
IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow - djug
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/8ba70824-dba2-4425-bc75-247c2c29bde1/ie-web-development-support-moving-to-stack-overflow?forum=iewebdevelopment
======
kayman
Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community.
it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old
closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.

~~~
sajt
I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their
community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable
questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the
party.

~~~
fredley
I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always
been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the
site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still
working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of
what enables it to continue to be a useful resource.

That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the
hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than
the stance against active discussion.

[1]: [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-
new-...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-
policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback)

~~~
dionidium
It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect
against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed
as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers
are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their
answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers.
It's a lot of should, should, should.

But why are we talking about _shoulds_ that will never get done when a _really
good answer is already here?_ You've got users actively providing good content
and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be
_over here_ instead? You know, we have these things called _links_ on the
world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at
the expense of the books in the collection.

~~~
drewblaisdell
This is by far the worst problem with Stack Overflow. The mods seem to leap at
the chance to mark questions that are similar, but not identical, as
duplicates.

~~~
bunderbunder
There's one easy fix for this, and several other problems with SO: Don't close
duplicate questions. Just cross-reference them.

Reasons:

    
    
      - Gets rid of the "This was closed because of trigger-happy
        moderators failing to distinguish between 'similar' and
        'identical'" problem by making that situation impossible.
    
      - Improves answer discovery for users: If Google gets you
        to almost, but not quite, the right question, 
        cross-referencing gets you the rest of the way.
    
      - Improves answer discovery for users: Maybe the best answer
        today isn't the same as the best answer 5 years ago.
    
      - Improves gamification: Rewards are the lifeblood of
        a site like Stack Overflow.  A way of dealing with
        duplicate questions that rewards users for 
        cross-referencing them is infinitely more in line with
        SE's basic idea than one that punishes them with
        public shaming. 
    
      - Reduces opportunity for petty bureaucrats to take root.
    
      - Represents a more thoughtful, measured way of thinking
        about software engineering.  Many questions really can
        have more than one correct answer, or the correct answer
        can depend on subtle details.  Which answer gets the
        green check mark may have as much to do with the situation
        of the asker than the quality of the answer.

~~~
robertwharvey
That's exactly what closing duplicates does: cross references it to the
original. If someone wants to post new information, they can do it on the
original.

~~~
dionidium
Yes, they _can_. But they _won 't_. (For various reasons, but primarily
because it won't get any attention. Nobody likes yelling into the void.)

An alternative to shaming is that you could just _accept this great new
content that a volunteer is giving you._

~~~
shagie
There _is_ a badge for _exactly_ that - Necromancer (
[http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer](http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer)
): Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more.

Whenever a question gets a new post it gets bumped up to the top of the
activity again - the same amount of possible attention as when an hour old
question gets a new answer too.

~~~
mark-r
It depends on the question. If it previously didn't have an answer or only had
one, it goes to the top. If it had 5 OK answers and you add a 6th really
awesome one, the ranking doesn't change much - expect it to be totally
ignored.

~~~
shagie
That is not always the case. Consider
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/263542/](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/263542/)
in which an answer was posted three years after the question was asked and two
years since the last visible answer was posted (
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/65281/timeline](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/65281/timeline)
) and is now the second highest answer in the question. That doesn't sound
like 'totally ignored'.

~~~
dionidium
It does happen. In fact, I think that a couple of my best (and highest-voted)
answers are _necromancers_. However, I should note that the question you
linked has 51464 views. And a lot of the questions I've earned _necromancer_
for were similarly well-viewed. That's not typical. Most old questions get a
fraction of those views.

Edit: In fact, I should admit that I usually only put the effort into
answering old questions when it's something that has a lot of views. It's an
indication that the question is linked somewhere prominent or is ranking well
for some search terms. _Those questions_ are worth putting the time in for.
Most aren't.

------
alexggordon
Firstly, bravo. I really applaud Microsoft for realizing what it wanted to
have in a Q&A site, and realizing Stack Exchange was that realizing. Then
realizing that people are probably going to go to SE, instead of a Microsoft
forum or product.

That said, I think Microsoft is going to be in an adapt or die philosophy for
the next few months, and I think this is one of those decisions. They know
they need to foster a community that anyone can be a part of.

Open Source move? Check. More Open Source? Check. Stack Exchange? Check.

The only thing this piece is missing is a better hardware platform, so I'm
going to be very interested in seeing what Microsoft can produce in the coming
months.

