A developer of Internet Explorer 7, Chris Wilson, has been trying to defend the browsers lackluster support for browser standards, and was then flamed for it. He admitted that IE7 would still be behind other web browsers in standards compliance, but went on to say,
In fact, we prioritized IE7 around 3 things – security, end user experience, and standards improvements in the platform. When I look back at the work my team has done in the platform, we have done only these things. No proprietary features added, just standards improvements.
Which I guess is good, and at least they didn’t add anything weird, and also admit that IE still has a long way to go to improving on that situation.
After getting very annoyed at the comments on that post, he posted again,
Few of you believe it - occasionally, someone who knows me really well does - but I actually believe in open standards. Real open standards. The ones built by a group of people with an interest in making the world better, not just in their own private vested interests. I’ve championed that in one way or another since I joined Microsoft, and I continue to do so today. It’s been a hard road, but not one I can imagine myself not choosing to walk down. It’s been gratifying to me over the past couple of years to see my championing pay off in the change of direction in Microsoft. It’s been frustrating, though, to be continually identified as the personal screw-up responsible for IE not supporting more standards today, when it’s actually because of my personal influence that CSS is IMPLEMENTED in IE.
Now in these posts I am finding some assurances that IE is heading towards a direction that it should have done a long time ago. But I’m also rather dubious. We here in New Zealand know a thing or two about what one company says can change from day to day (*cough*Telecom*cough*). However it seems that the new IE team is really looking for us to say a big “Thank You” to them. Well, that isn’t coming any time soon, at least for now. There have been some previous blog posts from Microsoft where they’ve announced new standards support and I’d just loudly go “Thank god! It’s about fucking time!” But then I look at things like this chart and weep myself to sleep.
Arstechnica has some comments.
I’ll quote what I just said in ClassForum,
Really though, why would you use a product that has basically been dumped for 5 years now? If it was any other software program, you would’ve replaced it with something else a long time ago. What made IE different?
