MS Director speaks out about IE, Firefox & others

He uses Maxthon!

[TheWhippinpost]

Interesting interview with MS Dir of Product Management on current problems and future for IE.

"...with respect to some of the other browser competitors, who haven't had enough browser share in the past to have to worry about those things. Once you start to get enough browsers out there, and people start to build sites that work with them, then you're kind of restricted and hamstrung in terms of how you make changes. "

"That's something I think the Mozilla guys have had a bit of a free ride on, until now. ..."

Betanews [betanews.com]

Maxthon is an excellent browser BTW.

[dcrombie]

Another way of looking at it:

"if you play fast and loose with the standards where you don't have a monopoly then it WILL come back to haunt you."

It's good to hear it's happening already ;)

[ronin]

"We could change the CSS support and many other standards elements within the browser rendering platform. But in doing so, we would also potentially break a lot of things..."

Though, presumably nothing that was written to be standards-compliant in the first place? >;->

This is a preposterous excuse from Microsoft, the tag-soup coder's friend.

[Lance]

This is a preposterous excuse from Microsoft, the tag-soup coder's friend.

I think he meant without associating the changes to a major version rev.

If you just put out a "patch" to magically make IE 6.0 compliant, you would have the same version of the browser interpretting things in two different ways.

Kinda makes it impossible to use work-arounds then. If you do it in a rev change, at least you can use IE conditionals.

[ronin]

If you just put out a "patch" to magically make IE 6.0 compliant, you would have the same version of the browser interpretting things in two different ways.

Two different interpretations, yes... but one of them would be standards-compliant and the other not.

Who cares about the non-standards compliant version? I am more tired than I can say of cross-browser testing. It is a development inefficiency I could do without. I would be happier if the standards compliant code that I write just worked in IE. I recognise that browsers are difficult and time consuming to put together, but IE needs to recognise that it's long past time to drop the "with us or with the W3C" stance.