Dean Hachamovitch - Do you have the hottest seat at Microsoft?

Posted By: The Channel 9 Team | Aug 13th, 2004 @ 12:12 PM

Dean Hachamovitch, the guy who runs the Internet Explorer team, seems to have a particularly tough job.

Just read all the comments over on the IE Blog.

Just how tough is it? After all, everyone has an opinion on Internet Explorer and what its future should be. Both inside and outside Microsoft.

The IE team just finished the XPSP2 release, so we sat down with Dean to get a look at the guy who is heading the team that is working on Microsoft's next-generation browser. Our first question was exactly that: how do you put up with the pressure of executive, governmental, PR, and customer demands?

We're going to follow the IE team as they take feedback from customers, write specs, design prototypes, release preview and beta releases, and finally release the product.

Yes, the IE team is hiring. Do you want to work in one of the hottest seats at Microsoft?

Tags: Internet Explorer

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Manip

True that tabs are an interesting problem.. if it was me.. I would have a task-bar that when you selected a group of icons it would spawn another task-bar above the normal one that contained a list of the items in that group.

MegaTrain

Informative video.

My comments on browser tabs-- they solve two problems:

1: Grouping separate browser windows in a way that the user has control over.

2: Opening related links BEHIND the current browser window to read later.

#1 is probably a "bigger deal" from a software architecture standpoint, but #2 is the thing I like the most about browser tabs. Browsing down blogs.msdn.com, and opening up interesting links in new tabs lets me continue down the list as I go, with IE "open in new window", I have to minimize the newly opened window if I don't want to read it right away. Tabs really match the way I do my browsing.

sbc
GW R/Me

Also another good thing about tabs - they do not interfere with your normal browser habit - so if you click a link that opens in a new window it will do the same as IE and open up a new instance of Firefox. Tabbed browsing appeals to the power user, they don't have to be used if you don't want to use them.

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

I'm playing with Optimal Access, a Tabbed interface for IE.

Has anyone else played with optional IE browsers? What's your favorite?

ghos

Before Firefox I had used CrazyBrowser and MyIE2 that had tabs. I found them to be worthwhile alternatives for sure for those who want to stick with IE.

However everytime I read about tabs and IE, the response from MS appears to be that Tabs are not needed. No one seems to be saying, "oh we missed the boat, lets add that feature". Why is MS so afraid of adding a simple feature like that? A feature that could easily be turned off by the user.
Sure the security issues drive others to use something else, but tabs was one of those features that immediately drew me to use another browser besides IE. I'm one of those who use Alt+Tab to switch windows, but it is too difficult to locate which page is which using that method with separate windows for each webpage.
I realize there are those who don't like tabs (which I cannot understand since to me that help contain things and make it much easier to manipulate multiple windows). I think for many though they simply haven't had the opportunity to give tabs a try and find out how much better they are to have around.

I'm still interested in what IE might bring to the table in the future, but in my mind and I believe in the mind of more and more users, it is believed that MS doesn't care about IE, or at the very least doesn't care what features users want.

lars

ghos wrote:

Sure the security issues drive others to use something else, but tabs was one of those features that immediately drew me to use another browser besides IE.

For me it's the other way around. I moved to Firefox in early June because of the security problems with MSIE, and to begin with I didn't find the tabs all that useful. But now I've learned how they can make help me group related pages in one window. And I'm finding it surprisingly hard to give that up. On the other hand I think the tabs feature gets way too much attention. If Microsoft just wanted to add tabs to MSIE I bet they could have done in just a few days. It's not rocket science. What will be more interesting is to see what else the guys at Microsoft comes up with that Firefox has not yet invented/implemented. Coming up with new ideas is the hard part.

Working in the MSIE group will be a tough job. Everyone is watching. But believe me, the worst job of all is working on something that noone cares about!

BHpaddock

Personally, I am very very fond of Avant Browser (http://www.avantbrowser.com). It's a completely free IE shell with several features that I've come to rely on.

Here they are in no particular order:

1) Pop-up blocking. IE has this now, but didn't when I started using Avant.

2) Ad blocking. Can be done manually for IE by editing the HOSTS file, but that's not exactly user-friendly Smiley

Of course, this I think is the least likely to be added to IE... as Ads are in many cases a legitimate money maker for web sites.

3) Tabs. When I discovered that I could middle-click on a link and have it open up in a background tab, I fell in love with Avant. Before Avant I would have to right-click, select "Open in new window," and then alt-tab back to the original page.
Avant's tabbing system is especially useful for forum browsing and research.

4) More menu customizeability. My monitor's resolution is 1920x1200, and I like having my Back/Forward/Stop etc. toolbar at the upper left, with the File/Edit/etc. menus to the right of them, and the tab window MDI controls (maximize, minimize tabs, etc.) on the right. ALL on the same line, though. With the address and search bar on the second line, and my customized Links bar on the third. I keep my tabs themselves at the bottom of the screen, just above the status bar.

5) Inline search queries. I can type "g robert scoble blog" into the address bar and get a google search for that string. Or I can type "d combustification" to lookup that word on dictionary.com.

And most recently, I've set it up so that I can type "kb 145629" to look up any KB article by its number in the MS knowledge base. This has become a great way for me to look up the details of a particular hotfix.

Cronan
Ivan the Terrible

It's easy to get side-tracked by all the details. I see it like this; when IE 4.01 came out looking and working better than the equivalent version of Netscape, I embraced it, but with a caveat: if Microsoft achieve market dominance with this (free) product, then they might well rest on their laurels, never implementing the w3c standards, never tightening up scurity, basically allowing the product to drift. Unfortunately, I was right, and this is where the anger I feel comes from. While many on the IE blog are Linux/Mozilla fanboys, many are existing Microsoft users who (like me) love the products, but feel cheated by Microsoft management's very poor attitude towards IE over the last three years.

martindolphin
Martin

Avant Browser gets my vote too - really like having tabs for the reasons already mentioned. Tabs are the single enhancement that makes me browsing sessions better.