
IE9 team responds to Reddit questions: reddit tl;dr version - dochtman
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/c10szx5
======
niyazpk
Mark my words, the decision of not to making IE9 compatible with XP will lead
to thousands of hours of developer time and millions of dollars wasted in
fixing browser compatibility issues. This will just be another reincarnation
of the IE6 effect.

BTW the tl;dr version is an excellent summary. It is a warning to all the
marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr
version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish.

~~~
cubicle67
[disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working
in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty
high :) ]

I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and
if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP,
then good for them. Seriously.

I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and
IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that
would are also able to install any of the alternatives that _do_ run on XP

~~~
pilif
in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please
upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please
install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group
policies exists"

~~~
grayrest
"hey! Please install a plugin[1]?"

<http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/>

~~~
pilif
yeah - that what I said today.

And now there's 300 less IE6 to worry about.

------
cubicle67
in response to a question about websockets and friends:

 _Our approach when deciding what technologies to support starts with data.
There are three things we consider: What are developers actually doing on the
web today? What do developers want to do in the future? <snip> We started by
building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used._

Isn't this arse about? Isn't it kind of hard to use new tech if it isn't
supported. I'd love to be able to use some of the new HTML5 things, but IE is
holding us back

 _XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a
modern web experience._

WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this
sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say
that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

~~~
StavrosK
Their entire attitude is worrying. I'm afraid that this is going to hinder the
web again, it just looks like they want to release the bare minimum they can
to get marketshare instead of actually make a good browser.

Opera, with its 5% market share (or so) has been reigning on the tests and
innovation for ever, and Microsoft can't get enough employees together to work
on a browser?

As far as I'm concerned, nobody should recommend IE for anything, as the risk
of Microsoft pulling another IE6 is too high, and not worth the reward.

~~~
DeusExMachina
I wonder if it could be possible to see more and more web apps take advantage
of the full standard and state clearly on the front page "this website does
not work on any IE version. Please use another browser".

This is indeed a hard choice to do, since it means leaving a lot of potential
users out of the plate. Maybe startups can afford such bold moves, I don't
know. But I think this could be the only way to force Microsoft change their
mentality, eroding their browser market share more and more.

~~~
StavrosK
This is debatable. For example, the historious bookmarklet works on all
browsers right now, except IE8 which refuses to run the JS. IE users are about
6% of our users, so is it worth spending hours debugging an issue for 6% of
the userbase?

We will do it, for the _user_ , not for the browser. I don't want to have to
tell someone "this doesn't work, use something else", because it's just not
polite to tell him what he can or can't use for a few extra hours of work on
our part.

However, if the browser is _so_ broken that it takes considerable work to make
it usable, then yes, I'll put up an overlay saying "your browser is too
broken, please use another one for the good of the internet and your sanity".

EDIT: Also, I don't want Microsoft to change their mentality. I want them to
stop making browsers (and maybe a few other things).

------
lenni
I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I
silently thought to myself.

It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely
sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then
not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and
ridiculous things in the bible.

~~~
tiles
[Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to
re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally
offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic
priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a
Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support
Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-
platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't
really control those things, they just use the product.

~~~
lenni
You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority
talking in detail, would have been better.

If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the
organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.

------
bl4k
Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being
slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never
'standard':

* innerHTML

* css applied to chrome

* XMLHttpRequest

* i18n DNS

* double-byte char support (since 96)

* embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one)

* first video embed (IE2 on Mac)

* hasLayout

* iframe

* marquee (for the lolz)

* contenteditable

* opacity/filter

* favicons

* first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5)

It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some
guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should
look like.

Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the
loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the
same thing.

People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but
they complain about web standards because it is easy to.

~~~
points
You're quite wrong.

HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features.

And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.

~~~
bl4k
That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for
so long and they threw in the towel after IE6.

Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas
previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way.

It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft

~~~
points
I disagree. They stopped innovating after they killed all of the competition.
They didn't need to any more.

