Thanks, Ruth Murphy http://ruthmurphy.org

Re evolving the Web platform – hope you folks will put in a position paper for this upcoming W3C workshop on Web/TV, http://www.w3.org/2010/11/web-and-tv/ … deadline looming but it doesn’t have to be a long paper… even a page or two would be really helpful to make sure things head in a useful direction.

Nice Post.My question is Which is better place ?Google or Microsoft?
In terms of innovation.
Well i am looking forward for the next post on Working culture.

”’when they’re sitting 10 feet away from their screen, and interacting with a “remote control””’

Do you have any mechanism yet for 3rd party apps/content to live on second screens (tablets, smartphones, eventually table surfaces) rather than clutter up the telly? At Joost (RIP) we had on-screen HTML/js widgets, but they always came between the viewer and the real content. These days bringing the widgets to a smaller nearer screen seems more appropriate, but there’s not a lot yet by way of standard communication channel between the devices…

“Do not try to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” (A.Einstein)

Your “Compatibility View” system goes down in history as the ultimate web standards joke on Microsoft.

I can’t believe Google was dumb enough to hire an idiot like you.

Like all baby boomers, it’s time for you to retire and end the stupidity of Internet Explorer.

-Dr. Powershell

Congratulations and I hope it meets all your expectations.

Best,
C

I completely sympathize about the commute. When I left Microsoft for Adobe, my commute changed in the same way, and it was amazing how much happier I was based solely on that change. (I lived in Wallingford at the time.)

I am excited to hear about the move. I wish I had the chance to work with you on the Open Web Advocacy team at Google. I would have had a lot of fun.

Cheers,

Dion

bruce

Congratulations, Chris! Very, very excited for you and for what it means for the community.

Good luck and do good things.

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.