IE 7 getting some props from security expert

I kinda agree wit John, Jaseone and Scottie. It's just inexplicable that IE was made to languish like it was. And Robert, hate to break it to you, but the whole explanation of the team being 'demoralized' is rather weak.

Microsoft screwed up. Big time. IE7 is a step, no doubt, in the right direction - but there are other aspects for which Microsoft's record is spotty at best - keeping the software up to date (Feature wise) even after ff/opera are no longer threats (in an admitedly outlandish scenario), embracing standards and security (or lack thereof) because of tight integration with the OS.

Robert, the team didn't make that decision, people at a higher level did. Are they still in a position at MS to make any decisions other than when to change the mop water?

Why is it so hard for a company such as Microsoft with a mind blowing amount of resources at it's disposal to make a standards compliant browser? I just don't get why IE7 is just a step towards standards complianceit just doesn't make sense.

>What assurances does anyone have that the next time someone says something mean about IE that they’re not going to take their ball and go home again

It's almost wholly a different team.

Scottie: have you tried the latest ASP.NET? I don't think you have. It does a LOT better job following Web standards.

IE 7 is going to take a step toward standards compliance. It won't be perfect, though, but the team is going in the right direction there.

I have to agree with most of what John has been saying.

Simply put, Why hasn't IE6 followed most of the standards that were laid out by the W3C (back in the later part of the 1990's and early in 2000.)? MS is an active part of this consortium. As a web developer, I constantly have to work around issues, bugs, etc, to get my sites to work in IE. It's a joke really. We code it to work in FF, and then "make it" work or IE. The only reason people put up with this is because IE has the largest part of the browser marketshare.

And ASP.NET and the Visual Studio tools don't make this job ANY easier. All these tools do, is BLOAT up my HTML with extraneous tags, etc. How is this making the web any faster? It's better just use a old text based editor, and hand-roll the code, than to use these tools.

And now, we have "conditional comments". Man, now I have to "undo" my CSS hacks that have been working for years now, and add in conditional comments??? WTF?

Why didn't MS bring IE at LEAST up to half-a-decade old standards?

No Robert, I don't expect people to be inhuman and have no emotions, (but nice job on misrepresenting what I said. You're good at it)

What I expect is that when a team responsible for mission critical software makes a mistake, that they own up to it and move on, not cry in their milk for 5 - 6 years.

Nor did I say I expect them to be arrogant. But I must ask, when you say things like that, what color is the sky in your world? What would have been arrogant about regularly updating IE to keep it compatible with current web standards?

What would have been arrogant about doing the security fixes just showing up in beta for IE 7 all along?

And no, it's not water under the bridge. What assurances does anyone have that the next time someone says something mean about IE that they're not going to take their ball and go home again. From a professionalism point of view, the IE team was so far out of line that it was a sphere.

The prats who made the decision to abandon ongoing IE work, and thereby abandon the people who relied on it for mission critical applications to the friggin' wolves should have been publicly terminated with no chance of reference, so that there was no danger they could go and sabotage anyone else with their immaturity.

But as long as it's MS doing the misrepresentation, and, by your words, quite deliberately taking action that caused their customers massive harm, then it's all the DOJ's fault.

Does MS ever admit fault in anything? I mean, what's the level of screwup that MS has to make to just admit fault without justification and finger-pointing? How obvious does it have to be for your company to not act like frat boys getting busted with illicit beer? What does it take for simple contriteness and sincerity, you know, the stuff you supposedly learned by the sixth grade?

If this is the kind of leadership that Ballmer and Gates believe in and support, no wonder Microsoft is an unfocused mess.

Compete fairly?

So you're going to ship builds of Opera and Firefox with Windows Vista?

Oh what's that, you're going to leverage your desktop monopoly to try and regain the ground you lost in your quest for internet domination?

So is that the current spin on why IE development has been so slow? That is just pathetic.

Why couldn't they just develop a way to uninstall IE and then move on to new development?

Well, ask the developers who left the team. I guess you expect everyone who works at companies to be super human and not have emotions and you expect executives to take on the government and continue to be arrogant even after being told to knock it off. Got it.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge. The team is rebuilt, IE is being invested in for the long term, we're going to compete fairly, and we're working with the industry and community to make a great browser.

Robert, here's what you said verbatim in this post http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/02/03/dave...

Don’t you remember a certain government telling us to make the market competitive again? That’s exactly what happened.

To which I said:

Oh please Robert, it was the DOJ’S FAULT that IE didn’t get updated for 6 years other than a neverending stream of security fixes?

If you don’t know, just say, “I don’t know”, but there was NOTHING in the DOJ/Anti-Trust results that said “YOU MUST NOT TOUCH IE FEATURES FOR SIX YEARS”.

and then you said:

John: our executives made an explicit decision to not invest in IE after that. Also, former team members tell me they were totally demoralized after that decision came down and wanted to go ANYWHERE else but stay on the team that got the DOJ’s focus on Microsoft.

It’s interesting that you seem to know so many facts about the team. How many have you interviewed? How many do you know? Do you talk with the head of the Internet Explorer team often? I didn’t realize you did.

That last part of course has nothing to do with what I said, but I suppose it's okay for you to misrepresent things.

