IE Team Interview?

Bas wrote:



cornelius wrote: i mean either abandon IE or make it work

IE works just fine for me. Okay, maybe it doesn't follow standards, but standards mean nothing to me as a user, and neither do developers.

IE doesn't work that well for me. OK, maybe it follows standards quite well, but standards mean something to me as a developer.

But above all, aesthetics [broadly] and performance outweigh most other concerns. May the best browser win...

i never said IE is a bad browser:

*i like the way fonts render, makes firefox look nurdy
*i like the low resource usage compared to firefox


but even tho IE7 is a step in a right direction, it still has alot to be desired of

yes its alot more secure but until CSS and javascript is brought up to speed (yes i do realize CSS as a standard is a joke) people would never be happy (some people will never be happy just because its microsofts product)



on another not heres a crazy idea

why dont microsoft come up with a separate browser/product that only renders XAML and has .net framework built in, something thats targeted at rich applications only none of the html bagage? i dunno call it Xplorer or Silverlight on steroids

cornelius wrote:



*i like the way fonts render, makes firefox look nurdy

Yeh, because ClearType is only compatible with IE7! :O

/sarcasm

Rowan wrote:



cornelius wrote:  *i like the way fonts render, makes firefox look nurdy

Yeh, because ClearType is only compatible with IE7!

/sarcasm

its not just cleartype, its just the way things render, i dont know im not a graphic designer, but IE7 feels "smoother" on my huge HD res panel



i currently have 3 browsers open:

*IE for surfing,
*Firefox for testing new web app (im working on since 6 this mornign )
*and opera for display ajax based server/cluster overview on the second monitor (i leave opera open for months and no issues with javascript when on other hand firefox uses over a GB of ram after a day of having the same page open, go figure)

arunmib wrote:

what do you think could be the problem with IE team, for not being able to deliver frequent versions?

Backwards compatibility.

bah too much of this backward compatibility .. screw backwards compatibiliy I want to see real progress!

and why not just have IE8 compatibility mode.. adds nothing new, and is practically IE7

and then IE8 fully featured, with useful tools, better support for everything, faster,  easier to make plugins for, just so amazingly better than its predecessor, that who would really care about it not being backwards compatible on some things.. people would update there tools, plugins, sites etc because they would enjoy the browsers new improvements or at least the users would and then it would be no brainer. At least i wouldn't care if compatibility was broken in favour of something that was done better generally.

Koogle wrote:

.. people would update there tools, plugins, sites etc because they would enjoy the browsers new improvements or at least the users would and then it would be no brainer...

It has been shown time and time again that people will not update their sites. Hence, if a site uses features that were present in IE5 or something, we do our best (up to a point) to keep those features working.

"Do no break the web" means exactly this.

And that goes for IE, Windows, Office. BC is the first thing we think about every time we discuss a new feature.

And when we don't get compatibility right, you can be damn sure it's a problem for us and our users.

BTW, "backwards compatibility" is WAY too simplistic of an answer to "why don't we have more frequent IE updates".  And sorry, I'm not going to give a more complex one for what should be obvious reasons.

Might as well stop posting here Bruce, until you can actually say something.

I mean that in the nicest way possible

BruceMorgan wrote:


BTW, "backwards compatibility" is WAY too simplistic of an answer to "why don't we have more frequent IE updates".  And sorry, I'm not going to give a more complex one for what should be obvious reasons.

Ironically, you don't have to look further than those whining commenters on the ieblog to see at least one reason. If there were a new IE release every three weeks, each of which had a subtly different feature set and none of which you could guarantee people would update to, web developers would be in some kind of versioning hell.

The other reason was the big push about ten years back to "web-enable" various apps by embedding the webbrowser control in them for all manner of functionality. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but now I'm beginning to think it was one of the worst ideas ever. It's even tempting to suggest that the webbrowser control should be forked from IE and left as it is, rendering-wise, just to cut out the issues that arise from it.

i understand why backwards compatibility is important especially on intranets

ive seem apps that work in IE6 but blow up in IE7! on intranets, these apps are due to monkeys who were given a keyboard



anyways why not fork IE?


why not create a version flag? something like

<meta name="ie_compat" content="8" />

if the above is spotted in a page, then render it properly with new IE8 following all todays standards

otherwise use the old engine


this way developers who follow standards say "hey mr. IE look at here, i have this nice standards compliant page for ya to chew on) if they dont follow the standard strictly its their fault




the reason this mess exists is because browsers are to lenient to muppet developers /applications who produce trash code

I blame all of IE's and the Internet's problems on the stupid person who came up with HTML and the concept of it being an easy and forgiving standard, so that you can write the code

<h2>Header <p> Some <b><i>paragraph</b></i> <body bgcolor="blue"> <img src="image.gif"> blah </p> blah <meta name="foo" />

and expect browsers to have to parse it.

