IE9 team responds to Reddit questions: reddit tl;dr version

in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group policies exists"

Dammit, I still run XP on my laptop. The latest Chrome and Firefox run just fine on it.

Not that I ever run IE anyway, unless something I need to do has been written to require it specifically, but seriously, Microsoft - your marketing team should not be writing the specs.

> I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP.

Keep in mind that many (most?) large businesses (aka "the enterprise") are still running XP so MS is only continuing the pain by not making IE9 XP compatible. This is particularly annoying given that both Firefox and Chrome run perfectly fine on XP.

Less than a year ago, I bought a brand new netbook preloaded with XP. XP might be originally 10 years old but it's still actively being sold.

But they are supporting XP, until 2014. And they've extended "downgrade rights" to XP Professional until 2020.

Agreed, that was awful. It's as if the answers had been rewritten by a committee of marketroids in some lame attempt to connect with the audience.

I recently ended up on some Microsoft guy's blog that was also in this style. Apart from that it was interesting but annoying to read.

You're talking about how IE9 itself could have been improved; cubicle67 was speaking about how the IE9 team's response could have been better.

In this case, while IE9 is still a terrible product, the team's response is so stuffed with fluff it appears this whole Q&A session might have backfired.

Everyone is just looking for a direct, no-bullshit response. We don't want anything that sounds "hip" or loaded with marketing speak.

But..

1. Part of 'what's out there' is still limited by attempts to remain compatible with IE6. Especially looking at the 'top X' sites. Yes, some sites are ignoring IE6 these days, but I bet when they started researching that wasn't the norm (and it's probably still not the norm today).

2. Spoke to developers and partners - yay. Except the majority 'partners' they speak with likely are very MS centric. This isn't a "MS devs are dumb" comment, but I speak with many people across multiple platforms, and there's a shocking lack of understanding (or even caring) about other platforms across the board. Many "mac only" devs don't know much about Windows, for example.

If the majority of people they spoke with were MS partners, they're going to get a very skewed input base. Did they go out of their way to consult with anti-IE devs? Did they talk to Rails/Mac-based shops to see what they're doing? Did the reach out to Opera or user groups (if any exist)?

"What they were going to do in the future" may have been dictated by their understanding of a future MS roadmap.

Okay, but if you look, the only (stated) reason they’re now adding SVG, for example, is that “Acid3 is one of the sites that is frequently mentioned in the community.” It’s not like SVG is otherwise used all over the web. (Though it’s starting to be a little bit, and will be much more once IE supports it)

As the browser with dominant usage share, Microsoft has (and had to a much greater extent 5 years ago) great power to hold new technologies back. For them to turn around and say “well, people don’t use those yet, so we decided they didn’t matter” is pretty rich. I think “arse about” is just the right description.

(In reply to both mgkimsal and jacobolus:)

I'm not defending Microsoft's actions, nor the level of standards-compliance and modernity of IE9 as actually being delivered. I'm just saying that their description of their process -- see what's actually being used out there, and talk to a bunch of web developers about what they'd like to be added -- is perfectly sensible and not at all "arse about". Whether they're being honest in describing the process, and whether they're executing the process well, are completely separate questions.

The thing is, this attitude isn't new. MSFT's MO for many, many years has been to put out "just good enough" products.

I wonder if it could be possible to see more and more web apps take advantage of the full standard and state clearly on the front page "this website does not work on any IE version. Please use another browser".

This is indeed a hard choice to do, since it means leaving a lot of potential users out of the plate. Maybe startups can afford such bold moves, I don't know. But I think this could be the only way to force Microsoft change their mentality, eroding their browser market share more and more.

> Their entire attitude is worrying.

it is most likely the case (as has been discussed in that reddit thread), that these guys are likely sitting around in a room of lawyers and marketers. their responses are filtered and picked carefully

care to elaborate? nothing is sacred to a hacker.

It's a little heavy-handed, but a pretty good analogy.

They tell me not to feed the trolls but here goes anyway.

You have constructed a straw man. He is not saying that one IE9 problem corresponds to one problem with the catholic church - in fact you made that up! Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. This is made evident by the tl;dr version but is just as obvious if you read the original thread.

It is impolite to put words (and other ridiculous things) in other people's mouths.

I like your comments, in general. But this one comes too aggressive against the whole reddit community and it's a disproportionate response. I'd rather say:

Could you please take that kind of topic to the proper forum, perhaps r/atheism, please? HN focus on startups, business and technology only. Think of it as r/technology + r/programming + r/business. Thank you for understanding.

While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.

