Monday, February 13th, 2006
Ask the Internet Explorer Team
Category: Browsers, IE
, Interview
The Audible Ajax podcast crew will be interviewing the Microsoft Internet Explorer team in Redmond, WA later this week (for an Audible Ajax podcast episode that we’ll release later this month). As the provider of the dominant browser platform, we have a lot of questions that we’d like to ask them. But we’re also interested in your questions.
If you have a question for the IE team, please leave a comment on this blog entry (Slashdot-style) and we’ll gather the most interesting ones together and include them along with ours. If we had a community-comment-moderation-system, we’d let y’all decide on the most interesting questions, but sadly, we don’t — so you’ll have to trust our editorial judgment. ;-)
The interview will take place on Thursday, so, don’t bother leaving a question comment past Thursday morning Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8).
Related Content:
How important will adherence to existing standards be in IE7? I’m not speaking to the embrace-and-extend philosophy, but simply to the embrace-in-a-non-standard-way-and-extend philosophy that sometimes characterizes your companies offerings.
What is your time-frame for full support of SVG and will you implement the tag currently found in Firefox? If so, when?
Mozilla Firefox has gained much popularity due to its extension model. Are there any plans of providing similar extendibility for IE (perhaps via pluggins written using .NET technology)?
@Dave: what tag? it got stripped out from your comment
my question: “Its great to see the big css bugs being fixed, are there any plans to continue imporving the Standards rendering with hotfixes or will we need to wait for major versions?”
Also: “Is any more development of IE planned after IE7 or is this more a once off thing? What kind of timeframe will major updates be on?”
aaaaaand: “We’ve read about the longhorn efforts to clean up Microsofts code and improve stability, will we see any of this in IE7?”
One last question, I havent really followed the IE blogs much so maybe they’ve said this already, if so forget it:
“We know about CSS improvements, but will there be improvements in the JScript engine, especially where memory leaks are concerned?”
How much of IE’s non-compliance is solely the team’s responsibility and how much is directed by other than technical arguments and time constraints, such as Microsoft’s marketing department or even the team’s own decisions to ‘differentiate’ IE? Is making IE so much harder to program for a conscious decision for lock-in?
Any plans in implementing support for CANVAS or JavaScript 1.6? More important, how come that Microsoft is not part of the WHAT?
Are their any plan to join the Open Ajax alliance (that aim to develop a complete ajax development environment based on eclipse) ?
sorry – canvas tag
What about a native SVG support ?
In the current version of IE, transparent png’s won’t display correctly. In transparent areas of the png, IE currently just shows a grey area. Why is this (AFAIK the normal windows explorer is able to show those files correctly) and is this problem going to be fixed in the IE7?
Another question: it is often said, that IE doesn’t use standards for a reason. At the moment, IE still has the biggest market share and by not using standards, web developers are forced to “break the rules” when writing webpages to assure, that IE displays them correctly. In return other browsers have problems with the “strange” code provided and “normal” users get the impression, that IE is the only browser capable of displaying most pages correctly. IMHO this is not far from possible. Any comments on this?
Ajax Applications Frequently Break the Back Button (history). any plan to add control API that solves these problems ?
any plan to add a Javascript Console? or will it be included with the next version of IE Dev Toolbar ??
any plan to add a Javascript Console? or will it be included with the next version of IE Dev Toolbar?
This may not be what they want to hear…..
Has anyone at Microsoft seriously considered phasing Internet Explorer out? Microsoft don’t make any money from IE, in fact all the negative publicity must have a damaging effect on the company.
By way of Internet Explorer they have more or less mobilised an entire generation of developers and programmers against the company, sometimes to an unjustified degree. The reality is that this bad will spills over to other MS products.
Why not do what they did with the Mac version, discontinue it, hand over the baton to Firefox and redouble their efforts at producing improved versions of their core software.
Ross Riley, very funny. Tell us another joke.
Will IE7 ajax support Multipart/x-mixed-replace server push? In IE6 it was not possible to access the ResponseText of an ajax object until the request was finished/the connection was closed. Will that be fixed?
