Jeremy Mazner responds to my comment about the IEvangelist position.
I definitely appreciate the history of IE, the advancements and innovation around IE 4 and 5 were very impressive and helped to shape the Internet into what it is today, I think the problem is the time from IE 5.5 until now.
I worry more about Microsoft’s commitment as a whole to the project, not just the members of the team. I am sure the team that originally built IE was very passionate about it, but after Netscape was vanquished it was no longer a priority for the company. Not until Firefox did MS decide to put more focus back on IE. I don’t worry about MS being able to add some awesome innovations and features to IE, I worry about what will happen if they vanquish Firefox… how can we trust a company who has a huge interest in keeping things on the desktop to advance the largest challenge to that platform? (Although they are doing a good job with ASP.NET 2.0, the best argument against smart clients)
That being said I look forward to seeing what the IE team can come up with; here would be my list of must-haves for 7.0:
1) Fix outstanding rendering bugs.
2) Better solution for using IE from managed code.
3) Better extensions model (see FireFox)
4) Place a priority on standards based development (CSS2, etc)
5) Turn off ActiveX completely.
6) No proprietary tags/script/etc.
Of course, all of these are meaningless without an answer to the “big” question.
-James
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Thanks, James, I like your list of must-haves, although I don’t know what people who depend on some of those IE features today would think
I understand the trust issue (and am glad you give props to ASP.NET 2.0). Let me ask you this — would could we as a company do today to demonstrate commitment to IE? Short of watching us for the next 3 years to see what happens, are there concrete steps we could take today that would make you think "okay, they are actually serious about focusing on IE"?
The biggest issue, for me, is the following of CSS standards (#4). That would show a HUGE difference, IMHO, in the mind of many web developers.
Jayme
While it can be abused, site upon site has proved ActiveX is essential for next gen web apps (Windows Update and HP’s new web based driver detection & installation).
I definetly agree with the rendering tabs and the lack of CSS support, in particular the Max-Width tag which isn’t implimented at all and is very usefull (although a workaround hack is available this is no escuse for proper support, nobody wants to write their css twice ala the Netscape/IE Javascipt days).
And you also forget to mention the infamous PNG problems with alpha layers, which should have been fixed 5 years ago!
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