Tuesday, March 04, 2008
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| IE team listens! Dave signs Off. |
| Posted by: Dave |
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The latest post on the IE team blog is a subtle but significant change of position for the IE team.
If I understand it correctly then by default IE will use the latest support for standards it has available to render web pages. If a page wants to protect itself from compatibility changes so that it continues to render as it did in IE7 then it can indicate that through the use of the meta tag.
This allows some web developers for whom compatibility is important to ensure that their content continues to render as it did in IE7 and also provides a relatively simple way for a page that breaks in IE8 to revert to IE7 rendering. If the IE team is undertaking the rewrite of the layout engine then quite a few pages may break in IE8 but this allows a relatively easy way out. There will still be pain as even the simplest change such as adding a meta tag will require retesting of web pages etc. but maybe that's OK.
This change still allows for the team to maintain the principle of the commitment to compatibility that allows a web page to continue to render the same in future versions of IE. It also should satisfy many of the standards advocates who screamed at the previous proposal. It's refreshing to see the IE team listening.
Final post for the moment at least.
On a separate note this is likely my final post here. I'm returning to work at Microsoft but on an entirely different product to IE. I'll be on the Windows Embedded team which promises to be a lot of fun. I'm definitely refreshed after my time off and ready to return to work. As a result I'm going to refrain from commenting on browsers here. I may restart blogging about my work at http://blogs.msdn.com/dmassy and will certainly continue my personal blog at http://spaces.live.com/dmassy. DMassy.COM will remain here for the time being and I'll leave the existing posts up for the moment. Maybe I'll use the space for something else in the future. I'll not be bothering to improve the blogging software, so comments will continue to produce an error when entered even though they do appear and the RSS feed probably will continue to fail to update as well. It's been fun blogging here although I never dedicated the time to address some of the issues with the blogging software or blog frequently enough to make it a worthwhile project. Thanks to those that did bother reading this :)
Thanks
-Dave
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Friday, February 01, 2008
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| Hate going back to IE6 |
| Posted by: Dave |
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I found myself having to use IE6 this week. I was using some free computer access at Children's Hospital while waiting for my three and half month old daughter to come out of surgery. The machines they have available are locked down Windows XP SP2 so that means IE6 only was available. That's OK as I'd prefer Children's Hospital to spend any spare money they have on treating sick kids than upgrading the computers in the Family Resource Center.
I'd forgotten how much better IE7 is (yes I know Firefox is nice too and had tabs before IE but despite attempts to use it for a week it still has never felt right), or to put it another way how much IE6 had come to suck. It didn't really suck when it first came out but since 2001 the world moved on. It shouldn't have taken Microsoft so long to respond to Firefox but it did, and they've acknowledged that error many times. IE7 was a big step forward over IE6, I'm sure IE8 is going to be an even bigger step. The IE team has big challenges ahead but it is worth remembering how far they've come as well.
It sure was nice to get home and use IE7 on Windows Vista again. It was nice to bring my daughter home too. She's doing fine as part of the first step to treat her hip dysplasia. Those adventures are covered on my personal blog.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
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| Lemurs on the Internet! |
| Posted by: Dave |
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This is brilliantly funny!
http://www.katemonkey.co.uk/article/48/x-ua-lemur-compatible
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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| Idealists Vs Pragmatists |
| Posted by: Dave |
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Lots of comments and lots of push back on the IE team blog post about Compatibility and IE8.
I think it comes down to two basic philosophies, Idealism and Pragmatism. Both want the same thing, solid support for standard recommendations. The idealists like to make out that the pragmatists don't want support for standards but that is not true. The disagreement is about how we get to improved support for W3C recommendations where the page is authored once and works the same in all browsers. That is actually what Microsoft is trying to work towards with this proposal.
The idealists don't believe that running existing web content in a future browser version, the way it is run in today's browser is important. They are prepared to have existing content break in an updated version of the browser in the pursuit of improved standards support.
The pragmatists take the approach that existing content should run fine in future browser versions and content that wants to take advantage of improved and new support must opt-in explicitly to that support.
I've always been more of a pragmatist than an idealist. Idealism is great and thank goodness there are idealists in the world. Let us not forget though that on paper communism sounds like a great ideal as well, unfortunately it just doesn't really work very well :)
Think for a moment about the bigger battle here between W3C standards recommendations and proprietary web platform technology such as Flash and Silverlight. That is possibly a bigger threat to web standards than older versions of IE being used on the web. How many websites are moving to Flash because they can't stand the headache of today's browsers, and Flash allows a richer experience as well.
Imagine for a moment I'm a decision maker for implementing a rich and dynamic experience for users on the web. My choices for implementation are to use Flash or Ajax/DHTML.