@Ross Riley: By making users migrate to firefox they are making their own users see just how successful open source can be, which could affect sales of their commercial products. Microsoft has also made attempts to control/charge for access to the internet as a whole (Passport, .NET…), by controlling the software people use to access it they can control a lot of potentially profitable markets
but a girl can still dream…
This is probably an overly naive question, but I’d seriously like to hear their answer: Why can’t the big browser makers get together, agree on the standards, come up with some compliance test suites, and set a timeframe for the true next generation of browsers? It could almost be a web/browser reset. Agree on what CSS3 should be. Agree on how XHTML should be presented. Agree on simple things like, where does the web site area start in the browser (i.e., is it 1px in, or 0px in?). And, figure out a graceful way for us to code so a site can fallback if the user doesn’t have a “new and improved” browser.
What I’ve heard in the past is companies don’t do this for strategic and revenue reasons. I can understand that, but I guess I’m getting tired of spending time debugging sites. I don’t do enough design that I’ve got all the hacks and side-effects of hacks committed to memory. I’ll do something interesting in one browser just to have it break another, and then I’m off on a bug hunt.
Bottom line: I’d like to hear the developers themselves explain why they can’t get together and fix this stuff once and for all. I don’t care anymore who did it “right.” I just want consistancy.
I echo all the above questions especially those revolving around standards compliance and the adoption of SVG and Canvas. Please dig for real answers on these questions, not the PR bable they are likely spout.
And I add one. “Why must Microsoft be evil?” Maybe somebody on the inside knows! ;)
Where will IE7 go with CSS1/2 compliance, alpha-transparency in PNG files, and adherence to the W3C standards.
Extend all you want, but for the love of god, give us standards compliance FIRST!! After that, find all the ways you want to break the web … the rest of us can go on coding for the WORLD instead of hacking sites to pieces to please M$.
I pretty much want to know about these:
JavaScript: memory leaks elimination
Canvas & SVG
Where will Microsoft go with HTML + TIME . Why are Webinars distributed in WMP when they could be delivered natively within IE with better non-linear navigation
Simple question.
What support for JavaScript (ECMAScript) has been added. Please don’t point to a spec/version #, as we all know that your implementations in the past, have NOT fully matched the declared spec.
e.g. on a per object/function level, what has been added? what has been removed?, what has been modified?
E.g. Have you added:
Array.indexOf(member);
Array.lastIndexOf(member);
I am intressted in multi-tasking and/or thread-handling in Javascript. I think such technology might encrease the popularity of IE among developers once again. Furthermore, introducing such feature can push the evolution of Javascript as language.
Following standards are important but innovative development is equaly important, in my opinion.
HI,
i am using javascript in my application which is running internet exploer . i am getting the following exception ”
A debugger break at “jScript – anonymous”could not be handeled because the source could not be found. check the class path in the debug option dialog. the application will continue
”
i have installed dubugger to find the error on the page.
can any one help me out in this?
thanks in advance
how can I lock the ie for internet usage form others but still system working others also
still i did’t got any info ..
I don’t see how anything can compete with standards compliance. As it stands right now, IE is something of a laughing stock in the browser arena. They are by a long shot, the greatest contributor to the least common denominator for web develpment. I have to fork my code and right thousands of lines of unnecessary functions specifically for I.E. more than any other browser and this experience adds to my apprehension of Microsoft as a whole. As the heart of Microsoft’s target market is responsible business use, this is the audience they are hurting the most by not having a fully standards compliant browser.
It’s no fun to focus on negative things, but it almost appears that Microsoft is comfortable with the image of being in opposition to responsible web development. If that is the case, web developers will do everything they can to be in opposition to Microsoft and do their best to further the open source movement. SIMPLE things, like standards compliance can easily resolve this and the public image of Microsoft can gain an even deeper foothold.
Eventually ISO-9000 and similar standards protocols will inevitably filter into the web. When this happens, standards compliance will become absolutely paramount. This kind of movement will put the focus of the business community on Microsoft’s negligence to the standards bodies. If this is the case, I imagine this kind of attention will not be favorable.
any plan to add a Javascript Console? or will it be included with the next version of IE Dev Toolbar ??
same question for me..
i think firefox is best then ie 7
Great blog, including in my favourites.
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Kim
I’ve never heard of Audible Ajax. What ever became of this? Are there any online example of it in use?
Too bad I missed this :(
Where can we find the answers please?