~~~
Avalaxy
> The only thing this piece is missing is a better hardware platform, so I'm
> going to be very interested in seeing what Microsoft can produce in the
> coming months.

Why? Honestly, I think the Surface tablets and Nokia's Lumia devices are
really high quality.

~~~
alexggordon
I really think Microsoft could do a much better job at fostering a productive
App development ecosystem, which is the heart of a good mobile operating
system. My ability to use a mobile device hinges on an expectation of UI and
Hardware, but a gold standard of an incredible App environment.

Obviously, Apple has achieved this. Google Play has had some rough spots but
is definitely a close second. Then there's the mortal wounds; the Amazon,
Samsung and Microsoft App Stores,

That leaves Microsoft as the only company that designs Hardware/OS but still
has a terrible App Store. In fact, scams and misleading apps were so bad[0]
Microsoft actually had to address them[1].

Don't get me wrong though, if the App Store were better, I would love me some
Lumia, but really, when Hardware and OS become a toss-up, really the next
thing to look at is the App Store. Microsoft has some great momentum in the
right direction now though and I would love for that to continue.

[0] [http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-
cessp...](http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cesspool-of-
scams-why-doesnt-microsoft-care/) [1]
[http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/08/27/how-were-
ad...](http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/08/27/how-were-addressing-
misleading-apps-in-windows-store/)

~~~
Avalaxy
You're absolutely right, the WP appstore really has a lot less to offer than
its competitors. It's really frustrating as a WP user to see companies
ignoring WP all the time. Honestly, there is no good reason any more to leave
WP out, there are multiple really solid cross platform development frameworks
out there nowadays.

~~~
kmdev
Tradeoffs (and I'm sure I'm mostly preaching to the choir). Generally, for
non-trivial mobile apps, you want to try and build native versions for
Android/iOS first. Frameworks that are cross-platform just aren't up to par in
many aspects (again, for non trivial apps). While you may be able to get
performance close enough to native performance with a cross-platform
framework, you're still going to be spending a significant amount of time on
the UI/UX side customizing to ensure your app's look, feel and general flow
line up with the standards and best practices for that platform. This is not a
trivial concern. Facebook found that out the hard way on Android as one
example. Users learn and form muscle memory on the platform they choose to
invest in and respond very poorly if your app doesn't deliver a UI/UX that
adheres nicely to the platform standards. Another concern, which is being
addressed, but is going to be an ongoing concern for still some time, is API
feature access on each platform. Cross-platform frameworks are continually
playing catch-up to try implement access to the most important new API
additions on each platform. The gap has certainly been shortened, especially
in the location services area but ultimately, there won't be API access parity
across platforms for quite some time and it will still lag behind the native
implementations.

Again, this is all in general, applies the most to bigger apps and/or apps
that rely heavily on fast performance or access to specific native APIs and
based on one mobile devs experience.

It is exciting to see that for most things that are somewhere between a blog
and a small to non-trivial application, just focusing on making sure your
site/small app works well on most mobile browsers is sufficient. You can also
usually wrap things up in each platforms' version of a WebView if you want to
get your app/site listed on each store for that extra exposure. Again though,
you have to be very careful doing that for the same UI/UX concerns mentioned
earlier.

Getting away from the more technical aspects, just looking at WP market share
vs Android/iOS means that even if a business wants to hit every platform,
they're still going to start with iOS/Android and making sure they have a good
mobile site experience before looking at WP. Add in the cost of finding a dev
to work on your WP build (or assigning one from another team to it) and you
end up with only the largest entities having the man-power and expertise to be
able to justify a priority list that includes executing nice implementations
across all platforms, including WP.

------
iancarroll
MSDN Social is probably the worst web I've ever used, honestly... The layout
is confusing at best.

The answer is attached to the bottom (full length, no see more or anything) of
the question and is then repeated again. Threaded comments are also very
poorly formatted, and they hit a limit pretty soon from what I've seen.

