Dean Hachamovitch - How do you make a product that hundreds of millions of people use?

There's an Internet Explorer team?

JohnSands wrote:

There's an Internet Explorer team?

LoL. Indeed , it don't fell like it. Instead of dreaming and talking about what is the future of tabs , x , y and z , etc is.. why not code the present ?

So this what happens when a product becomes planetary? I choose the illusion of intimacy over pleasing every province in the imperium. Ah, but I am not here to answer to shareholders.

I am the one sitting on the couch trying to potato-quarterback the IE-game. Here at half-time it's all about FireFox. And this is coming from a guy who built his own IE-based MSHTML editor.

Hmm...

Well at least we know that their jobs are *hard*.

Dean seems like a very intelligent guy, but it would be nice to hear how they are tackling these hard issues instead of just listing them.

Right now IE XPSP2 is really showing age and really does need an update.

If they are able to tackle the complex issues that he mentioned, then why is it so hard to just add say tabbed browsing?

I am a die hard MS fan, but this is one area that the open source crowd is really beating MS.  Mozilla Firebird is really impressive given its age - you have to admit.

Any chance we could get a video on the future of IE?

pardon my saying but i'm missing the point where he actually talks about IE dev.

If Dean is so worried about security then why doesn't he move IE development to the .Net framework? If Quake II can be ported to .Net then Microsoft shouldn't have any excuses.

I want a job at the IE team , being paid for thinking about the problems and not resolving them. 
Well you could say IE for longhorn is going to be marvelous because they will add all those incredible features, but it's light years away.
They did improve IE with SP2 ? sure , but not what it should be with all this time gap between the latest IE release.

[Posting from Firefox ]

I understand the "basics" that Dean outlines but, pardon me, shouldn't those already be in place? The basics are not a new phenomenon. Dean mentions them as if he is working on a version 1.0 product.

I agree with others that the team should make some incremental releases that include easy features like tabbed browsing, etc. while they figure out a way to be all things to all people.

The question was: How do you make a product that hundreds of millions of people use?

Of course it sounds like a version 1.0 discussion. It's a version 1.0 question.

I am a user of NetCaptor for 3 big reasons.

1) Tabbed interface
2) Tabs are SAVED on exit, and resumed when reopened
3) I can provide URL paths to never display (blocks ads and other rotating flashing graphics)

I think if you were to look at taking Tab's to the next level, it would be nice for me to have groups of tabs.  That I could save/load at different times.  Or be associated with a specific window. 

I use the Tab's as a way to explore a site (for example when you Google something and want to open 10 different results and review how well the match what you are looking for).  And I also use tab's as a "Todo", as I find interesting articles I don't have time to fully digest, the tab's stay open in my browser forcing me to look at them eventually, where as if you just add them to a Favorites list, you have to remember to reopen it, and delete it when you decide if its useful or not.

And while we are on the topics of wishing for things that IE did better, giving me the ability to almost 'blog' about a site when I save it as a Favorite, or capture a snippet of text from the page so that I can search for favorites.  I am now in the habbit of blogging specific sites or articles so that I can find 'contextual' text about the article later.  Save a book mark of "Channel9" doesn't help me when I remember this site as "MSDN Site with lots of useful video clips of key Microsoft Employee and PM's".

Good talk, good to know someone who likes their job is running IE.