If I choose Ajax/DHTML then I am going to have to hack away at code to make things work the same in all browsers (even Opera, Safari and Firefox have different implementations so I need to test and test again before even thinking about the headache of IE. There is also a lack of good tools to consider. Added to this I now have the concern that after spending a lot of effort to get the content to work right in all currently available browsers it is quite possible my solution will break when a new version of a browser is released.
If I choose Flash (or maybe Silverlight) then I have solid (maybe not great but they are working on that) tool support and most importantly a pretty good guarantee that no matter what OS or browser the user has then their experience is exactly the same. Wow I save on a lot of testing and grey hairs there. More than that I can be pretty sure that the companies that release Flash and Silverlight are not going to break my solution when they upgrade their plugins. It's something that is core to Microsoft's platforms. Stuff that run on earlier versions of Windows still runs on Windows today.
Hmmm! Which one do you think I'm going to choose.
A browser is a platform on which other people build solutions and deliver content. If the platform is constantly moving then it is unreliable and will scare developers away.
I think the proposal from Microsoft deserves much more serious consideration than it is receiving from the idealists. It's clear that some of the people commenting haven't actually taken the time to read the details of the proposal or the reasoning behind it. Everyone concerned has admitted it isn't ideal but it does allow for a structured way to move forward.
Those that want to live life on the edge and always have the latest and greatest version of the browser rendering their content can use the version of the meta tag but today's content continues to work in IE8+ exactly as it does today. That sounds good to my pragmatic side.
Are you an idealist or a pragmatist?
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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| IE8 and Protecting Compatibility |
| Posted by: Dave |
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A solid post on the IE team blog from platform architect Chris Wilson. It's worth a thorough read. Also Chris Wilson's response to some of the negative comments is worthy of note.
Obviously this isn't the ideal solution but it is probably the only practical one to move the web forward. Of course some people think that compat isn't important and they won't be persuaded otherwise. I did like AndyC's comment "It's forcing us to accept a world in which browsers won't ever be perfect... ". That is exactly right. No browser is perfect. Sure many are better than IE at the moment but only the truly naive would think the other browsers are perfect.
Reading the comments is fun and frustrating. Fun to see how silly some of them are and frustrating to see that many people simply don't understand or accept the reality of the situation which is that the commitment to compatibility is not something that Microsoft is going to walk away from.
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Friday, December 21, 2007
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| Looking at IE8 & ACID2 |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It's really great to see the progress on IE8 announced earlier this week.
Lots of points made in the comments on the IE team blog. Here's my response based on my experience to some of them.
- It must be fake!
Is that really likely? I don't think so. the team has been silent and haven't announced things until they are confident about it so that expectations don't get set incorrectly.
- Is there any guarrantee they'll ship IE8 passing ACID2?
Well there's never a guarantee but I think it would be extremely unlikely that the IE team would announce this and show a video and then disappoint the audience. One of the reasons for the team's silence has been that they don't want to talk about stuff before they are pretty confident that they can deliver it. Of course that isn't an excuse for their complete silence :) but it is a reason. It's good to have a healthy skepticism when Microsoft announces something but when the actual development team talks about something I'm more confident.
- Will IE8 be available only for Vista or XP as well?
That's a reasonable question and I can't answer with full confidence but until Vista reaches a critical install point (whatever that might be) I'd expect the team to continue to deliver future versions of IE for Windows XP as well as Vista. My expectation is that IE8 will run on Windows XP.
- Passing ACID2 isn't the same as good CSS support.
Very true and a point that the IE team has repeatedly made when discussing ACID2. Watch the video to understand the details of some of the work. Later in the video Alex Mogilevsky and Markus Mielke discuss some details.
- When can we get it?
We're probably still some time away from a final release. I'd expect a full year of public beta of IE8 before we see a final release. We aren't even in public beta yet. The team says that this is an early and unoptimised build. Those demanding it gets released as soon as possible should be careful what they wish for. I'd prefer something that is correct and usable rather than something that people reject and then stay with an older browser.
- Deliver it for IE6 and IE7 now!
This is NOT going to happen. The only time they change the behavior of the browser outside of a full release is to address specific security concerns. Once a version of the browser is released web developers come to rely on it, bugs and all. If you start changing that behavior then web developers don't know what functionality they can or cannot rely on and pages randomly break. Consistency of the platform is essential to developers that's why it's important they get IE8 right. If that takes longer then that's OK. I don't believe any browser vendor changes behavior on a previously released version, it would cause chaos if they did.
The news on IE8 is very exciting and it was great to see some of my former colleagues in the video. I hope the team will continue to discuss progress on the team blog regularly.
