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Comment by jpcx01 | Hacker News Reader

Please remember Microsoft web developers are human, like you and I. Ask around, they all HATE ie,much more than you could know. It's an embarassment and joke inside the company.

The IE development team however are not human. They are monsters.

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Ouch :(

I certainly aren't human after having to deal with nasty comments on IEBlog over the years ... and I guess now, unfortunately, even on news.yc ... I guess I should be happy it hasn't deteriorated to death threats in here yet (like it has at other places) :/

So do you have weekly meetings with Steve Ballmer where you all get together and cackle maniacally about new IE idiosyncrasies?

Given the level of effort it takes us as web developers to support IE, I don't think you can fault people for expressing their frustration every once in a while. IE is the greatest source of dev-rage in web development. I personally appreciate the level of attention that IE has been getting lately, but we're still fighting with the old versions, waiting for them to drop off.

It's not fair at all to take it out on individuals on the IE team or do something stupid like threaten physical violence (and I'd fully support someone being called out for that), but letting people rant at your organization as a whole keeps people sane. Leaving Posterous because a designer finally hit a boiling point in frustration? That's just as bad.

FWIW, I can appreciate how hard it is to work on a team where you're fighting both the legacy of your old products and the decades-old impression of Microsoft as anti-web. Every version reduces the amount of frustration we encounter and every version that drops off makes us all that much happier. We're glad to see IE join the forefront of the browser race again. :)

I personally appreciate the level of attention that IE has been getting lately, but we're still fighting with the old versions, waiting for them to drop off

You can't really fault Microsoft because IE6 has yet to drop off. To their credit, Microsoft has made large strides in getting users to upgrade, but as reported in the past a lot of corporate customers are unwilling to upgrade. I'm sure a lot of people on the IE team would like to see IE6 die as much as the rest of us.

It's hard not to fault 'them' (the organization, Microsoft) because it was the years of inaction on the part of the executive that left IE6 as the foremost release for so long. It's not the fault of the current IE team and possibly the executives in the chain of command over the web clients, but it most certainly is the fault of the organization.

It's at least partly the fault of the US government that tried to dismantle the company over developing a free browser. If it was your software company, would you get right to work on the next version after that?

I'm curious as to why you think that; do you have a personal experience with one or more of the team members, is it based solely on their product, is it their handling of public relations, etc.? Make no mistake, IE as a product/team/etc. (and MS in general) have made a lot of mistakes, but "monster" is both ambiguous in meaning and quite damning without any context.

Heh, I was just kidding about that monster bit. I know several devs on the IE team and have consulted with MS as a web developer for many years.

Yeah, just throwing in non standard random crap like XMLHttpRequest. No good will ever come from this experimentation without a guiding standards body.

I honestly don't think that was the point at all. Yes, XHR allowed for AJAX to follow, and was rather revolutionary. That said, the original implementation was very tied not just to MSIE, but to ActiveX and, by extension, to the Windows platform. It was not even in principle possible for Mozilla, Opera and others to implement XHR as originally implemented by MS, since to do so would require implementing ActiveX support. Rather, cross-browser support for XHR required developing a second, incompatible API. Similar concerns hold back implementing support for MSIE's "filter" CSS properties and several other such experiments.

> It was not even in principle possible for Mozilla, Opera and others to implement XHR as originally implemented by MS, since to do so would require implementing ActiveX support.

Incorrect. The code to create an XHR object in IE looked something like this:

var xhr = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP.6.0");

Any browser could absolutely have supported creating XHR objects in this manner without being forced to support ActiveX.

Right up until MS changed their implementation, say to version 7. MSIE's implementation of XHR exposed internal details of the ActiveX-based implementation which were subject to change-- it was never meant to be an external API, but rather, to enable features in Outlook Web Access. Thus, any third-party implementation would have to involve making a list of special magic strings to recognize in the ActiveXObject() call, then delegate to code that attempts to replicate internal implementation details of the given ActiveX object.

If non-ActiveX browsers had started deliberately breaking feature detection, the browser wars would have been even worse.

Microsoft did stuff the Microsoft way. There's no question that there are horrible bugs people have to deal with due to crazy implementations.

Inhuman monsters is way way over the top. The IE team can take credit for plenty of bugs, but they can also take credit for some pretty neat things as well.

Despite what we think of their work, the team itself is a class act: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29039

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