Category: Microsoft

Microsoft hosted another Internet Explorer Team Chat yesterday. I’ve put up logs of the chat in plaintext and RTF format. Not a whole that we didn’t already know was said. All in all, it was pretty disappointing compared to the last one I participated in, during which there was at least some useful discussion. Oh, and for those who are wondering, the person nicknamed “ali” in the chat who was asking questions was not me. I don’t know who it was.

Do you know anyone who needs to grab Windows XP Service Pack 2 but doesn’t have the bandwidth? Microsoft has a solution: they’ll ship an SP2 installer CD for free to pretty much anywhere in the world. All you have to do is fill out this form, and a CD will be shipped out almost immediately. My brother received his less than a week after it was ordered.

There are a lot of nice enhancements in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in SP2. They feel a lot smoother. Browsing with Internet Explorer is no longer popup hell, and Outlook Express is no longer prone to loading remote content without thinking. Even so, Firefox and Thunderbird still blow them away.

It looks like Microsoft is hosting a new IEBlog over on their new MSDN Blogs site (thanks to mine for the heads up). It’ll probably be worth following and seeing what they have to say. Certainly not daily reading, but probably something to check out every now and then. I’m hopeful (though not very optimistic) that we’ll see some good debate there. Right now most of the comments over there are just mindless IE-bashing, which isn’t very conducive to getting any real use out of the blog. If this sounds like something you’ve done, consider leaving thoughtful comments instead.

Also, there is an Internet Explorer Feedback Wiki hosted on Channel 9. There are some useful links on there, but surprisingly, the site seems to have a somewhat ‘IE-sucks’ kind of vibe. Odd for an MSDN wiki.

All in all I’m happy that Microsoft is trying to become more open with its development efforts. It’s headed in the right direction. However, it remains to be seen how committed they are to it, and whether or not it translates into any real changes.

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.