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
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| ACID2 - The IE team does listen. |
| Posted by: Dave |
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Finally the IE team talks about progress.
This is a great milestone and clearly shows progress in the right direction for IE8. There's even a video.
It's a shame its taken so much screaming from web developers for the team to talk. I hope this isn't just going to be a string of announcements but we'll see the IE team engage in some real conversation and engagement with developers.
This is great though and we shouldn't detract from the significance of this progress. Yipeeeeeee!
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Thursday, December 13, 2007
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| Opera Publicity Stunt? |
| Posted by: Dave |
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The latest complaint from Opera is to the EU claiming Microsoft is holding up the web and abusing its position by not supporting standards in IE.
In my view this is a classic case of running to the courts if you can't compete. If Opera were so wonderful wouldn't it be much closer to at least Firefox in market share? Firefox has exactly the same issues but I'm sure they'll support Opera in this complaint. This complaint is pretty lame and running to the EU asking them to intervene and legislate is just sad. This complaint also seems to confuse itself with the previous antitrust complaints about shipping a browser with windows as an abuse of power. Doesn't every desktop OS ship with a browser? If you shipped Windows without a browser then how would the average user get a browser?
Unfortunately knowing the EU they might take a serious look at this.
Of course if Microsoft would actually publish a roadmap of how it intends to improve it's support for certain standard recommendations in the future, such complaints might hold even less water. As it is the IE team's silence is being interpreted by some as stagnation and that no progress can be expected in the future. The IE team needs to show progress and that it takes the complaints of web developers seriously.
-Dave
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Wednesday, December 05, 2007
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| IE Blog Bombarded |
| Posted by: Dave |
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The entry on the IE team blog about IE7 being a year old is being bombarded with negative comments. Some comments are silly but the overall theme is the same: IE7 is a year old and is a disappointment to web developers.
The response is strong but can't be unexpected. The IE team promised frequent updates to the browser but over a year after the release of IE7 no one knows anything about when IE8 might arrive and if it is likely to address many of the complaints of web developers. The IE team appears to be completely disengaged from their customers which is a shame. Even when we were working on IE7 and it was too early to say anything about what we were doing we'd still hold regular online chats. Often we'd respond to questions with statements such as "That's a great point and we certainly hope to address that in the future". At least the customer would know we were there listening. At the moment though the IE team is completely silent. The earliest we should expect any news is next year and I'd then expect at least a year of beta before a final release. That puts as in 2009 as the year to expect IE8.
I understand how difficult a task the IE team has. However it does appear that some of the momentum has been lost after the release of IE7 and web developers who are a key customer of IE feel ignored. They may not be being ignored but that is certainly how they feel. It'll take sometime before the IE team can regain the trust of web developers and IE8 better be something really good for them to have a chance to do that.
Do you as a web developer feel ignored?
-Dave
P.S. Shortly after I posted this Dean Hachamovitch posted something on the IE team blog about IE8. Basically he talks about the name and confirms that development of IE8 is ongoing. It's still a long way from real customer engagement. I'm sure IE8 will be amazing and look forward to hearing details. I continue to encourage the IE team to talk to customers and be seen to be talking to customers so that web developers feel the love. They don't have to talk details of IE8 just talk to customers and listen and be seen to listen.
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Monday, December 03, 2007
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| MSRC |
| Posted by: Dave |
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There's an article on CNET about the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
The attitude to security at Microsoft sure has changed for the better over the last ten years or so. The article recalls the scramble around security flaws found in IE3 back in 1997. I was working on IE4 at the time and we were all moving buildings so most of the team was out of the office. Many had gone up to Whistler to go skiing I think. We were holding an IE4/Trident Design Preview to customers so I'd stayed in town to present at that. I wasn't part of the scramble to fix IE3 as I hadn't worked on that release but I do recall some of the scrambling :)
As I recall I did a pretty lousy presentation at that design preview as it was one of my first ever presentations. I got a lot better after that and really enjoy talking to customers and presenting. That's probably the part of my job at Microsoft I miss the most.
Security is something the IE team lives and breaths now. No one touches code without considering the security implications. It's good to see an article explaining how much effort Microsoft puts into security. The picture of George opening a cupboard to show supplies for a security response is fun too. I recall working with George on IE. He's a good guy and passionate about security.
-Dave
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Saturday, December 01, 2007
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| IE6 to get a JScript Perf improvement |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It looks like IE6 users will get a JScript perf update. They can download it now and hopefully it'll become an automatic update if it proves successful.
It's not exactly clear but this appears to be the same garbage collection improvements delivered in IE7 a year ago. Better late than never :). Those improvements were well received then so allowing IE6 users to benefit from them is great. Of course an upgrade to IE7 if you can would still be recommended for all the other improvements including security contained in the product.
