http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Windows-Fumbled-Future-Microsoft/dp/1416573259/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1

I’ve got a target date (by mgmt) of June 2011 that I’m allowed to unconditionally drop all support for IE6 and I look forward to that day like winning the lottery! (much alcohol will be consumed during the celebration I’m sure)

IE9 looks to be an absolutely amazing browser (hard words for me to utter) and thus I can’t wait until it becomes IE’s most used version.

The only issue I have is one that you and Microsoft can’t control… the long tail of support.

Roughly speaking, if each browser version sees active life in the enterprise market for 10 years… it will be 2021 before all the “really-buggy” versions of IE are gone

Ah, the life of a web developer – always an entertaining challenge.

But my point was that IE opened the Pandora’s Box of client-side programming power through the browser; no one else had exposed as much of a dynamic programming platform in HTML/CSS/JS at that time.

Even then, though, it was problematic for web developers; because we didn’t fix “ALL” the bugs, and then the market was fragmented even more. And even then, as you point out, we can’t force users to upgrade (which would be ideal, for web developers building new content).

Again, you were on the team, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve your side of things, but all I can tell you is how it appeared from an outside perspective: That Microsoft developed, then mothballed, IE for business reasons related to maintaining the dominance of Windows. And what’s more, those business reasons haven’t gone away, which is why many web developers still find it difficult to trust Microsoft, because whatever your progress with IE or your activity in standards committees, there is always an underlying assumption that you are looking to constrain the web platform to protect your revenue streams from Windows and Office.

MS does not have that much experience in developing for Linux. On the other hand, they have actively helped the Mono/Moonlight project which is developing a Silverlight clone that work on Linux.

I threw myself a little party when I saw NS4 drop below 1% in the logs.

IE6 was a very good browser relative to the competition at the time–NS4 was a complete disaster from almost any perspective, and was FAR worse when it came to CSS support than IE6. It wasn’t until a considerable time later that Firefox finally surpassed IE6. (IE5Mac was probably better than IE6Win, but I’ll leave that aside, as will I leave the tragedy that IE6Mac actually existed as that subscription software abomination but was never released to users in any practical way.)

But that’s the thing; the reason that IE6 evokes such a visceral, seething, burning hatred in web people like myself today isn’t that it wasn’t a good browser at the time. It isn’t even the proprietary technologies that it included. It’s the simple fact that there are a relatively small number of egregious and obvious CSS bugs in it that went un-fixed until IE7 five years later.

Now, I didn’t work on the IE code, and it’s probably far harder to fix, say, the 3px float bug than it seems. But most of those bugs–and bugs they were, by any measure–had existed since IE5, yet gone unfixed. And while it’s possible fixing the float bug would have broken existing pages (some of the container expansion bugs probably would have), a lot of the minor but fiercely annoying ones don’t seem to have any practical application in existing pages apart from making things look weird if you don’t take them into account.

So the issue I, at least, have with IE6 is simply that there were small but destructive bugs in IE5 that not only weren’t fixed in IE6, but continued to sit unfixed for five years. FIVE YEARS. Or call it three. THREE YEARS. I would argue strongly that at least SOME of those were .x release-level issues, not even something that would require a full version step up or hose the existing web. It’s not like FF or Safari or Opera haven’t had similarly annoying bugs–it’s just that they almost always get fixed in a timely manner, in a dot release update.

Says something that the Mozilla team could literally write a competitive browser, from scratch, in less time than it took to even get started on IE7. I suppose one could argue that the IE team did the same thing during the ~2-year dev cycle of IE7, but that doesn’t help the point any.

Don’t think I’m disparaging the IE team on any of this–I blame it almost entirely on management, since I can only assume the decision of where to spend time was made at a higher up level.

Anyway, just trying to make it clear that there are those of us who recognized IE6 as a very good browser in its era, but still harbor a deep-seated, almost unexplainable hatred for it now, and for completely different reasons. Doesn’t help any that 7-year-old technology still has 20% market share, so it still hurts all these years later.

Most of this wasn’t innovated, but political. ActiveX is a big security hole, but it allowed much of the web to be Windows only since ActiveX content required Windows DLLs to function.

Microsoft also spent millions on buying ISP loyalty. I worked for an ISP and we were offered free equipment and training if we made I.E and WIndows the “primary” platform for our users.

I’m glad to see Microsoft finally taking standards seriously. But, technologies like Silverlight are basically heading in the wrong direction. Especially at a time when the very similar Flash itself is under attack. When will Silverlight for Linux based Android or RIM be around? (I’ll give you guys a pass on the iPhone OS version).

Innovate, but make sure it’s not an excuse for locking users into a Windows only world.

I’ve never minded the flame wars, or even the trolls, who are frequently amusing. I find fanboys frustrating – whether they’re Microsoft fanboys or the competition’s.