~~~
damian2000
Not to mention that its slow as hell.

------
ihaveajob
This is great news. In the past we worked with a great group of developer
advocates, and I know they spent countless hours answering all sorts of
technical questions on Windows development on StackOverflow. Making this
official was only the next natural step.

------
hoodoof
Such a bad idea. The format of StackOverflow is very tightly defined. I bet
all support questions don't fit that format. Then what?

StackOverflow should speak up against companies doing this.

~~~
MichaelGG
Correct. Microsoft did this for Azure support. I had a question, they redirect
you to post on SO. And then the question is closed because it's off topic.

Now moving to a dedicated Stack Exchange site would be fine (like AskUbuntu).
The software is OK, it's just the idiotic mods and hostile users that make SO
suck.

I asked a question on Server Fault, and 5 years later someone added a helpful,
perfect answer (a new library was available that did exactly what I needed).
That answer was down voted, and then the user was chastised by someone,
telling them off for answering an old question. Bizarre.

~~~
cesarb
Strange. There's even a badge (the "Necromancer" badge) for answering an old
question: "Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or
more".

~~~
k-mcgrady
I don't think all the badges are for good things. I recently got a 'peer
pressure' badge for "Deleted own post with score of -3 or lower."

------
andrewstuart
I created www.NotConstructive.com a few days ago in response to some of the
challenges of posting to Stack Overflow.

Launch announcement:
[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/notconstructiv...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/notconstructivecom-
launches-nobel-prize.html)

~~~
stinos
Was this some kind of relaunch then? What happened?

HN post from over a year ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062876)

~~~
andrewstuart
Yep, read the blog post link in the parent message.

------
mooreds
I guess you have to go where the people are, but man, I wouldn't want to
outsource the knowledge base/forums for a major product to a different
company. Seems like a valuable asset to give up.

~~~
wvenable
All the data is creative commons and Stack Overflow makes complete data dumps
available:
[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

So the trade off (going where the users are vs. the assets) doesn't seem that
bad.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Its only 25GB!? I could have this all in Elasticsearch locally!

~~~
justin66
Deduplication. They zeroed out all the "your question is not relevant because
we say so" answers.

~~~
Aldo_MX
If you still have a link to a deleted question/answer, archive.org is your
friend.

It's a shame that the SO community is constantly killing interesting and
useful questions, just because "they don't match their format".

~~~
justin66
Interesting, thanks. I was really just making a joke: the questions I google
up are somehow quite often flagged for one reason or another, which makes SO's
uncanny SEO effectiveness kind of irritating.

I agree that is baffling the way interesting questions are always getting
quashed.

~~~
Aldo_MX
I know that this was a joke, but in all seriousness, you should better
bookmark any question you find useful/interesting.

------
meesterdude
This is great news, and this new Microsoft that seems to be emerging (albeit
late to the party) is a welcome change of direction.

But lets not kid ourselves. It's still Microsoft. In my eyes, they have one of
the worst track records and it will take a monumental change for my
perspective to change to positive; I do not know what it would truly take to
change it.

They have played the evil corporation card for so long, I worry if you give
them an inch they'll take a mile. But I welcome hearing good news from
redmond, and hope it keeps coming.

~~~
larssorenson
The day I can run Visual Studio on Linux to develop a C# app / website I can
deploy, run, and test in Linux is the day I forgive Microsoft for their recent
issues. They definitely seem committed to turning over a new lease.

~~~
meesterdude
I was thinking something similar. If they were to materially invest in Linux
(specifically help in it's sore spots) I would be able to forgive them. If
they were just a positive force in software as a whole and made everything
they touched better, and contributed their efforts to all sorts of existing
community efforts (like linux; but other projects like browsers, databases,
etc), they would win over the masses overnight. No question.

Microsoft, as a company that makes great software, is what I've always wanted
them to be. But they've been so caught up on their own platforms and solutions
that have run counter to that.