-Dave
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| The IE team speaks |
| Posted by: Dave |
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but doesn't say much.
Tony Chor the Group Program Manager for IE made a post on the team blog about the first year of IE7.
It's an interesting post that shows that IE7 has been a reasonable success. Of course the trolls on the IE blog comments are trying to make out IE7 is some kind of a disaster but the numbers are impressive however you look at them. The reduction in vulnerabilities and support calls is certainly a step in the right direction for any software product. There's also a hint at the end of the post that more news on IE can be expected shortly. Hopefully that means news of where IE8 is headed and when to expect it. Most importantly though I'd hope to hear more about engagement with the developer community. Setting up a bug tracking database that helps web developers work around known issues in recommended (non-hacky) ways would be a great first step. A return of the regular online chats would also help restore confidence that the IE team exists and cares about customers.
At least this post is confirmation (kind of) that the IE team exists but it's not the level of openness established before and during the development of IE7. If the IE team wants to be treated with respect and have some degree of credibility when talking to web developers then they need to be a lot more open about current issues and the road map for IE over the next couple of versions.
I have great hopes for IE8, it'd be great to have some solid news so that it is more than just a hope :)
-Dave
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Thursday, November 08, 2007
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| No more "Click to Activate" |
| Posted by: Dave |
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Good news that the "Click to Activate" is going be removed from IE. This follows the settlement of the Eolas patent dispute.
The functionality was a silly workaround to a silly patent. It was annoying but could have been worse. The entire case is best described as silly. It's a great shame if Eolas made any money out of such a patent, but we may never know the details of the 'settlement'.
-Dave
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Monday, November 05, 2007
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| Seattle PI |
| Posted by: Dave |
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I got a mention in a column at the Seattle PI
A fairly balanced piece. Thanks Todd for representing my views accurately.
-Dave
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
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| Future of ECMAScript |
| Posted by: Dave |
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There's an interesting post on ECMAScript on the IE team blog.
As is often the case though the post lacks specifics. The phrase "thoughtful evolution is the right way to go" is used but without an example of what exactly that might mean I can see people reading into it whatever they want. To me it means let's not break the web :)
This is the closest we've come to a roadmap of the future of anything in IE though so we should probably celebrate that fact. It sets the expectation that the scripting engine will progress in future versions of IE which is good.
Al Billings a former IE test engineer now at Mozilla and Chris Wilson platform architect on IE then seem to get into a silly argument about NDA's in the comments. Maybe Al is breaking NDA and maybe not but it all seems pretty much irrelevant since Al has been gone from the team long enough.
Interestingly Chris seems to have more comments about what this all means on his own blog.
More posts like this outlining the roadmap for IE's future is what the developer community needs. ECMAScript is just one part of the IE platform. What about DOM, CSS and layout, performance, vector graphics, security etc.?
-Dave
P.S. I know the comment submission on this blog returns an error but the comments do get through. I've abandoned attempts to fix it and instead hope to move to different blogging software soon to address this and a few other annoyances. I'm busy with a new baby in the house though so that project is at a lower priority that getting much needed sleep in everyday :)
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007
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| Don’t Break the Web |
| Posted by: Dave |
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The phrase "Don't Break the Web" is a pretty common one on the IE team, referring to the commitment to compatibility. It means that existing content on the web has to continue to function as before. This is because it is not possible to force people to update web content so it functions in a new version of IE.
I was a little surprised when I attended a W3C WebAPI working group meeting when I was working on the IE team at Microsoft to find that this is a common expression amongst all the browser vendors. It makes perfect sense though. If you come out with a new version of the browser and that version doesn't work on existing web content then no one is going to use your new version.
There are exceptions of course. IE7 broke quite a bit of existing stuff although usually in relatively minor areas.
It appears that there are people who comment on the IE team blog who still don't understand this principle. They seem to want an opt out flag rather than an opt in flag for new behavior. That makes no sense and I can only assume the people believing this are still in high school and have no appreciation of business. Just imagine I run a small hotel and have a website to attract business. I know nothing about websites and focus on running my hotel, and paid someone to create the website over three years ago. A new version of a browser comes out and the website is broken. I now have to pay someone to come in and fix it. Even a small change to doctype is going to cost me money for a change that is being forced on me. This situation is typical on the web today where a lot of businesses rely on it for dealing with customers but understand little of the technology behind it.
There is so much content out there that even small changes can "break the web" so everyone who creates a browser (Opera, Mozilla, Safari and IE) is extremely careful to ensure that the vast majority of existing web content functions in new browsers with it having to change.