MS certainly don't have a vested interest in the internet - it goes against
their core business.

~~~
bl4k
I think its fair to say that Microsoft don't do complacency

esp. in competitive markets

IE team was torn apart as part of internal politics

~~~
jfager
That's not fair to say at all. IE6 is a perfect example of complacency in a
competitive market from years ago. Their mobile efforts to date are a perfect
example of complacency in a competitive market today. They were _years_ late
in shipping Vista, _years_ late in trying to meaningfully compete with Google,
they've been long complacent with their Mac Office products, and some of their
developer tools are atrocious.

You don't get a pass because your internal bureaucracy and politics prevent
your engineers from doing their jobs.

~~~
bl4k
Actually you are correct. I think if they had the option to, they would not
have been complacent, but all the internal muddling stalled them on Vista
(worst project ever) and IE. They only got their teams cleared out in the past
18 months and restructured and there is a lot more to do (Dean Hatchamovitch
leads the IE team now, great guy who came in via sysinternals)

So you are right that internal turmoil shouldn't be used as an excuse. I think
they know that they can't be complacent though, the Vista slip must have cost
a lot of market share to Apple.

------
points
Just to clarify for those that haven't read the answers, this doesn't look
anything like the "IE9 team" responding. It looks like a marketing team
responding.

That's why you get BS answers like "XP is a platform that doesn't allow for
the performance characteristics of a modern web experience."

~~~
philjackson
I'm just wondering; if they had said "we don't want to have to spend time and
money backporting new APIs and we want to encourage you to upgrade Windows",
how would we react? Frankly I would have far more respect for an honest answer
like that.

------
nl
Can we kill the IE-should-be-built-on-webkit meme? One of the web's strengths
is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations.

Yes, the differences suck when you are dealing with CSS incompatibility
problems, but when you look at the big picture it remains vitally important.

~~~
shadowsun7
_One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible
implementations._

What do you mean by this? Am genuinely curious, because I've always raged at
the lack of browser standardization.

~~~
logophobia
Because:

* Mono-cultures are bad security-wise, it's harder to target multiple platforms with different vulnerabilities then one platform (which is one of the reasons IE had such a bad reputation for a long time)

* It prevent people from coding to specific browser bugs/quirks. When there are a lot of platforms it is easier to code to standards (if they are consistently implemented across browsers) then specific platforms. Theoretically at least..

------
DevX101
I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit
admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned
explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9.

Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their
audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS
posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven.

The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted
and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and
become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had
succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and
paying big bucks for similar campaigns.

There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll
see how that goes.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
>The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted
and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their
advice.

Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point
of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to
build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and
instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive
developer commentary.

~~~
DevX101
At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type
of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the
campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post
would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their
fault.

~~~
barclay
> The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post
> would be a disaster

I dunno. If you look at some of the more technical stuff the MS devs post on
channel9 (and some of it being really, really good) you could almost imagine
that there _could_ have been an interesting and informative exchange of
information here.

~~~
kenjackson
Honestly, I don't think there could have. Take for example, the question on
spell checking. The right response, IMO, would have been. "Given everything
else we needed to do and still needs to do, this is pretty far down on the
priority list."

I'm sure that would have been disliked just as much as their response, which I
actually sort of liked as it went into more detail about how items get
prioritized.

But a general tip to the IE team... you can tell customers your decisions, not
how you arrived at them. In general the most vocal people will be those that
disagree with your decisions, and can then attack how you made the decisions.

------
jasonkester
The actual responses are here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/)

The comment linked summarizes the IE team's responses in the voice of a M$
strawman, ready to be attacked by Reddit. As a result, it makes for a more
entertaining read if you like to hate Microsoft, but it doesn't tell you what
they're actually thinking.

I preferred the long version.

~~~
cubicle67
the long version doesn't tell you what they were thinking either

 _[edited to add the following]_

Yes, there's a few cases where the longer version contains a bit more detail,
but in general the tl;dr version is a pretty concise summary. For example,
compare this answer