In a version of the future, it could happen. There could be a day where I, as
a RoR developer, consider using MSSQL as my database, because it manages to be
better than postgres or mysql, and has approachable OS/support licensing.
Where I write code in their frameworks because they're better than Xcode and
output code that runs on all platforms. Where I use IE because it renders the
best and fastest and has the best inspector (and obviously, zero IE specific
code required; and starts running on linux and OSX).

So it could happen. It's a sharp, sharp pull up from their current path, but
there is a path to me advocating for them and what they build.

------
px1999
Given the nature and content of the specific forum, and that SO is built on a
largely microsoft tech stack, moving it to SO makes sense.

Still an interesting move from Microsoft. Projects hosted on github, open
source, versions of the .NET runtime for mac and linux, embracing docker,
node.js and avoiding getting in fights over front end frameworks... this
really seems like they're trying to turn a new page.

~~~
zanny
This might just be another embrace phase. They have been cyclical in the past.
If they were to get a large portion of market share on their proprietary tech
platforms they would certainly move to lock in their users and cripple the
open platforms they are now adopting. They are only restarting the cycle
because they are losing ground.

And I'm not coming at this from a malicious Microsoft angle, they are just in
the same league as Adobe and Oracle in that they maximize revenue by
dominating markets and crushing competition to force users onto their
proprietary platforms. It is inherent to how their principle earning divisions
operate.

~~~
jsmeaton
This makes no sense to me. There is no opportunity for "extend" or
"extinguish" for either StackOverflow or GitHub. Similarly, if they ended up
destroying the various non-microsoft .NET implementations (mono..), it would
affect the platforms they run on very minimally. There'd be a couple of pissed
off people, but meh.

------
thepoet
[https://developer.linkedin.com/blog/stacking-api-support-
lin...](https://developer.linkedin.com/blog/stacking-api-support-linkedin)

LinkedIn API support moved to Stack Overflow too. Same timing might not be
coincidence.

------
towelguy
With more and more teams moving their support to Stack Overflow, they should
think about a way to show if the user is an official support person in their
signature, rather than them writting "disclaimer I work at this" every time.

------
BorisMelnik
Wow this is very surprising, glad to see Microsoft moving more into the
commoners domain. Not a big SO user, but what would prevent them from getting
IE.stackoverflow.com?

~~~
ygra
Because web development questions that have to do with IE are not off-topic on
SO. Why would they need an own site? There is no csharp.SE, java.SE, android-
dev.SE, etc. either.

------
Animats
Does this mean Microsoft is terminating developer support for IE? All Stack
Overflow can do is answer questions. They can't fix bugs in the product.

~~~
yuhong
No, they are likely going to use it as a source for bugs to fix in IE.

~~~
Animats
That's useless.

Don't bother to report a bug to anything that doesn't offer tracking. It's
pointless.

~~~
yuhong
I don't think this is replacing Microsoft Connect.

------
danabramov
Hopefully they'll do better than Facebook!

------
wcdolphin
That blog post does not look very "official". I had to double check to make
sure it wasn't a joke.

------
arrowgunz
That is one smart move by Microsoft. Microsoft definitely seems like it is
heading in the right direction. I'm quite excited to see what Microsoft have
under their sleeves. Faster release cycles for Internet Explorer (like any
other popular browsers) would be a killer move by them, IMO.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I don't see what's so amazing about this move. SO is well established at this
point and Microsoft are just moving a small subset of their vast technical
support effort to another platform.

It is an excellent publicity stunt, though. It'll certainly fuel more of the
"Microsoft has turned over a new leaf" discussion, but in the grand scheme of
things with all their previous announcements like open-sourcing the C#
compiler and .NET platform, this is a pretty negligible move.

~~~
foxylad
It may be negligible, but for me it's evidence of a humility that I haven't
seen before. "Old Microsoft" would never have publicly admitted that MSDN was
inferior to SO, and if they admitted it privately their response would have
been to build a replacement. Hell, Ballmer would have been throwing _tables_
at anyone who suggested this during his tenure.

