IE7

[Douglas Crockford]

"There is only one thing standing in the way of realizing the potential
of Internet infrastructure: the concerns over trustworthy computing,"
said plucky Bill Gates in his opening keynote at the RSA Conference in
San Francisco. "This is the top priority for Microsoft, and it will
remain our top priority," said Gates, ironically.

And so Gates announced that the long dreaded Internet Explorer 7 will
ship this summer. Previously it was scheduled to ship with the Longhorn
operating system in 2006, but that product seems to be stuck in the
muck, and the real immediate costs of insecurity are vast.

As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was
realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

http://www.crockford.com/javascript

[Randell D.]

Douglas Crockford wrote:

"There is only one thing standing in the way of realizing the potential
of Internet infrastructure: the concerns over trustworthy computing,"
said plucky Bill Gates in his opening keynote at the RSA Conference in
San Francisco. "This is the top priority for Microsoft, and it will
remain our top priority," said Gates, ironically.

And so Gates announced that the long dreaded Internet Explorer 7 will
ship this summer. Previously it was scheduled to ship with the Longhorn
operating system in 2006, but that product seems to be stuck in the
muck, and the real immediate costs of insecurity are vast.

As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was
realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

http://www.crockford.com/javascript

I read somewhere either on eWeek.com (or perhaps Groklaw?) that IE7 will
only be released as beta for XP and that there is no official date for a
'stable' release until Longhorn comes out.

randelld

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 05:44:10 -0800, Douglas Crockford
<no****@covad.net> wrote:

As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was
realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

I think this is very unfair, the stability comes from a no innovation
monoculture, all innovation whether it's IE or Netscape or Opera or
Safari introduces the extra cost and headaches of coping with bugs.
The reason the situation has been so benign for so long is because
everything but IE has been completely irrelevant to most development
work (and because bugs that incompatible with IE in the other browsers
are fixed extremely quickly because all the same pages have to work
with it.)

The IE5.5 to IE6 migration was the easiest I can remember, it
certainly didn't pump massive quantities of new bugs. All I hope is
we don't get a new rendering engine to deal wth.

Jim.

[Douglas Crockford]

>>As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was

realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

I think this is very unfair, the stability comes from a no innovation
monoculture, all innovation whether it's IE or Netscape or Opera or
Safari introduces the extra cost and headaches of coping with bugs.
The reason the situation has been so benign for so long is because
everything but IE has been completely irrelevant to most development
work (and because bugs that incompatible with IE in the other browsers
are fixed extremely quickly because all the same pages have to work
with it.)

The IE5.5 to IE6 migration was the easiest I can remember, it
certainly didn't pump massive quantities of new bugs. All I hope is
we don't get a new rendering engine to deal wth.

You are making my point.

[Jim Ley]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 14:22:31 -0800, Douglas Crockford
<no****@covad.net> wrote:

As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was
realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

The IE5.5 to IE6 migration was the easiest I can remember, it
certainly didn't pump massive quantities of new bugs. All I hope is
we don't get a new rendering engine to deal wth.

You are making my point.

When anyone innovates you get lots of new bugs, my point was IE5.5 ->
6 introduced far and away the fewest bugs compared to any other
browser releases (even more so when you consider the number of sites
relying on bugs to exist) So I think you're being very unfair to MS,
I would suggest that MS learnt that lesson some time ago.

Jim.

[Douglas Crockford]

>>>>As developers, we have greatly benefited from the stability that was

realized when Microsoft stopped shipping new browsers. When Microsoft
innovates, they pump massive quantities of new bugs into the web. I hope
it is different this time, that Microsoft has learned its lessons and
will never again ship crap. We shall see.

The IE5.5 to IE6 migration was the easiest I can remember, it
certainly didn't pump massive quantities of new bugs. All I hope is
we don't get a new rendering engine to deal wth.

You are making my point.

When anyone innovates you get lots of new bugs, my point was IE5.5 ->
6 introduced far and away the fewest bugs compared to any other
browser releases (even more so when you consider the number of sites
relying on bugs to exist) So I think you're being very unfair to MS,
I would suggest that MS learnt that lesson some time ago.

I hope you are right. But based on recent experience on the Security
Front, there is not much reason to be optimistic.

[RobG]

Randell D. wrote:
[...]

I read somewhere either on eWeek.com (or perhaps Groklaw?) that IE7 will
only be released as beta for XP and that there is no official date for a
'stable' release until Longhorn comes out.

"But the news that IE 7.0 will be available only to Windows XP
SP2 (Service Pack 2) customers isn't likely to sit well with
security experts who argue that the threat from the Firefox
browser is at the center of Microsoft's aggressive
anti-spyware and anti-virus plans."

<URL:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1765331,00.asp>

--
Rob