Thursday, January 15, 2004

I just read the comments made by Robert Scoble about his lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team via CentralMX and was a little worried by one or two of the issues raised. Firstly this:

"Another thing that the commenters generally aren't thinking of is "how to get adoption." I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn't be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don't care about those issues and won't download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.

As a good example, Dean gave me a few companies with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of desktops, that still are using IE 5.5, or older."

If CSS and PNG issues aren't sorted out now, then this further slows down adoption of web standards and further infuriates web developers who wish to create valid xhtml and css without worrying about current support. As for the hundreds of thousands of desktops using IE 5.5 or older these will eventually be replaced as support for old OS's disappear. I was still using Windows 95 at home until recently but I can't get software for it so I upgraded, most people will upgrade to the latest platform available (unless their machine is a dinosaur in which case a new machine will be on the xmas list) which in turn will provide them with at least the latest IE release or Safari.

secondly:

"Along these lines, it's useful to think about Internet Explorer as two separate things. One is the engine underneath. This engine gets used all over the place inside Windows (and by other apps). It's what renders HTML inside Outlook Express, for instance. The second is the browser application. It's easier to change the application. Harder to change the engine. Why? Because so many things rely on it. Dean told me yesterday that when they release a patch, it needs to be tested in 400 different iterations. The support matrix is horrendous and something we, as users, never think about."

If the engine gets used so much why don't Microsoft make sure it adopts the latest W3C recommendations so it will work throughout all html rendering applications? I don't care about the Windows support matrix and I won't think about it because it shouldn't be an issue, if Mozilla can build a standalone browser that works perfectly then why is it Microsoft have such trouble?

Jon 1:59 PM Permalink