (Opera Link, for example -- incredibly useful, but in its current form not revolutionary). But anyone following Opera developers' blogs can tell that yes, they're working on the next version, and could pick up some vague clues as to some of the planned features and capabilities.
With IE8, no one without an NDA knew whether Microsoft had spent a year on design, a year on coding, or just took a year off. The IE8 blog asked us not to take silence for inaction, but what else should we have assumed?
Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Different managers are required for different stages of a corporation's existence. Sure, they made the corporation what it is today, but they also mismanaged it into a crippled, bloated, low-growth, living entirely off of prior achievements, slug. It's an axiom that after a certain point, the best thing the founders of a corporation can do for their creation is leave, and I don't think Microsoft has proven to be an exception. Microsoft should have re-invented itself at some point during the 95/NT4 era, and instead calcified into the Microsoft of today. Perhaps the DOJ inquisition had a lot to do with that, but a corporation is forced to live under the regime it finds itself subject to.
Re:Maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
I bet it's really hard to manage a project when you post an incidental blog entry about an icon change and you get 300 puerile comments about how you should be working on OMG CSS OMG STANDARDS when the roadmap for the product and what it would support based on time constraints and backwards compat requirments was laid out at the beginning of the project quite openly.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd be no secret about what I'd be doing if I was running the Internet Explorer 8 team. Here's a few things I'd do:
6. Look for a new job because they fired me.
MS doesn't want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can't compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE's modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties.
Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:2, Insightful)
Their recent quarterly results show that Vista sales are disappointing.
Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows Vista's sales numbers to people with computers that can run it but already run XP are low, and that's what's being discussed.
Re:Too mundane, not flashy and pointless enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
I read almost all the comments from both blog entries. Aside from a few slashdotty tin-foil-hat EVIL M$ posts, I felt most were fairly well thought out. I don't think anybody was dissing the developers or managers, but more of "hey guys! we are all feeling neglected here" kind of deal.
How about this. Are the comments you read on those two posts of the same nature as, say, those from the infamous "Digg Rebellion"?
Re:Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've done *serious* web development then you consider yourself a *professional*. And as a professional, you no longer have the luxury afforded to the "my CSS is art" drama-queens.
As a professional, you should be more concerned with the viability of your design to meet your clients goals: most often to sell something, support something already sold, or strengthen the brand they use to sell things. Which means you should be focusing on nothing more than making your design accessible to the widest swath of viewers.
You should be TARGETING IE from the beginning. No, it's not sexy or trendy. And Yes, i'm writing this from Firefox, so I feel your pain. But when you develop for, FF/Opera/Safari and you realize it looks like crap in IE, you have to go to a client and say "The design doesn't work for 70%+ of the web population. I need time to fix it" Of course, they are not going to be happy. The obvious question is "You just NOW thought about that?" Now, if you do your job, you'd develop on IE first, and then go to the client and say "With another day, I can make this design work for the <30% of users on FF/Opera/Safari. Would you like me to do that?"
This really isn't debatable. Is IE the best browser? Not in my opinion. Does that matter one bit when you're being paid $50-100/hr to do web development? Not for a second...
Developer overload (Score:4, Insightful)
When that dialog does not occur usually it is because the product team are overloaded in terms of the features they have to implement in the time frame that they've been allocated. Sometimes you just don't have time to engage with external entities to the degree that you'd like, or at all. On a product as significant as IE has proven to be in influencing defacto standards, that is quite dangerous.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
My point was really, there needs to be some innovation. HTML & CSS have grown stagnant and are not keeping up with what modern web applications are asking it to do. W3C is an ineffective standards body and is incapable of delivering something to meet these new demands. The only way I can see innovation now is if browser makers roll their own. Hell, even firefox has those -x-rounded-corner things. Gee. Maybe people want rounded corners huh? Why isn't this getting added to a formal standard?
The important thing though is to make sure you meet all the baseline standards first before adding cool crap on top. IE doesn't meet the baseline yet, so they aren't in a place to do cool new stuff.
At least, this is my opinion.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they're fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world's web sites didn't work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft's biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn't the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn't spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
We've been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I'm integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can't blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I'll go out on a limb and say that's not a bad thing.
Our PCs would be a lot safer, too. Call that a bonus.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:2, Insightful)
How about a 2 column layout with a fixed column and a background that extends the page? Is that useless or obscure? Can I do that today using CSS without resorting to some kind of image based hack or is what I'm asking also something I should feel guilty about? Should I just make a black and white page that is all times new roman (er, wait, no fonts allowed, right?).
Fuck this. I'm just going to make web pages that are plain text.
(grin)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:2, Insightful)
As a web developer myself, the solution is never so simple as to say "screw IE." The customer you are building the site for wants a page that works in all browsers. Since IE is widely used (*gag*), unfortunately, we have to obey our customers. And if I don't do it, my competition will, and I've lost a customer. Granted, I don't want those customers, but 99% of them are like that, so I don't really have a choice in the matter. There's no way we can all unite together in some kind of revolt -- some developers may not even want to unite because it's extra business for them!
The damage has already been done. How would you propose we stop supporting IE's shitty rendering engine without angering our customers?? Don't get me wrong, I am also tired of working around IE's retardedness, but I think that simply stopping support for IE is not a feasible option at this point in time. Repairing the damage is going to take time -- lucky for us, other, better browsers are gaining a lot of traction, end-users are becoming (slightly) more educated, and with each day we get closer to being able to develop without headaches. But until that day, we just have our hopes, blood, sweat, and tears...