So again, it's simple. Either show us the precise text in the settlement that explicitly forbade MS from ANY updates other than bug fixes and security fixes for 5-6 years, or get off your "omg, u misrepsent m3! Suxx0R!" high horse.

Their hurt feelings are a personal issue that hurt, in a very real, definite, not-inconsequential, measurable way millions of IE users worldwide. They got caught, you know, breaking the law, and instead of accepting the consequences of their actions, and proceeding like adults, they flipped off their customer base.

How many of IE 7's "fixes" could have been a part of IE 6.X had they not been immature Robert? How many websites the world over would not have had to do extra work to deal with "IE can't handle CSS and other modern standards properly"? How many people didn't get to go home on time to be with their families because of Microsoft's inability to suck it up and act like grownups.

That decision, made for no other reason than hurt feelings cost millions of people billions of dollars and you wonder why no one trusts MS anymore? Hell, even outside of the "evil" part, their reaction to any kind of adversity shows the senior management of MS to be immature and unable to function like grownups, even when it's a problem they created.

Deciding not to invest in IE for no other reason than a reaction to the DOJ was stupid. How can I possibly misrepresent that?

John: thanks for the total misrepresentation of what I said. But, thanks. Let me see how you do when the government tells you to make the market competitive again and to let a competitor back into the market.

J. Random, Robert talked about the lag in IE dev. Basically, the IE team and exec's feelings were hurt by the anti-trust team, so rather than working with the new rules, they had a hissy fit, and stopped new IE development, because "I'll show those antitrust arsehelms" is SO much more important than supporting their customers with timely updates.

That is what happens when you have old teenagers instead of adults running your company.

Pronob: I just loaded http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/? in FF 1.5.0.1 and didn't get a single popup, they were all blocked and that was without any extensions, just the built in pop up blocker.

Chrono Cr@cker: All the other major browsers have had the ability to add and modify search engines for as long as I can remember, while it is certainly good to see IE jumping on the bandwagon it is still just catching up to the competition.

I am yet to see or read about anything in IE7 that isn't already implemented by the other major browsers so tell me again why is it such a major thing?

Mike,

I had no idea that IE went five years between releases. Thanks for filling me in on that, and I must say how thankful I am that I haven't had to touch it in at least four years now.

I saw a news article just now that speculates on MS bringing out a competitor to BlackBerry. So, while all of their shipping products languish for years on end, MS's management is apparently completely hung up on reacting to anyone else who's making a significant amount of money.

MS may be the biggest software company, but it sure isn't the leader.

Interesting. It's nice to see adding and modding search engines has been made easy.. A Definite ++ in IE!

Have they rewritten the way IE reads html and css? There has definitially happened something, if you open pages in IE7, things are looking different from IE6.

kp...
The pop up blocker becomes useless when you go to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/? using firefox too. You should have mentioned that too in your blog post

Liking it? Do you even READ the things you point to? He merely said he's happy they are FINALLY improving the security (took them 5-6 years to get that message, playing DOJ political football games all the while). Bigggg big difference, between "liking" and happy the tone-deaf dimwits at Microsoft are finally slumbering down the road inch by inch.

Opera is the best, Firefox is just too darned geek-head web developerese and clunky slow (tho I like it), IE is a more of a disease, over a browser. Avant and Max good front-end covers tho.

less than 5 minutes later, I changed back to Firefox. The IE crowd has a lot to learn from Mozilla...

Lookin forward to giving it a try!

IE7 looks great! Pop-up blocker is practically useless. Using IE7 try browsing http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/? and you will know what I mean. Boat loads of Pop-ups still show up with blocker setting HIGH. Any fixes?

You really know how to cherrypick Schneier's article :)

He didn't exactly say he liked IE7. He's just happy about the announced changes in security, because a browser used by the masses will become less insecure, hopefuly much less.

Quote:
"I'm not switching from Opera yet, and my second choice is still Firefox. But the masses still use IE, and our security depends in part on those masses keeping their computers worm-free and bot-free."

well good thing for them, I had the first IE7 beta installed, then upgraded to XP Pro and IE7 doesn't work, tried everything but still doesn't work. nice job Microsoft.

Great - now if it could just render html and css properly. Notice how nobody talks about that? Wonder why.

we don't like microsoft :P

Happy Lincoln's Birthday!
Did any of you buy him a gift? No?

Ok. Well I am using IE7 and I still sit here and think "this is the best the IE team could do after releasing IE6 FIVE YEARS ago?"

I'm sticking with it just in case I stumble across some nugget of usefulness, but I am not optimistic.

I think Opera is still the best browser out there, bar none. Firefox is for the overclocking crowd who have unleashed their inner geek.

I don't like firefox it cause crash and alots of holes. Netscape (net./com.) is S_ck ! Pains I stay-put XPsp2 and " E " Only that is all. so Enter Your's Own Risk and Becareful

I can't wait until IE7 destroys Firefox or Opera by accident one day, remember folks, don't use Microsoft applications in a production environment!

Microsoft requires users to do the heavy lifting. Bruce Schneier changes nothing to the fact that 99% of people out there don't see the difference between ten web browser apps. Except the icon, may be. Who said the "e" icon means the Internet to most users?