This problem is radically exacerbated in enterprise environments, where new software changes can mean retraining as well as compatibility testing, and the internal software (web applications) may not be easily updatable – or at the very least, it costs the corporation real money to do updates.

I’ve had a long personal history of seeing what small changes to correct blatantly wrong behavior can do to compatibility; it’s not pretty. Certainly as browsers all successively approximate “correct” behavior (aka figuring out what correct interoperable behavior is, when it’s not well-defined), this problem will lessen – but it won’t go away.

Top-level motives aside, I’ve continually advocated for more effort applied to the web platform in Microsoft. I’m not totally convinced a radically shorter development cycle would be a good idea, though – see next reply, but also note that the Silverlight platform is essentially side-by-side; changes don’t affect old Silverlight applications, like they do on the web (because web developers tend to reject versioning).

1. you should indeed blog more, +1 on what Dan Connolly said.

2. product cycle, company policy, and “you suck” comments: most commentors don’t seem to work in a big enterprise. Namely, they don’t seem to see how complicated it is to evolve a product when it is so much related to other products in the company, be they good or bad (development frameworks, Sharepoint suite, etc.).

This is, actually, the main reason why I don’t blog about the company I work in. I have no time for flame wars.

(Oh, and I’ve been using and avocating Firefox for several years but yeah, IE6 in 2000 rocked, and MS was very early and energetic on CSS adoption, back in IE3. Just in case anyone puts me in the fanboy box: I’m not a fanboy.)

With that said I’m looking forward to IE9.

Even now IE is back in active development, the fact remains that Silverlight has had four releases in the time that IE has had two. And yeah I know what you’ll say about proprietary platforms vs standards-based ones, etc, but I still wonder exactly what the level of resource is for both of these teams, and whether Microsoft couldn’t push IE along a bit quicker if they really wanted to.

I remember what a pain it was each time a new release came out and stuff broke. It was partly the plateau that gave a stable platform to build web 2.0 on… not a popular view these days, but it was. Part of the problem was that the tools and frameworks weren’t there.

I think the 2 year or more cycle served its purpose though. It is time for continuous update and a subscription model to match. For example, if there is bug to work around in Chrome, I can report it and not bother with a workaround for that current version since I know that it will get fixed, and no one will be using the old buggy version. Coordinate with release cycle and you’re done.

I would have said that the “Vista reboot” (restarting development from the server code base) was also involved. Maybe it happened later than the plateau or had not tha much effect on ie7 development.

Regarding “Microsoft’s intentions toward the web”, I think it’s nonetheless an important question. I can understand that, since you work there, you may not be in a good position to discuss it, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that a combination of circumstances is enough to explain the lack of willingness to interoperate shown by some teams at Microsoft (e.g. the Office team’s choice to not interoperate with everyone else regarding spreadsheet formulas). Whether someone high up could have pushed for some work on the rendering engine during this period and chose not to, we have no way to tell (and I doubt anyone could really tell without having been personally involved there). Things like that end up costing a lot by sinking the enterprise’s reputation.

Well, that’s a lot of negativity, and the comments above show that the resentment left by the plateau is still very much alive. I for one will tell that I’m grateful to the ie team for the work they have done since ie7 (even though there are decisions I don’t like much, e.g. supporting h264 only), and to the other team that embrace interoperability and more to more openness.

Thanks for posting here from time to time, too!

On the 5-year plateau, it was really a 3-year plateau – we shipped IE6 in 2001, and I moved over to IE to lead the platform PM team in late 2004. IE’s product cycles just seem to have settled in at around 2 years.

So what is the benefit to MS to keep doing their own rendering engine? I know competition is good, but I think we’ve got enough competition out there already years ahead of IE. Seems IE9 will deliver half of the stuff webkit was delivering last year.

Why not just integrate an open source rendering engine that’s already on its game?

I mean that in the most non-douchebagy way.

Oops, missed the capslock key.

Stop making the web a nicer place to work and live, stop removing roadblocks to standards adoption, stop driving progress in the HTML and CSS working groups, and above all, stop giving open and rational explanations when I demand them.

I don’t want to understand, and I don’t want to cooperate. I want to be miserable and angry. I want to hate you. I have to hate you. Please.

IE6 has been the bane of Web builders’ existences for nearly a decade, and has cost the sane advancement of the Web years in terms of people having to waste time and resources on cross-browser compatibility.

Just the way Microsoft wanted it, I suspect…

Thanks for nothing.

I only wish IE8′s compatibility was a 1-to-1 copy of IE7 instead of a new browser essentially with differences and new bugs that IE7 didn’t have. Aside from lack of standards support, compatibility was my biggest complaint. It doubled the work required to test websites because you have to test IE7 and IE8 compatibility mode separate. Big mistake in terms of developer relations. I hope IE9 does not follow the same path.