

How I didn't help 280 North resolve an issue with IE - jf
http://jf.posterous.com/how-i-didnt-help-280-north-resolve-an-issue-w

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vsync
Wow, seems everyone is going back and forth on side issues, not the technical
WTF at the core of the story. Is there any legitimacy to an arbitrary stack
limit, particularly such a low one, and especially in a way that's
inconsistent depending on the type of object the function is attached to?

This is only exacerbated by the uselessness of the available debugging tools
and Microsoft's general unhelpfulness.

~~~
zaatar
vsync - Thanks for the feedback; We have made massive improvements to the
developer tools we ship with IE. Please take a minute to download & install
the latest Platform Preview from here - <http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/>
\- and give it a whirl. If you hit the F12 key, you should see the developer
tools show up, and you will be able to see the tons of improvements we have
made since IE8.

See also:
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/22/ie9-developer-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/22/ie9-developer-
tools-network-tab.aspx)

If you have any suggestions or comments, please reply back. There are many
open channels of communication, e.g. the IEBlog, Connect, etc. but as an FYI,
I will also be looking at responses in here, within news.yc

~~~
lenni
Ravi, even though Microsoft browsers make my life as a web developer a misery
and I hate your employer's tactics with a passion, I appreciate you putting
your head on the block here in a humble and courteous manner.

Now all your team has to do is to ship a great IE9.

~~~
p0ppe
And make sure people start updating a bit faster.

~~~
zaatar
We are doing all we can; no, I'm serious - this isn't a cookie cutter, "Here's
$nice_boilerplate_response, now go away" thing. We are severely limited by law
(both US and international) about shoving updates down people's throats when
they don't want them. We are limited by law about what we can call a "Security
Update", and what we cannot ... We have absolutely no control on what IT
Admins decide for their corporation's intranet as well ... etc.

While it would be awesome to silently push down IE9 onto everyone, I
unfortunately doubt that it is going to happen (I'm not a lawyer ...)

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lenni
I'm no lawyer either, but can't you change IE9's EULA? In Google Analytics I
never see a great range of Firefox and Chrome versions - they seem to update
fine. 80 - 90% are on the latest version.

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philwelch
People who use Firefox and Chrome care about having a good browser. People who
use IE are content to use what came default with their computer and might not
even care about running automatic updates.

~~~
philwelch
What? I'm serious--you can't compare Firefox and Chrome users to IE users on
how many of them keep their browsers up to date, because FF and Chrome users
by definition are people who take an active role in downloading and installing
web browsers. It's a selection bias, not a slam against IE or IE users.

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egometry
Communication is always an issue with larger companies. This is one of the
awesome benefits of 0th/1st stage start-ups: the right hand always knows what
the left hand is doing.

~~~
andreyf
_Communication is always an issue with larger companies_

No, not always. A lot of the Google Chrome team hangs out in #chromium. If you
come in to track down a bug showing genuine intelligence, it's likely a
solution will start getting pushed down to user machines in the dev channel by
the end of the month.

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qeorge
I've heard passing reference to this bug before, in the form of "you can't
attach unlimited window.onload events", but I've never seen anyone run into it
in practice.

Glad to see its fixed though. Wish I had a neighbor who worked for MS. ;)

~~~
tlrobinson
Just to clarify, the bug wasn't fixed in IE, but we were able to work around
it in Cappuccino.

~~~
qeorge
Thanks for the clarification. Should have read more carefully.

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latch
I've had a number of really negative experiences with MS evangelist - I
generally see them as a sales tool, especially on the dev-side of things (I
can't think of a single good developer that I know who would want to become an
evangelist).

Anyways, in my ever-lasting cynicism, this is what I got from the blog post:

-There's a bug in IE

-IE bugs are hard to debug

-There's a bug with MSDN downloads

-It takes "a lot of help" for an insider to figure out how to report an issue and identify the people to report it to

-It took 20+ days, and numerous attempts to get help from Microsoft

-When the IE team says its "tracking it", you shouldn't expect any resolution

~~~
zaatar
(Disclaimer: I'm the "Ravi Rao" mentioned in the post, and I work full time on
the IE Team at Microsoft)

That's extremely unkind, if you ask me. We have a support line that puts you
in direct contact with Product Support Services people who are best equipped
to debug your issues, and I know that every support call generates a ticket #
and gets resolved; in cases where the PSS Engineer isn't able to debug/sort
out the issue themselves, they get escalated to us, on the Product Team - I've
done tons of investigations myself, and we funnel the information back to the
caller via the PSS, so they're not dealing with 10 different people but
rather, maintain a single point of contact.

In this case, I not only exchanged email with Joel, but also with Ross Boucher
of 280 North behind the scenes, and within the same day, narrowed down the bug
to our JScript engine. A trouble ticket was generated the same day I learnt of
the problem, and that's how we were tracking it. You could get the exact same
service by calling our 1-800 support desk albeit the support folks will have
to go through their script to make sure the mistake isn't human error at your
end, to begin with ... sure, it'd be great if all your issues got resolved
within 30 minutes of us hearing about it, but the reality is that it may
sometimes take longer than that. You're spinning it absolutely the wrong way
if you imply that having "insider connections" is essential to getting a bug
report investigated.

Joel and I (and others internal to MS) worked hard to get a startup's problem
resolved as soon as we could; I can't believe you're actually complaining
about it.

~~~
zaatar
And for 280 North's side of the story, see:
[http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/03/01/internet-
explorer-g...](http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/03/01/internet-explorer-
global-variables-and-stack-overflows/)

Quote:

    
    
       I want to give another thank you to all the folks at Microsoft who helped us track down the problem and provided us with a simple test case that reproduced the problem. They were quite helpful, and we (along with all of our users) appreciate it.