HTML also includes stupid tags like <blink> and <menu> and they decided in their infinite wisdom to have seperate tags like <b>, <i>, <u>rather than generalizing on <span> and <div>.

The laxness of the HTML means the inertia for making a browser is absolutely phenominal, which just leads to the fact that we have only two or three monolithic browsers with gigantic codebases which struggle along, and then people have the cheek to blame the people who make the browsers when they memory leak or crash or have a bug.

The worst bit is that the HTML notation was invented after it was clear in Computer Science that it was a bad idea to have a lax format for content providers, and that if you allow computers to "guess" things they get it wrong.

</rant>

You know that you're going against the received wisdom there don't you? (The received wisdom being that HTML's "any idiot can make a website" design is one of the key factors in its success.)

Massif wrote:

You know that you're going against the received wisdom there don't you? (The received wisdom being that HTML's "any idiot can make a website" design is one of the key factors in its success.)

are all the terrible myspace type pages worth the all the millions of hours in lost productivity from developers world wide?

do i have to suffer because some muppets forget to close their tags or god knows what else?

imagine if visual studio was forgiving when one forgot to put a semicolon at the end of a line?





as i said why not leave html as it is, but have the browser fork the layout engine to adhere to strict new well taught out standards, be it latest versions of html or css or whatever



or even better, scrap HTML and use XAML!




this way idiots can continue making their tag soup while good developers can sit back and enjoy more free time!




someone needs to come along and say enough lets develop a way of easily making interfaces, learning from all the mistakes of html

evildictaitor wrote:

I blame all of IE's and the Internet's problems on the stupid person who came up with HTML and the concept of it being an easy and forgiving standard, so that you can write the code

<h2>Header <p> Some <b><i>paragraph</b></i> <body bgcolor="blue"> <img src="image.gif"> blah </p> blah <meta name="foo" />

and expect browsers to have to parse it.

HTML also includes stupid tags like <blink> and <menu> and they decided in their infinite wisdom to have seperate tags like <b>, <i>, <u>rather than generalizing on <span> and <div>.

The laxness of the HTML means the inertia for making a browser is absolutely phenominal, which just leads to the fact that we have only two or three monolithic browsers with gigantic codebases which struggle along, and then people have the cheek to blame the people who make the browsers when they memory leak or crash or have a bug.

The worst bit is that the HTML notation was invented after it was clear in Computer Science that it was a bad idea to have a lax format for content providers, and that if you allow computers to "guess" things they get it wrong.

</rant>

The laxness of HTML means anyone can make pages.  That makes HTML incredibly more approachable and powerful and ubiquitous than a rigid structured, "easy to parse" language.  It's why the web happened in the first place.

But in the early days, there were many gaps in the "standard" and of course NN3 was the standard.  IE3 was specifically coded to match NN3's behavior, whether it was "correct" or not.  Anything else would simply have been stupid.

LaBomba wrote:

Might as well stop posting here Bruce, until you can actually say something.

I can say lots of things

What I'm not going to give is an in depth explanation of the complexity of IE's release schedule and process or discuss IE8's feature set. 

For one thing, why?.   If I say "backwards compat is important!" someone is guaranteed to "chuck it, then, and F the pages that don't work!"   Yeah.  That's smart.   Then I could try to convince that person forever.  I think I'd just rather not go down that path.  So you won't see me argue what I think to be obvious points.  It's obvious why we don't release a new IE frequently.

For another thing, remember, Mary Jo is watching!  Any detailed posts here from IE team members tend to get quoted (or mis-quoted on your POV) in the industry press.  Those types got a lot of buzz from Al and Dave's posts on their blogs.  They don't need help from me, or from other MS employees who don't know what they don't know.  Part of "blog smart" is to only blog what you really do know, not what you think you know.  MJ gets lots of fodder from MS employees shooting their mouths off. 

And lastly, 3 years of IE blog comments and the like have made me a bit cranky.  I'm far less in the mood to discuss anything IE because sadly, there are better ways for me to spend my time.

cornelius wrote:


as i said why not leave html as it is, but have the browser fork the layout engine to adhere to strict new well taught out standards, be it latest versions of html or css or whatever

You should read what Chris Wilson has to say about IE8. 

BruceMorgan wrote:


And lastly, 3 years of IE blog comments and the like have made me a bit cranky. 

I'm interested in your opinion on *why* most of the posts on the IE blog are so critical/hate-filled/despondent.  In fact, I suspect it isn't something you'd answer, but any other Niners want to hazard a guess?

Rossj wrote:



BruceMorgan wrote:  And lastly, 3 years of IE blog comments and the like have made me a bit cranky.

I'm interested in your opinion on *why* most of the posts on the IE blog are so critical/hate-filled/despondent.  In fact, I suspect it isn't something you'd answer, but any other Niners want to hazard a guess?

Yeah.  Emotional maturity of 12 year olds.  Certainly web developers have many valid critcisms, complaints, concerns. 

Many of the comments express these in shall we say less than constructive ways.