~~~
eridal
Looks like it's more of cost saving than humility, at least to me

------
mathattack
Wow - is this a massive pivot for Stack Overflow? A new revenue model?

~~~
dragonwriter
No, Google and other vendors have done this with a number of things (shifting
support channels to SO) over the last few years. Its not a shift for SO. It
might be a shift for _Microsoft_ , though.

~~~
mathattack
Does SO get paid for it?

------
eximius
This is... not what Stack Overflow is for...

~~~
scrollaway
Are you an owner or shareholder of SO? There's no way this was done without
their consent, so unless you actually have a say in what SO is or isn't for,
well...

------
tkubacki
Asked my first IE question there - got downvotes with "it's not an IE support
page" comment

~~~
vatotemking
do you have a link to your question?

~~~
DCoder
I would guess it's this one:
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/NFYi1.jpg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NFYi1.jpg)

~~~
tkubacki
Yes this was that one.

Being honest this may not be following guidelines - so I deleted question.
Maybe someone should create Stackoverflow like site for more open questions.

~~~
ygra
It's a very poor question, indeed. And downvotes and the close doesn't
surprise me. Hobo Sapiens' last comment actually details that quite well. I
also wouldn't expect the dev team to comment on that at all. When they are
able to share whether something is being done, then the status on the page
will change, but before that they'll make no comments or commitment on
anything.

~~~
tkubacki
Agreed on question part.

Regarding IE itself: strongly disagree - marking most of new tech as "under
consideration" is poor communication management at best - if they are not
interested in sharing anything they should add another status. This is
misleading.

~~~
jonathansampson
We can have only so many statuses because it becomes difficult for even us to
communicate in a meaningful way. "Under Consideration" means we're giving
thought as to whether or not we will implement the feature, and when.

As for Web Components, we're actively discussing the related specs with other
browser vendors, and trying to approach the topic as appropriately as is
possible.

We certainly desire to be open and up-front; if you can identify ways in which
we can improve our side of the discussion, we would love to know.

~~~
tkubacki
I think IE status page lacks some kind of info (in status item details) You
could make it more clear for devs whether some tech has your real attention or
your message is "this is ok but don't invest you time in it - we will not
implement this in next 30 yrs"

------
jessedhillon
I don't understand why Microsoft continues to make it's own rendering engine.

I get that they need a web browser they can control and distribute with their
OS, but why a rendering engine? Especially one that, in my region (SF bay
area), runs natively on fewer than 1% of the dev machines I see out there. If
somebody _were_ inclined to test their site for IE they'd most likely have to
go through the hassle of setting up a VM running Windows just to do it. More
and more, I'm hearing people just say "I don't test my work in IE" and being
fine with it.

Is there a good argument for developing their own rendering engine, given the
existence of two really good open source engines?

~~~
Encosia
I'm glad they do. IE9 spurred a lot of competition around GPU accelerated 2D
rendering and we all benefited.

Even now, IE11 and 12 are _dramatically_ faster than Chrome on my laptop in
terms of how quickly pages load, scroll, etc. Even though I don't use IE as my
default browser, I think I probably continue to benefit from their performance
work.

Regardless, Trident isn't going anywhere since Windows Store apps built with
HTML/CSS/JS rely on IE's rendering engine to run.

~~~
gsnedders
They've also pushed the market into caring more about effects on battery life.

------
dfar1
"With over 40-thousand questions tagged "Internet Explorer", and dozens more
asked every day, it has proven to be a great place to find reliable help."

The announcement makes it seem that they are proud of how many questions are
out there about IE issues.

~~~
Renaud
As of just now:

* tag [internet-explorer]: 27,934 questions

* tag [google-chrome]: 28,153 questions

Since the number of questions is your metric for attributing shame, that
surely imply that chrome is much worse than IE, especially considering the
long legaccy and larger install base of IE vs Chrome...

Or, I don't know, could it be possible that the number of questions reflects
more than just how bad a piece of software is?

~~~
andreasvc
Chrome has by far the larger install base.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers)

~~~
rgbrenner
for a little over 2 years, chrome has been more popular than IE

SO is 6 years old