I can't blame them for side-stepping those issues--I would do the same thing. Anytime someone mentions that they're Catholic on reddit, people automatically assume that (1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation, (2)you agree with how the Church handled it all, (3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this problem. I don't know a single person who approves of the practice of just moving people around, but there are so many complexities to the issue. I can't even begin to discuss the finer points without someone piping up with their random, pointless garbage that taints the conversation. The Catholic Church has done a lot to fix the problems with the child abuse stuff. We've stopped with the Crusades (and apologized for them!). And the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality and things of that nature are much more nuanced than people realize. Honestly, most of us are just tired of talking about these things. (Except the crazies who get all the press. The news people don't like talking to sensible people--that doesn't make for good TV.)

Really, most of the stuff on reddit about Catholics is vitriol and hate, and there's really no point to answer obvious flame bait questions when there are other perfectly good questions to answer.

You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better.

If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.

It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users".

While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance.

Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?

That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for so long and they threw in the towel after IE6.

Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way.

It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft

innerHTML is still the fastest way to inject content into a page.

I am clarifying the list now, point applies either way - lots of innovation that we appreciate today came out of IE

I was a web dev at the time of 3, and I remember a lot of CSS properties that IE supported and added, I will dig up a list. Thanks.

(btw agree on IE5 being a great browser, I had a lot of work replacing internal intranet desktop apps with IE5 intranets - the enterprise loves ie5)

Sorry I rattled these off, going back and clarifying and adding some references in a moment so that the entire argument doesn't get simply shot down by pointing out a single feature :). Thanks.

Ye this is what I was talking about - pointing out one of the points not being correct (even though IE implemented 128 bit ssl first) means you call my entire reply wrong. I just rattled these off the top of my head, the point still applies.

One meme I don't want to kill is, God damn it, Microsoft... release an app that allows web developers to test in IE6-9 on the same machine, without needing lots of VMs.

Spoon.net goes some of the way, but IE9 won't work on my XP box. So I'll need to reinstall Windows 7. Which means Synergy will stop working again. Blah.

While I agree with grandparent's take on webkit meme, I don't agree with your take on multi-platform meme. IE-on-other-platforms meme will never die, because this is an important issue for many people.

For major releases, like IE9, they could have taken another approach. Like, for example, abstracted many components (css/html engine, js engine, plugins framework, etc.) from the underlying OS and then port just the bridge between those components and underlying OS. It's not easy and there're always many quirks, but we're talking about Microsoft, after all.

Because:

* Mono-cultures are bad security-wise, it's harder to target multiple platforms with different vulnerabilities then one platform (which is one of the reasons IE had such a bad reputation for a long time)

* It prevent people from coding to specific browser bugs/quirks. When there are a lot of platforms it is easier to code to standards (if they are consistently implemented across browsers) then specific platforms. Theoretically at least..

You should also keep in mind that even WebKit isn't standardized. Webkit rendering is wide and varied.

Multiple implementations:

a) Force specifications to written carefully, and exercise the edge cases. It's important the browser authors do this because otherwise web pages authors are forced to find these edge cases (as happened in the IE6 & early IE7 days, when MS had so little competition that they could afford to be careless)

b) Slow down change the core technologies. This sounds like a stupid "advantage", but I'd argue that it has enabled the core HTML/CSS/Javascript trinity to become so well established that any new platform is forced to support it. Ironically, that also means new platforms become viable simply by supporting the web platform.

c) Allow multiple paths for experimenting on new technologies.

Here's the link announcing they will be managing the campaign:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_wo...

Quote from the link: "See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign."

At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their fault.

>How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

I now have reason to believe you're correct.

Especially with the answer about visualisation, the summary was spot on. Seriously, what the fuck, Microsoft? Your browser is so precious that you can't release it as a standalone product so the entire world can move on?

Compare these answers to the "why not build on webkit" question:

Reinterpreted answer: "Our marketing team tells us the best way to get cross-browser compatibility is to reinvent the wheel."

Original answer: "Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to getting to a web with same markup (i.e. write once and renders consistently across browsers). For one perspective around the challenges with various Webkit implementations see this article that recently ran. The way to achieve same markup across various browsers and various implementations of rendering engines is through the W3C with comprehensive standards test. We have a robust engine and platform with IE9 that coupled with our work towards same markup and participation with the W3C is focused on making the life of developers a lot easier."

Sorry, but that's not stripping out the BS. That's inventing BS claiming it was Microsoft's when it's in fact a BS reply of some trolling reddit user to another trolling reddit user's question.

Yes, you are correct. But the newest version, Office 2010, is much better and also supports VBA. My coworker that uses the beta version is positively surprised at the quality of the product.

EDIT: It's actually named 'Microsoft Office for Mac 2011' and not 2010 and will be released at the end of October.

No, I didn't know that, because it's completely counter-intuitive approach to creating software. You have to abstract most of the stuff and then port just OS-specific stuff. It's beyond me why a company of the great software development tradition like Microsoft would go and maintain two completely separate codebases.

IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because: a) it's not open-source b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft

So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.