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:2, Insightful)
You hit the nail right on the head. I'd venture that a large segment of those who are whining about Microsoft can't afford the Microsoft tools. They want similar functionality but they want it for free. I make the same argument that you made all of the time. The tools and examples to make things work the "Microsoft way" are out there in MSDN. People don't want to have to pay for access to MSDN. So instead they whine and bitch and moan about MS not being standard compliant.
To me it just seems like a foolish way to spend a life time. If you want to write an app that only works in Firefox then go ahead and bundle Firefox with your application. If you want to write an app that will "just work" with 90% of the computers in the world, then write to Microsoft's messed up standard and be done with it. At the end of the day it's all code. It's just making a computer perform a stupid task or three. Who cares if the code isn't "compliant". Does it get the job done?
Re:There has been conversation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is a business. Keeping IE non-compliant with standards makes them money. If they complied with standards then all the Web pages and applications would soon do the same, which means there would be nothing stopping companies with Web apps from migrating to something cheaper than Windows and Office. MS's strategy is called "tying" and is illegal for companies with monopoly influence in a market, but MS still makes more money breaking the law and paying off politicians than it does complying with the law, so we're screwed. IE will never be compliant with the specs unless MS loses their monopoly influence.
Isn't This Part Of A Strategy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if they haven't committed on certain features or levels of compliancy, this surely does not mean complete silence. Disappointment about delivery of features can be expected, but usually it's tempered with some amount of understanding in the face of transparency and intentions.
So to me, the silence is a strategy. The choices are:
- they're not planning on implementing the standards that people expect (CSS, DOM, SVG, XHTML) so they want to avoid fact-based criticism for as long as possible. The longer they wait, the more people may fall in love with Silverlight?
- they're planning on implementing standards and they want to surprise the hell out of the developers (to have them come rushing and gushing back to the fold).
Ok, so I'm foolishly hoping it's the latter strategy (I've heard they do have a new layout engine they're working on). But the longer they wait, the more people will expect.
It must be fairly obvious to them by now that most developers realize just how far behind standards compliancy IE is. Seriously, they are the _ONLY_ major browser out there with: its own DOM, its own event handling, its own vector graphics (VML/Silverlight) and woefully behind CSS implementation. EVERY other browser gives a shot at supporting SVG - where are they with that? They haven't even TOUCHED the spec yet!
Re:In a perfect world (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've never understood" (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is this completely missing the point (people want 3 column layout, and they HAVE to implement them anyway with tedious gesticulations), but you're posting on a site with a 3 column layout, for fuck's sake!
Navigation on the right, content and comments in the middle, links and tools on the right. No, that's not a newspaper layout (which have more than 3 columns, in case you've never opened one!), and it makes at least some fucking sense.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't This Part Of A Strategy? (Score:3, Insightful)
IE is one of many, many projects that go one there and I doubt he keeps a detailed day to day list of what's going on.
This is no different then any other company. Hell, I would be surprised if it was even interesting to him any more.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In a perfect world (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the difference between various browsers' error-recovery algorithms is a fairly big part of the problem... but only in the sense that the browsers are being used by the developers for debugging. If there were some sort of "developer mode" which would provide extremely useful debugging tools, but only on well-formed code (and making well-formedness the requirement instead of actual validation keeps it open to future versions of HTML/CSS), it might accomplish the same thing without causing problems for end users visiting existing websites.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:2, Insightful)
People know what text editors and text processors are. They have been there since the dawn of computing, and there never was something special about them.
But they don't know what web browsers are. When they became popular with the layman, it was Internet Exploder who was leading the market. It also had a generic name.
Moreover, it's just a viewer. They don't have to actually work with what it views, unlike text editors.
It's obvious why bundling it with Windows made it the most popular web browser.
Yeah, IE7 works pretty well until you have to actually make a website that displays correctly for all web browsers. I've banged my head for days on a simple problem that occurred only in IE7. When it comes to web standards, Firefox is much, MUCH better.
Did you say the same when you were still using IE6? That's an even bigger pile of shit. More bugs, no PNG transparancy, no tabs, etc.
Re:In a perfect world (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't really complain about this enough. You drop a semicolon or parenthesis in C or Java, your compiler lets you know about it, and doesn't proceed until you feed it something that makes sense. Same generally applies for scripting languages. Why browser writers in the early days of the web decided otherwise boggles the mind, and we're still paying for that decision today. You can't just cut out "quirks mode" et al. without breaking large swaths of the web.
I see the W3C's specification of well-formedness on XHTML as the way forward, the light at the end of the tunnel. Since it only applies to the fairly recent XHTML, there's really no need to sweat about the effects on legacy documents. If someone's got noncompliant XHTML floating around and doesn't care to fix it, nuts to them. On the subject of uncooperative ad servers, if you as a developer can't get them to serve you compliant XHTML, just drop them. It's not as if there's really a shortage of advertising services out there. This won't have to go on very long before every company will fall into line.
Of course this all only applies if well-formedness is actually enforced by all browsers, and only if XHTML actually catches on. Similar strictness on the part of HTML 5, if it ever arrives and becomes dominant, could perform the same function too.