We do need a more standardised versioning mechanism such as conditional comments to allow developers to have maintainable code that copes with different browser behavior. We also need clear doctypes that developers can select to use. It's unrealistic to force new behavior on existing content on the web that hasn't asked for it.
-Dave
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Friday, October 05, 2007
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| IE7 Update |
| Posted by: Dave |
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So the IE team have released an updated IE7.
I know that many on the IE team have probably worked very hard on this. Releasing even minor updates to what is probably one of the most used and relied on pieces of software in the world is no small achievement. Testing alone takes a lot of effort to ensure that everything still works.
However I can't get too excited about this update. The menu bar on by default in XP is a change that doesn't really mean much to me. You can argue that it is part of listening to customers and responding to their issues, but to me it is backing away from a design that I've become very used to. Although it really doesn't matter. I suspect it may help deflect some support calls though and thus help save money and costs. I've got used to not having a menu bar and I don't really want it back since I can still easily get to the options I need frequently through the toolbar. Some people are very resistant to change though. No more WGA is probably a good thing but I've never encountered a problem here either. Is it a sign that WGA isn't working and Microsoft are backing away from it? I don't know, again I suspect it was only costing in support calls rather than preventing piracy on what is a free update, so this saves money in support costs as well.
Hopefully the rest of the team are focused on more meaningful updates in IE8. That's where the focus should now be. It's inappropriate to put major functionality and behavioral updates into a minor release as that only leaves everyone confused as to what behavior to expect in which version. IE8 is where major updates should be expected. Since we aren't even in beta yet I suspect it is some way off.
Hopefully some of what Chris Wilson talked about in his interview at Web Directions South will come to pass. Again it would be good to see this information released on the IE team blog where people are looking for information.
-Dave
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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| 64bit Browser. Who cares? |
| Posted by: Dave |
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I run the 64 bit version of Windows Vista. It works really nicely on my 64 bit machine. The funny thing is that the 32bit version of IE is the default version on 64bit Vista. So although almost everything else in the OS is running 64 bit, IE is only using the 32 bit capacity of the processor. Vista ships with a 64bit version of IE that I can run from the start menu but I can't make it the default browser for the OS. That sounds pretty crazy.
The reason for 32bit IE being the default browser on 64bit versions of Windows is that a lot of key extensions aren't available for the 64 bit version of IE. Flash and Quicktime are two particular extensions that are very popular but don't seem to make a 64 bit version available. There are other popular toolbars that also don't appear to come in 64bit form. As a result if you are running 64bit IE and come across a site that uses Flash (that's a lot of web sites) they don't work as expected. In the interests of compatibility, Microsoft makes the 32 bit version of the browser the default in 64 bit versions of the OS. That way everything continues to work just fine in 64 bit versions of Windows and the average consumer isn't any the wiser.
Interestingly none of the other browser vendors appear to offer a 64 bit version of their browsers. Please correct me if I'm wrong here but I can't seem to find a 64 bit version of Firefox or Opera for download.
So we appear to be in a catch 22 situation. The 64 bit version of IE can't be made the default version in Windows because a bunch of extensions and websites will no longer work. The extensions won't bother offering 64 bit versions because there is no demand for them. There is not demand for 64 bit extensions because nobody runs a 64 bit version of IE.
Will this situation ever change? I doubt it unless someone makes it worth the while of the extension vendors to make 64 bit versions of their software available.
Does it matter? Probably not. It's one of those situations where the purists would like to run 64 bit versions of everything on their 64 bit processor machines, but the reality is that 32 bit browsers aren't hitting any of the limits that require a move to 64 bit. Maybe that day will come sometime.
I do wonder though if Microsoft really takes 64 bit seriously enough yet. A lot of new machines are 64 bit but OneCare is not available for 64 bit. Why is that? Does running 64 bit Vista really make any difference over running 32 bit Vista on this machine? Maybe not, I'm not sure. If I want to run OneCare do I have to run 32 bit Vista? Does any other antivirus vendor offer a 64 bit version I can use?
Does 64 bit matter? In some memory intensive applications it probably does. I'm not sure it really matters that much for the average desktop usage of browsing, email and word processing. I don't know.
-Dave
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Monday, October 01, 2007
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| Chris Wilson Speaks |
| Posted by: Dave |
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There's a great interview with Chris Wilson available from Web Directions South. Chris is platform architect on IE and has worked on more versions of IE than I have :) It's good to hear his voice and that the layout revamp in Trident is underway. Just this news without any details gives web developers confidence that IE is headed in the right direction albeit very slowly.
