I attended an Internet Explorer Team Chat earlier today, which was mildly interesting. I’ve posted a somewhat sanitised log of the chat on my blog, so you can read for yourself and see what they said. In short, I wasn’t very impressed with their responses. They weren’t committing to anything, and most of the hard questions were tackled with “we’re constantly evaluating feedback” type of answers. After spending an hour in the chat room, I didn’t come out of there feeling any more enlightened about Internet Explorer than before I went in. Apparently they’re going to be doing this once a month now, so if you missed it this time, you can mark your calendars for the next time. Or something to that effect. Yeah.
UPDATE: Looks like Neowin.net has caught wind of this. Thanks to hao2lian for pointing that out.
I was there too, and I mirror your sentiment. Sounds to me like they’re too busy on damage control to touch upon any form of innovation before Longhorn.
The talk about maintaining “backwards compatibility” and not wanting to “break the web” as opposed to developing a standards-strict rendering model seemed to excite the tinfoil-hat gang… Seems to me like the sunniest assumption I could make is that they’re just choking on their own popularity and that their millions of customers demand and will accept nothing but a broken browser.
Let’s hope for the best. I’d be pleasantly surprised if the next IE rollout had any treats at all for the standards-savvy designer or developer.
Chat with the IE Team
aebrahim has a blog post containing an IRC log of a chat with the IE development team, which they hope to be the first of many. A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for any Microsoft development team…
RE: Why is IE going down so much?
And Now: Ba-dump
The IE team steps out of their cave and into the glaring sunlight.
Zeldman to help with IE7?
According to a recent Internet Explorer Team chat found over at aebrahim’s blog, it seems Jeffrey Zeldman, other standards evangelists and big name developers could possibly find themselves working with Microsoft on future versions of IE.
Tabbed br…