Microsoft's Lack of Nightly Builds For IE 154
Ricky writes "Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer — or at least something more frequent than months-to-years. Ars talks with Microsoft's general manager for IE, who says the IE9 development cycle will look much the same as previous versions. Not a great idea."
Obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer
Um, because they never have and never will?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody else uses Trident (IE's rendering engine), and if Trident breaks, a lot of other stuff in Windows breaks. They don't want to release development versions of their browser, because their corporate customers don't want users breaking things.
Frankly, I'm wondering what benefit nightlies would have for MS, who does pretty much all of their testing in-house.
Normal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Confused about article, any developers here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, the article seems to take some things for granted...
the reality is that every other browser has a more regular release cycle than IE does, and that keeps them relevant.
I guess Opera's release and development cycle(s) is why it is so popular!
The result is a strong perception that IE is lagging behind, no matter how great the major release versions are.
The perception that IE is lagging behind has nothing to do with a bad development cycle, it's more tied to ... bad development and a not-very-good product.
and the browser's updates are pushed through Windows Update. The actual browser doesn't have its own updating system, and this is a large part of the reason that over 40 percent of users are still using IE6 and IE7.
That's an interesting assertion. The only backup he gives are numbers for browser stats.
On the whole, this seems like one guy doing an editorial and talking off the cuff. That's how it struck me, anyways.
Re:Obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, why the hell would they release nightly builds?
Re:Security Updates? (Score:3, Insightful)
The author of the article seems to think IE should be treated separately from Windows.
I guess Konqueror should have it's own update system, the OS update system isn't good enough?
Re:Normal (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not you think that it is a good idea for there to be IE nightly builds, it isn't exactly absurd to judge a product by the standards of other similar products, rather than other products with similar licenses.
Re:Obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shitty article. Nothing to see here....
Who is Many? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer."
Whoever "Many" is, they seem to always be interviewed by Ars and FoxNews.
More Microsoft Bashing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
'if Trident breaks, a lot of other stuff in Windows breaks'
Which is, of course, precisely the reason to have a meaningful suite of automated tests and frequent build/test cycles. You'd rather work 6 months on something and then throw it over the wall to testers only to have them come back with either hundreds of regression failures (best case) or a handful of failures so severe they couldn't even get past the basic smoke test script?
That's even before you get to your user community, which as the article points out happened with IE8, when the beta is sprung on the web development world with catastrophic amounts of breakage of existing pages?
This story is bookmarked (Score:5, Insightful)
Filed under "weirdest story ever to appear on /."
Next week we can discuss the outrage that stems from Microsoft's refusal to offer free back massages on the New York subway.
Re:Of course not.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus, with Firefox if you file a bug they [...] generally fix it right away
No they dont.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90268
Re:so Microsoft doesn't publish nightly builds of (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but development of IE7 and IE8 have not been tied to a specific OS at all. IE7 was released before Vista and installs on XP, and IE8 well before Win 7 and that installs on Vista and XP. Microsoft has said that IE9 will be released in 2010, while Windows 8 is set for 2012. IE and Office are both on different development timetables than Windows -- although Office is almost always released 6 to 8 months after a desktop Windows release. Sure, they're linked in some senses because each product has a target platform, but otherwise there is no specific tie-in.
Microsoft's fiscal incentive is to maintain market dominance and some semblance of standards compliance. If they lose too much market share, developers may not create websites to handle IE quirks any longer. Then IE will falter, and MS will not be able to develop web apps only for IE, which is part of their strategy to lock-in users to Windows.
Re:More Microsoft Bashing (Score:3, Insightful)
Because many of us use their stuff and despair at the problems that arise that we cannot fix and the Microsoft will ignore.
That creates a culture of just complaining to each other about the company in general. We say to each other things like "this was the company that was given the BSD source code on a plate and still couldn't get even ping right" and other things non-techies would find completely irrelevent.
Just filter the MS stories out - there's not going to be much else other than jaded comments from those subjected to years of MS hype that treat every announcement from MS as a lie. In hindsight they may be right nearly every time, but to start with it's a preconception. It's not like racism, it's not "all dogs bite" but instead "that ornery blue eyed dog is going to bite me again I just know it".
Re:Obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
As somebody who has frequently participated in beta tests of lots of software, including Microsoft's, this is spot-on. Sure, their infrequent betas get some good feedback and some good bug reports, but they also get absolutely drowned in a deluge of people on the discussion boards (newsgroups, actually) who complain about:
A) Nothing particular at all, they just signed on to complain.
B) Stuff that's completely unrelated to the beta (such as a complaint about IE6 on the IE8 beta discussion)
C) Stuff that's completely unrelated to the product (complaints about Excel on the IE8 board)
D) "How dare Microsoft release [a beta of] this product with such-and-such [known, sometimes in release notes] bug!"
E) "WTF I installed the latest version of X, and now I can't access my Y, so I'm switching to competitor Z and never buying anything Microsoft again!"
F) Complaints about Beta 1 bugs during Beta 2 or RC test phases.
G) Complaints from people who installed the software on a production machine, and expect Microsoft to provide support for it.
These are the types of morons that Microsoft has to deal with. I've seen some of this type of behavior in other betas, to be sure, but some of the problems, especially D, E, and G, are most common on the MS betas. People just seem to expect that any code from MS will be production-ready and expects the company to stand behind their software as though it were a released product.
Microsoft would be *insane* to release nightly builds to a group like that. A closed beta nightly program, maybe (participants culled from those who are actually useful and productive on the public beta) but certainly not open. Especially considering point F above; people already can't always keep up with the pace of the infrequent releases, and asking them to identify the build number they're using would be an exercise in futility for far too many.
Re:Normal (Score:3, Insightful)
Safari != webkit, Chromium != Google Chrome. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Webkit is a rendering engine. Its pretty useless without supporting code. The link you gave links you to a loadable library essentially. The app icon you get for OSX actually runs a script that has Safari use the webkit library from the package, but the UI and everything else is still the same old Safari thats installed on the system.
If someone bothered to put the effort into it, you could stuff IE's renderer into Safari on Windows, or you could stuff Firefox's Gecko into Safari on Windows or Mac.
Chromium is not Chrome. They may share a common tree, but they aren't the same either. Chrome may be built from a snapshot of the chromium tree, but that doesn't give you nightlies of chrome.
So now we're down to ... Firefox is the only browser with Nightly builds.
Re:Obvious...Pre-Christmas gift,shoes,handbag (Score:1, Insightful)
coolforsale issues problems did not deliver ordered a product failed to send duplicated charge credit card stolen cheat spam coolforsale complaint
(fair is fair - we don't want your spam, you don't want to be linked with negative keywords, so go away or I shall taunt you an n+1 time)