 _XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a
modern web experience. We have a great browser for XP users (IE8) but as the
web continues to advance you need a modern operating environment that can take
advantage of the underlying hardware through the OS. IE9 requires Direct 2D
support which is available in Vista (with SP2) and Windows 7._

to this

 _Because Microsoft neither wants to backport new APIs to XP, nor do they want
to release a version of IE9 that doesn't require the new APIs._

~~~
StavrosK
Especially with the answer about visualisation, the summary was _spot on_.
Seriously, what the _fuck_ , Microsoft? Your browser is so precious that you
can't release it as a standalone product so _the entire world_ can move on?

------
Griever
The refusal of including auto-update is pretty infuriating to me.

"Will you force users to keep IE up to date so developers don't have to
support legacy browsers.

Corporations don't want to have the latest version of a browser."

Alright, I understand that auto-updating could be an issue for IT at large
corporations, but why not just make it a feature that is enabled by default?
I'm sure IT guys who DO want their users using the latest stable release would
be quite happy, and those who don't could easily disable it.

------
jan_g
I think that tying IE to operating system is a bad decision. If they can make
whole MS Office package available on OSX, then why is browser that special ?
Of course I know many of the reasons why _not_ port IE to other oper. systems,
but it would make my life easier if I could have all browsers on my machine
for development testing.

~~~
cubicle67
I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, but from what I can see
Office for Mac isn't simply a port but a completely separate codebase
developed in parallel (for low values of parallel)

It (Mac Office) also generates a significant amount of income for MS

~~~
jan_g
No, I didn't know that, because it's completely counter-intuitive approach to
creating software. You have to abstract most of the stuff and then port just
OS-specific stuff. It's beyond me why a company of the great software
development tradition like Microsoft would go and maintain two completely
separate codebases.

~~~
jasonlotito
Because then Office would end up like iTunes for Windows. Office for Mac is
actually really, really nice. I'm sure they have a lot of shared common
libraries between the two, but it isn't a quick and dirty port. They take what
they can use, but make sure that the end result is tuned for the OS.

~~~
mdwrigh2
Not to derail the topic from the main issue at hand, but what's so wrong with
iTunes on Windows? While it doesn't conform to all of the Windows idioms you'd
expect, I still found it to be a better music player than just about
everything else. This was a couple years ago, back when I was using Windows,
however.

~~~
jasonlotito
First, there is the issue of those Windows idioms that you expect on Windows.
iTunes and Safari both essentially forgo any pretense of adopting Windows
standards and instead keep their own way of doing things. It would be as if
Office for Mac didn't use the menu bar on Apple, and instead, simply copied
what they did on Windows.

It also doesn't work well with the OS. Things you can quickly and easily do in
WMP are painful in iTunes.

I'm sure some people found iTunes a pleasant experience, but most people I
know only have it installed because they have an iPod or an iPhone, and are
forced to use it.

Basically, it works well enough, but it's not a polished application.

~~~
calloc
Office for the Mac doesn't follow standard Mac OS X idioms either ... for
example using its own spell check rather than the system wide one. Printing
goes through their own dialog which can cause all kinds of issues. Excel's
scrolling is not the same as scrolling in the rest of OS X (they followed the
scrolling from Excel on Windows which is horrible).

The worst part is that I like to have various apps open in my dock, then when
I click on them or switch to them with Alt + Tab I DON'T want them to open a
new empty document that covers the entire screen thereby disrupting my thought
process, and even if it did that when I open an existing document it should
close the temporary empty document it just created (see TextEdit for a good
example of that).

In Excel for example the only way to get the function toolbar to show up is to
click the "Formula Builder" in the "Toolbox". As soon as I click away from it
to format the text a certain colour the bar disappears.

When I am within a Cell in Excel, I can't use any of the Cmd + key shortcuts
to accomplish anything, for example, selecting the entire contents of said
cell.

Going back to the text editing part, I can't easily look up a word in the
built-in dictionary with ctrl + cmd + d while hovering over a word.

Office for the Mac stands out like a sore thumb.

~~~
jasonlotito
Fair enough. You do make some good points. =) However, I think it's fair to
say the Office for Mac team has done a lot more to make their software for the
Mac, rather than just a mere port.