This is the sort of presence that the IE team needs to have consistently so web developers hear from the team on a consistent basis. This interview and a transcript of his talk at Web Directions South should be up on the IE team blog where people are looking for news and info on IE. Instead the team blog seems to just have silence and we get information through other sites.
-Dave
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Friday, September 28, 2007
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| Some Attention! |
| Posted by: Dave |
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He he :) The back and forth that Al Billings and I have been having over the IE team's silence has got the attention of Mary Jo Foley on her blog. Mary Jo is a long time Microsoft watcher on ZDNet.
I should be clear that my motivation for having the IE team open up a little comes purely from my desire to see them do the right thing for a product that I worked on for many years. I support IE and the IE team and want to see them succeed. While some of the criticisms hurled at IE are justified, many are not. It's essential that the team has an ongoing conversation with its customers so that the customers see that the team cares about and understands the product and some of its issues. Silence is the worst thing here. If they aren't ready to talk about IE8 details then that is fine although they have to start talking direction and roadmap for IE8 ASAP, details can wait. I don't want them to talk about stuff too early before it is settled as that can only lead to expectations being wrongly set. During much of IE7 development we'd say "sorry can't talk about that yet" but at least we were there having a conversation and able to say that. Withdrawing from the conversation after some of the openness during IE7 is just wrong. I maintain that having a bug database that is open and helps point developers to workarounds is a great basis for a conversation helping both web developers and the IE team.
I don't want to see the IE team make some statement in response to this attention and then withdraw again. I want to see the team change the culture and embrace the conversation turning it to their advantage.
-Dave
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
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| IE Team Silence |
| Posted by: Dave |
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Another ex member of the IE team, Al Billings has made a call for the IE team to start talking to the community. Similar to the call I made a few months ago now.
Al and I differ in a few respects but basically the ask is the same. The IE team needs to start talking to the developer community about the future of IE.
Al worked in test on IE for many years and now works on QA for Mozilla. Unless IE moves to the Open Source model which is extremely unlikely, I see little benefit to issuing alpha quality nightly builds. I know Opera does this but I still don't see the point. The code is in such flux with known bugs that any feedback is pointless and the developer community can't rely on what they see. Let's wait until beta quality builds to take a look and see if the IE team can deliver.
I do agree though that the IE team needs to start talking to the developer community on a much more consistent basis. After the release of IE7 all online chats stopped. The online chats had been taking place every month since well before IE7 was under development. After the release of IE7 the bug reporting system was withdrawn. There have been vague promises that it was only temporary but it has now been almost a year and no replacement is in sight.
The IE team does not have to give exact details of IE8 but their complete silence shows a complete lack of respect for the developer community.
The management of the IE team needs to at least show that they are willing to listen to customers and that developers are important to them. The openness during the development of IE7 was refreshing but it all seems to have evaporated in the last year.
Unfortunately I suspect the silence won't change until IE8 is ready to beta. Who knows when that might be? In the meantime companies are struggling to know which way to go around key strategic issues such as Vector Graphics Technology. Adobe are about to finally kill their SVG plugin and developers don't know what to use instead. Is IE8 going to provide an answer and support SVG natively as other browsers are doing? It's little surprise that web developers feel jerked around by IE. The longer the silence continues the more even I who was once part of the team starts to question if the IE team can deliver on any part of what is needed in the next generation browser.
-Dave
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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| Phishing and IE7 Explained |
| Posted by: Dave |
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My friend Sandi Hardmeier, an MVP who runs www.ie-vista.com has an excellent article on Phishing protection in IE7 on the Windows Help site.
It explains what phishing is, how it works and what to watch for in IE7 to help protect you. Along with the other security work in IE7 such as Protected Mode in Vista IE helps protect people against the bad guys.
It continues to pain me how badly Microsoft explains issues such as this. The marketing people show a complete lack of technical depth and wash over anything of substance in the product as they focus on nice pictures and bland feel good language. At the same time if the product team explains anything it has such technical depth and detail that it is difficult to understand and everyone's eyes glaze over.
The IE team did a lot of good work around security in IE7, some of it hidden and some of it clearly exposed such as the phishing work here. Like safety systems in cars security of software will probably never be perfect. However I do not believe that IE deserves much of the abuse it gets for being insecure.
Always make sure that whatever browser and other software you use that it is up to date with security patches.
Thanks
-Dave
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Monday, September 10, 2007
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| Find as You Type |
| Posted by: Dave |
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Sven Groot has issued a new version of his "Find As You Type" extension to IE. This is a great extension and seems to work great for me on IE7 on Windows Vista.
An alternative extension called "Inline Search" that does the same thing can be found at http://www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch/HomePage. These extensions allow you to easily find text on a web page in the same way as Firefox and other browsers instead of IE's clunky "Find on Page" functionality.
