Al Billings on the late IE feedback system
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.
September 21st, 2007 at 09:18 UTC
So do you regret not taking the job at MS? I mean, you’d be on the inside of the black hole at least :)
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.7 on Windows.
September 23rd, 2007 at 02:47 UTC
I can’t say I regret not going after that job. I like the freedom I have right now to engage in a lot of different and interesting projects, and working at Microsoft would definitely involve me making a lot of sacrifices — personal and otherwise — in hope that it would amount to a “greater good”. And I’m not convinced it would.
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Linux.
September 28th, 2007 at 20:32 UTC
Almost a year since Internet Explorer 7 was released. In between? Radio Silence…
I hope there will be more feedback taken into account for version 8 than for version 7. And if it’s only the missing pressure of an OS release and the small bit the WaSP fought for.
Then again, there are so many bugs around IE. From User Interface down to the rendering engine. Trivial things they almost already declare WON’T FIX…
Hopeless, isn’t it?
Posted using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.7 on Windows.