Al Billings on the late IE feedback system
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
Al Billings, who left Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team in May 2006, has just made a lengthy post about “Borgzilla” (his name for the mismanaged Internet Explorer public bug database which was shut down around the time that IE 7 was released).
Al pretty much confirmed my take on the situation: Microsoft didn’t dedicate enough resources to the project and didn’t provide the users with the tools they needed to use the system effectively. He also explains that there was a disconnect between the public bug database and the IE developers, since the IE team was primarily working with their own private bug database.
Toward the end, Al offered the IE team some suggestions to improve their relationship with the web development community. I have to say, I completely agree with Al’s conclusions in this post. To people on the outside, it feels as if the IE development team has died again. We’re sitting here today with no real clue about what to expect in IE’s future beyond what we already knew a year ago. All of the latest posts on the IE blog are about the present or the past. The last few posts in Chris Wilson’s blog are about lolcats and vacation. I want to hear the IE developers’ opinions about HTML 5 and what parts (if any) are planned for IE 8. I want to know if display:table and friends, :before and :after, and outline support are currently being worked on. I’m not even asking for any promises; just some real open discussion.