This shows an interesting point, that IE is Very extensible. I'll be the first to admit that it isn't the easiest extensibility in the world since it relies on COM and OLE but you can to some pretty clever things with IE's extensibility mechanisms.
It's a real shame the IE team couldn't squeeze this into IE7. I'm pretty sure it's high on the list of things for IE8 as it is a major usability issue with IE.
I hate having to have non essential addons installed as they are a major cause of instability and performance issues as well as installing something always increases the risk of malware arriving with it. However I think this falls into my category of essential extensions to have.
Thanks
-Dave
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Friday, August 31, 2007
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| Eolas Settlement |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It's good to hear the Eolas case has been settled. This was the issue where a small company without any product claimed to own the patent around automatic activation of objects in a web page. After back and forth on if this patent was valid it looks like this can be put behind us. I don't see how the patent could have survived but I'm not a patent lawyer and was astonished that a jury originally awarded for Eolas in this case.
Hopefully IE will be allowed to revert behavior to avoid the extra click for activating an object or having the page use script to insert it. The behavior introduced a year or so ago in IE to work around the patent was only a minor annoyance but many pages don't want to have unnecessary script on their pages. The fact that a simple workaround avoids the patent just goes to show how stupid this case was. Patents and IP are important for the industry but in this case the validity patent was very questionable. As I say though I am not a lawyer :)
Thanks
-Dave
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Monday, August 20, 2007
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| Bill Hill on Ch9 |
| Posted by: Dave |
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There's a great video of Bill Hill on Channel 9. Bill is passionate about reading and is responsible for cleartype. It's well worth watching.
He joined the IE team after I left Microsoft so I never worked with him but I do hope his passion infects the team.
-Dave
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| New IE VPC’s are up |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It looks like the Virtual PC images for testing multiple versions of IE on a single machine have been refreshed.
This is a super useful ability for web developers! I'm sure it'll be announced on the IE team blog shortly.
-Dave
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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
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| A bug tracker system |
| Posted by: Dave |
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There are a lot of comments on the IE team blog such as the one's here and here requesting a public bug tracking system for IE. Some of them verge on being down right rude and show the frustration of web developers. Tony Chor's comment shows the team at least acknowledges the issue. I remember telling Tony that I thought it was a mistake to close the public bug database when IE7 was released but he has a really good point that there is little point in one unless they can manage it properly. I think a bug tracking system is a really good idea not so much for the IE team but for web developers themselves so that they can find workarounds for issues and at least know that what they are encountering is an acknowledged issue. However some of the proponents of a public bug database seem to be a little deluded about what this means.
Before I go further I want to get one basic assumption out of the way. IE is NOT Open Source Software. It is never likely to be open source. If you want to discuss that and why open source is great and will solve world peace and hunger etc. then please go elsewhere.
Why do I mention that so bluntly when discussing a bug tracking system? Well it means that any bug tracking system for IE is never likely to be full public access to the IE team's bug database. The team is not going to allow the public access to issues on features still under development and certainly isn't going to allow people to see some of the internal debate on what issues get fixed when.
So what is the purpose of a bug tracking system?
Quite simply it is to allow developers who rely on IE technology a way to submit bugs and seek workarounds for issues in both fully released and beta released versions of the product.
What is a public bug tracking system not going to do for you?
It's NOT going to give you insight into product that has yet to be released as a beta. It is NOT going to help you understand the IE codebase. It is NOT going to give you an idea if the issue will be fixed in the next version of IE.
So why do I think a public bug database is a good idea?
As I stated before the real value of a bug database is to help web developers who hit an issue search for it and find recommended workarounds so that they can avoid the issue with minimum fuss. Imagine a bug database that has great search and repro cases so a developer can easily identify the issue they are hitting and find the best recommended solutions. Maybe that is as much an expansion of the current KB articles as much as a new system.
There are people screaming about this as though it is a life and death issue. I agree with some people who suggest that if it is that essential they should go build the database themselves. There are some efforts and I do think Gerard Talbot should be commended for his efforts. However this doesn't quite equate to the objective bug database that is needed, and any such database would need the support of the IE team to be really useful.
This is however important if the IE team is to win the hearts and minds of developers and have those developers feel like they have the support of the IE team.
Thanks
-Dave
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Friday, August 10, 2007
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| IE7 Security - Protected Mode |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It's good to see the IE team talking a little more about the security work undertaken in IE7. There was a lot of work done in IE7 to improve security across the board and many of the attacks we have seen have not affected IE7.