------
marknutter
Lack of Websockets support so disheartening it almost makes me want to cry.

~~~
lukifer
This one drives me crazy too. At least it can be emulated via Flash or
Socket.io to support the same features on IE.

------
mirkules
Just read the original, and while I do disagree with Microsoft's approach to
answering these questions, I think the reddit community did a disservice to
themselves (and possibly the entire hacker community) by transparently
disguising attacks in the form of asking a question. For example:

"When will they be releasing a Mac OSX version? I couldn't find the download
link on their site. I must be an idiot. But I submitted a question so I'm sure
they'll get back to me and tell me where the download link is. I've also got a
Linux machine at home. Perhaps I could use that? Has anyone tried the Linux
version yet? Does it work OK? I couldn't see the Linux link either, but I
wasn't really looking very hard. Some companies don't support Linux, so
perhaps it's understandable if they haven't got a Linux version yet. I'm sure
it'll be coming along soon. But I can't imagine anyone would release a new
browser these days and not have a version that runs on Macs. So it must just
be me. Right?:-/"

I'm not saying tough questions shouldn't be asked -- they should, and were --
but this particular kind of question is immature and should have just been
ignored. I'm not at all surprised MS decided to respond in PR speak (although
I still don't condone it).

Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft reach out to a more mature audience and
actually have their engineers answer questions this time.

~~~
niels_olson
Perhaps we should invite them to an HN ama?

------
Groxx
> _As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking
> web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their
> browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety._

I doubt I'm the only one, but... I'd be willing to bet the _delays_ in
adopting updated browsers is a _far_ worse security hole. I can't count the
number of times I've heard of a company getting a virus into the network
through some specific version of IE, and which only works on some specific
version of XP. Businesses which _don't_ update are a script kiddie's wet
dream, because they're such an easy mark to cause trouble to.

And, to the writer of the tl;dr version: _wow_. That's a billion times more
readable than the official responses, and remarkably accurate for the ones I
was able to stomach reading. Excellent job.

------
Locke1689
I saw this and at first I was hopeful that something good would happen. Then I
saw the comments and remembered that, for every smart Reddit user there are
about 99 blithering idiots.

Most of the comments were troll responses and a circlejerk of Microsoft hate.
Very disappointing.

------
nphase
_Making a browser gives us more power to control web technologies._

This makes me truly sad. It's clear they've learned nothing from their own
browser history and have a terrible attitude towards the progress of the
modern web.

~~~
dbrannan
It seems they are still fighting for control through the web browser, and its
a strategy ingrained into their very core. I would think they would do
everything possible to protect their cash cows (office + os) and limiting
browser functionality to the least common denominator (IE) is the easier way.

------
greyman
I wonder if we also could have something like "HN questions" here?

~~~
steveklabnik
My searchyc foo is weak, but I think this was done a few weeks ago.

And also, this is directly part of Microsoft advertising on Reddit. Since HN
doesn't have ads...

Not saying they wouldn't ever do it, just that's how it got on Reddit in the
first place.

------
jerome_etienne
im surprised how honnest they are. sure they control what they say, but it is
far from the usual "ie9 is better than all other browsers" diagrams they usual
give us

------
Tomek_
Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low"
too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get
real!

~~~
cryptoz
IE is the only (common, useful) browser that doesn't run on Linux. It's not
_that_ absurd to hope that future versions might be cross-platform.

~~~
Tomek_
IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually
use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would
never use it as his default browser, if only because: a) it's not open-source
b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft

So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.

~~~
cryptoz
Microsoft makes gobs of money from ads on Bing searches, just as Google does
from Google searches. In the consumer market, Windows share is falling. Google
is releasing an OS later this year, Apple's products are obscenely popular.
Android is more and more popular every day.

People don't _care_ what OS or browser they're running half the time. The
thing is that IE is _not an option_ ; it can't be bundled on the most popular
smartphones, or the most popular tablets because MS won't let it be.

I'm not suggesting that Gentoo nerds who write web software are going to care;
I _am_ suggesting that MS is losing out badly because of their Windows-only
attitude. The future is NOT Windows-only software: the future is cross-
platform software.

Microsoft is making a big mistake by not allowing anyone to use IE unless they
also use Windows.

~~~
Tomek_
At no point I wrote that I'm for IE being Windows only. Sure, Mac version
would make sense. But a Linux one? Not really.

~~~
cryptoz
Linux phones are selling faster than Apple phones. Why doesn't it make sense
to support the new, popular mobile OS?

------
gbrindisi
I hate when i read a lot of "Because Marketing told us so...". I know this is
how the world is going, but damn it's harsh.

