shocking announcement: Microsoft is listening

gblotter · September 15, 2005

A Microsoft IE engineer reads and responds to Jimmy's blog.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/jt/2005/09/01/hate/#comments

Andy · September 15, 2005

gblotter wrote:

A Microsoft IE engineer reads and responds to Jimmy's blog.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/jt/2005/09/01/hate/#comments

i wouldn't say shocking - over the past 23 years of my professional career, i have had numerous dealings with microsoft at many levels - they're committed to delivering quality products - then again, so are other companies, too - and as you noted in your comment on the blog, competition is a good thing!

i've stated on this board numerous times that i've switched from pc to apple, but i can tell you that i'm still a fan of microsoft: i use office for mac (it's a great product) and i have also downloaded and begun to use microsoft's anti-spyware beta on my last remaining pc laptop - this tool was recommended to me by the same linux geek friend who first turned me on to firefox!

thanks for the link

gblotter · September 15, 2005

andy wrote:

... over the past 23 years of my professional career, i have had numerous dealings with microsoft at many levels - they're committed to delivering quality products

I agree with you that Microsoft has many quality products that I use every day. Sadly, IE is not one of them. My blog comments were specific to IE - not MS Office, MS AntiSpyware, etc. Microsoft admits (via the IEblog posting by the IE Web Standards Project manager) that IE is riddled with CSS bugs, and that most of these problems are not prioritized high enough to be addressed in IE7. For me, that kind of attitude does not portray a company "committed to delivering quality products" - specifically the IE product. Microsoft takes this attitude "because they can", not because they are resource constrained. It is a position of arrogance. In my opinion, IE is a piece of crap software. If not for the Microsoft name, IE would have been jettisoned long ago by users. The reality of our world is that IE is the default web browser for most people. However, no one should take that to mean IE is a quality product. The example of the VHS/Betamax videotape wars shows that the better product does not always win in the marketplace. However, the emergence of DVD also shows that inferior technology (even if VHS dominated the market for a time) will not be tolerated indefinitely.

Mike Lane · September 15, 2005

gblotter wrote:

I agree with you that Microsoft has many quality products that I use every day. Sadly, IE is not one of them. My blog comments were specific to IE - not MS Office, MS AntiSpyware, etc. Microsoft admits (via the IEblog posting by the IE Web Standards Project manager) that IE is riddled with CSS bugs, and that most of these problems are not prioritized high enough to be addressed in IE7. For me, that kind of attitude does not portray a company "committed to delivering quality products" - specifically the IE product. Microsoft takes this attitude "because they can", not because they are resource constrained. It is a position of arrogance. In my opinion, IE is a piece of crap software. If not for the Microsoft name, IE would have been jettisoned long ago by users. The reality of our world is that IE is the default web browser for most people. However, no one should take that to mean IE is a quality product. The example of the VHS/Betamax videotape wars shows that the better product does not always win in the marketplace. However, the emergence of DVD also shows that inferior technology (even if VHS dominated the market for a time) will not be tolerated indefinitely.

Let's not forget that IE did win the browser wars so most people don't consider it to be that crappy. Of course most people aren't web designers. According to the IE7 blog they have fixed the most troublesome of bugs:

Peekaboo bug
Guillotine bug
Duplicate Character bug
Border Chaos
No Scroll bug
3 Pixel Text Jog
Magic Creeping Text bug
Bottom Margin bug on Hover
Losing the ability to highlight text under the top border
IE/Win Line-height bug
Double Float Margin Bug
Quirky Percentages in IE
Duplicate indent
Moving viewport scrollbar outside HTML borders
1 px border style
Disappearing List-background
Fix width:auto

In addition we’ve added support for the following

HTML 4.01 ABBR tag
Improved (though not yet perfect) <object> fallback
CSS 2.1 Selector support (child, adjacent, attribute, first-child etc.)
CSS 2.1 Fixed positioning
Alpha channel in PNG images
Fix :hover on all elements
Background-attachment: fixed on all elements not just body

Also consider this. IE holds such a massive share of the browser market that they are poised to push CSS, standards, xhtml, graphics, and just about everything else forwards by leaps and bounds. You have to give credit to Firefox (and the hype behind it) because without them, my bet is the Microsoft would have just lived with IE6 for the rest of time. HOWEVER, they are moving and in the right direction. This is going to be much more than just getting yet another browser that supports tabs, this is going to make a massive difference for everyone.

Believe me, I know the frustrations with IE6 at least as well as anyone on this board (well, at least when it comes to webdesign anyhow). And no, I'm certainly not happy that it has 95% (or whatever) market share. But it just isn't accurate to say that the Microsoft Dev's and anyone else at Microsoft aren't interested in turning out quality products.

Trust me, I know a ton of people who actually are dev's for Microsoft - Office for Mac, Office, MSN IM, etc. etc. (one of them was my bro-in-law until he quit to be a teacher 2 months ago - he was on MSN Auto and then MSN IM). They are extremely bright (stereotypical geeks, every one of them I kid you not

) and very proud of their accomplishments. The buisiness side of Microsoft may take kind of a lot of prodding to actually move, but once they do, they generally have some of the best products in the world - IE6 notwithstanding.

luke_church · September 15, 2005

Mike Lane wrote:

Let's not forget that IE did win the browser wars so most people don't consider it to be that crappy.

Hmm... I would take issues with that... Netscrape was just even worse for a while, and MS did push IE out quite hard... By burning it into the core of Windows...

From an end user perspecitve it's not *that bad* and frankly, most end users don't care how much trouble web designers have had to go through, they just want to have a nice, hassle free existence...

You have to give credit to Firefox (and the hype behind it)

I agree. I don't like Firefox especially, though I do use it, it has its own particular brand of annoyances, but I'm very glad for its existence...:):

because without them, my bet is the Microsoft would have just lived with IE6 for the rest of time.

Sorry, I don't think you can assert that. We wouldn't have had IE7 before Longhorn/Vista, sure... However, I think the issue has been that IE has had security difficulties, because of the difficulty associated with its job and position on the 'information frontline' and partially because of its history...

Joe end user, cares a great deal more about their credit-card number than about your website not looking as fancy as you would like to make it.

Consequently, I think its fair to say that their IE team's priorities were elsewhere, but I'm not convienced we would have had IE6 for the rest of time.

HOWEVER, they are moving and in the right direction. This is going to be much more than just getting yet another browser that supports tabs, this is going to make a massive difference for everyone.

Hopefully.

Believe me, I know the frustrations with IE6 at least as well as anyone on this board (well, at least when it comes to webdesign anyhow).

Hehe, I can believe it. I pity you. There is no way I would become as involved in web dev as you have done. Everytime I write XHTML/CSS I get this sickening discust for web authoring and start longing for strict compilers again

: Qudos -> Mike

:

Microsoft may take kind of a lot of prodding to actually move, but once they do, they generally have some of the best products in the world - IE6 notwithstanding.

I think that's probably fair to say, the quality of their stuff does seem variable, but overall, I don't think it's very much worse than anyone elses, and a lot better than some.

I think that over the past couple of years they have genuinely improved, a long way. Lets hope that IE is high on the list

:

(Oh yes, and can they please fix the bug whereby if I open 25+ copies simulataneously, it does nasty things to my computer... Not kidding... Real pain... And 'normal use'... Errr yeah..........)

Cheers,

Luke

shocking announcement: Microsoft is listening

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