One thing that I don't think Microsoft has done that a good job of explaining is Protected Mode in Windows Vista. There is an article for developers on MSDN and some coverage on Microsoft.com for non-developers. There are also some good posts on the team blog. However the MSDN and team blog articles are fairly technical while the coverage on Microsoft.com doesn't really explain anything at all.
So here is my quick explanation on why Protected Mode is good and why you should not disable it. It's important to note that Protected Mode is available on Windows Vista only as it relies on UAC. I've heard complaints about UAC and people turning it off because it is annoying. I don't find it annoying at all. The only reason I can think for these complaints is that the prompts can be pretty frequent when you are first setting up a machine and installing lots of software, once you are past that stage though the prompts are really not that common and they are designed to protect you.
Anyway back to Protected Mode, let's consider the situation of using any browser on Windows XP. If you are logged on to XP as an Administrator which I know many people are, then all the software you run including browsers is running with admin privileges. Think about that for a moment because it really should scare you. If an attack gets through the browser or any extension running on the browser it can start writing content to any part of the system and quickly destroy data or install some malware. Ouch!
Things get a little better if you are logged on to XP as a limited rights user since the software you run won't be able to write to the system and only to the user data. However an attack can still wreak havoc on that user data and might undermine the user's configuration.
Now let's consider Windows Vista and IE7 Protected Mode. On Vista IE7 browses intranet and internet content under what is called protected mode which uses the features of UAC to restrict the access of IE to writing to the file system. As a result even if an attack gets through then the damage it can do to the system or the user is very limited. If some software does need write access to the file system or user settings through IE then the user gets an appropriate prompt.
So that's my quick and scary explanation of why Protected Mode is a wonderful thing. The IE team did some pioneering work with Protected Mode in IE7 on Vista. Running software in Protected Mode is not an easy job for the development team as it involves broker processes and other such stuff. It may not be appropriate for all software but for something like a browser which is such an attack target for the bad guys it makes sense. It'd be great to see the other browsers adopt Protected Mode under Vista as well.
Thanks
-Dave
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
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| The Compatibility Commitment |
| Posted by: Dave |
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People still do not seem to understand the commitment to compatibility that is essential for the browser. For example this comment on the IE team blog is typical, where the commenter believes compatibility is an excuse for not changing things. Compatibility is a concern whenever you make changes to platform technology on which others deliver content.
It's all very well to say "RULES ARE RULES" and "STANDARDS ARE STANDARDS" and if a developer doesn't follow those rules they deserve to have their content broken when browser is updated. However the reality is that there is a lot of poor content on the web developed using what I call the "hack it and see" approach to programming. Using this technique a developer copies and pastes code from somewhere else and hacks at it until it does what they want without any real understanding of how it really works. On the web there are lots of good programmers who do understand how things work but there are also plenty more people using the "hack it and see" approach.
For a company offering services and products over the web changing a website when maybe the original developer has left the company is rarely a quick and easy thing to do.
So whenever a browser changes how it handles HTML, CSS or DOM behavior it needs to be careful that it does not needlessly break existing content. That does not mean browsers will not change to have greater compliance with standard recommendations but it does mean that such changes need to be made with some form of versioning system in mind so content can opt in to the revised behavior.
When developing IE7 we found all sorts of hacks in common usage that relied on the incorrect parsing of content in IE6. As the behavior was corrected in IE7 those hacks stopped working and the content rendered incorrectly in IE7 which we wrote about on MSDN. In one case a hack was actually relying on the fact that IE6 did not support a part of CSS2.1! So even if you think that you are just adding some new functionality it can still break existing content.
Compatibility is a serious commitment. Firefox's small market share and tech savvy audience might allow them to get away with more changes than IE can get away with. The IE team was taxed considerably with compatibility issues during IE7 development with many customers not paying attention until late in the beta cycle if at all to the upcoming changes.
I'll say again. Compatibility is not an excuse for not making changes. However it is a constant concern, probably only second to security when changes are made. If a change breaks a large commercial website then it is clearly unacceptable.
Thanks
-Dave
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Sunday, August 05, 2007
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| Comments Re-Enabled |
| Posted by: Dave |
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It's good to see that the IE Team has re-enabled comments on the last post of the team blog. Comments had been disabled, probably automatically because the post was over two weeks old. This left no mechanism for conversation at all on the team blog.
Hopefully we'll start to see more frequent posts and more of the team responding to questions on the blog. There's plenty of things on IE7 that can be discussed even if they are not ready to discuss IE8. Of course a clear road map of what developers can expect and when from the IE platform would be the ideal.
I'm going to try and take a break from beating the IE team over the issue of community engagement for the next week though. Even just re-enabling comments on the team blog shows that someone is listening. I know they have lots of good ideas for IE8 and can't wait to see them.
-Dave
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