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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

I was at CES last year, and the showing of the IE team was my favorite part of the trip. They were a bunch of younger guys who basically said "We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things in our name. We're changing that, and we're here to tell you about it." They seemed like really cool dudes.

I even went over to the mall to try a Surface when they came out. Then, I realized Windows 8 is still Windows and walked out empty handed. The stuff MS is doing with Metro and touch is really interesting (as were tablet PCs before that), but I feel like they're still building on three decades of crufty sands. It's time for their System 9 -> OS X transition.

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Do you really think the fault is with a bunch of greybeards? More accurate would be:

"We know the guys who used to work here did some terrible things because they were told to by people who still run the company. We're changing that, because we're being allowed to for now, and we're here to tell you about it."

Ballmer: "I know, let's have a bunch of kids at CES promoting this fictional younger / hipper image because Apple is destroying us."

Sounds like competition is working!

(Disclaimer: I worked on IE from 2007-2013)

Yes, the current IE team is extremely strong, and has only gotten smarter & stronger during the time I worked there. There's tons of meetings I've walked out of where we made a decision to do X rather than Y because "the standard says to do X" and it was the guiding principle for decision-making.

That's really good to hear. But why was the non-standard way even an option?

> But why was the non-standard way even an option?

People tend to have their own ideas on how things should be done. They should definitely be heard too. There is nothing wrong with questioning or doing things differently than current standards dictate as long as you have open, honest discussions.

Because, sometimes, standards are wrong, purposefully allow implementation-specific choices, or are helplessly vague and everyone can't agree on the interpretation.

However, the right answer is usually to exceed the requirements of the standard in way that best benefits the consumer and meets business goals.

The IE box model actually made for sense if you wanted your fluid layout to look good.

Many of the IE specific stuff dates back to the IE4/5 era, and back then Netscape was not much better.

After developing for Netscape 3 and 4, IE4-6 were a breath of fresh air.

if(document.layers) ...

It is unfortunate Netscape "Mariner" was cancelled.

Windows 8 may still be Windows, but WinRT is very much the System 9 -> OS X transition. Windows 8 supports both the old Win32 APIs and the new WinRT APIs.

That was going to be my comment as well... The WinRT kernel was started "fresh" to be mostly compatible, without the weird crufty legacy support. I think the biggest things holding back RT is that it's only on locked down ARM platforms, and low-level SDKs aren't widely available.

I would speculate that RT will become the main windows kernel by Windows 10. Then again, I'm less likely to even be running Windows by then (4-6 years).

WinRT isn't a kernel, it's a shell. It's like saying that Android is going to replace Linux.

You might (understandably) be conflating WinRT and Windows RT. One is ARM only, the other is not.

Well, OS X had Classic[1] for years, so it had that compatibility layer to bridge 9 to X.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Environment

Right. In addition, CarbonLib ran on OS 8/9, so developers could migrate their apps to Carbon but continue to build OS 9 and X apps from the same codebase.

I think of WinRT as more of a weird System 9 -> iOS transition.

Reminds me of the 'I contribute to the windows kernel. We are slower than other operating systems.' article:

http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74

"Another reason for the quality gap is that that we've been having trouble keeping talented people. Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, and we hire youths straight from college to replace them. You find SDEs and SDE IIs maintaining hugely import systems. These developers mean well and are usually adequately intelligent, but they don't understand why certain decisions were made, don't have a thorough understanding of the intricate details of how their systems work, and most importantly, don't want to change anything that already works.

These junior developers also have a tendency to make improvements to the system by implementing brand-new features instead of improving old ones. Look at recent Microsoft releases: we don't fix old features, but accrete new ones. New features help much more at review time than improvements to old ones.

(That's literally the explanation for PowerShell. Many of us wanted to improve cmd.exe, but couldn't.)"

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