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We are doing all we can; no, I'm serious - this isn't a cookie cutter, "Here's $nice_boilerplate_response, now go away" thing. We are severely limited by law (both US and international) about shoving updates down people's throats when they don't want them. We are limited by law about what we can call a "Security Update", and what we cannot ... We have absolutely no control on what IT Admins decide for their corporation's intranet as well ... etc.

While it would be awesome to silently push down IE9 onto everyone, I unfortunately doubt that it is going to happen (I'm not a lawyer ...)

vsync - Thanks for the feedback; We have made massive improvements to the developer tools we ship with IE. Please take a minute to download & install the latest Platform Preview from here - http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ - and give it a whirl. If you hit the F12 key, you should see the developer tools show up, and you will be able to see the tons of improvements we have made since IE8.

See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/22/ie9-developer-...

If you have any suggestions or comments, please reply back. There are many open channels of communication, e.g. the IEBlog, Connect, etc. but as an FYI, I will also be looking at responses in here, within news.yc

And for 280 North's side of the story, see: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2010/03/01/internet-explorer-g...

Quote:

   I want to give another thank you to all the folks at Microsoft who helped us track down the problem and provided us with a simple test case that reproduced the problem. They were quite helpful, and we (along with all of our users) appreciate it.

(Disclaimer: I'm the "Ravi Rao" mentioned in the post, and I work full time on the IE Team at Microsoft)

That's extremely unkind, if you ask me. We have a support line that puts you in direct contact with Product Support Services people who are best equipped to debug your issues, and I know that every support call generates a ticket # and gets resolved; in cases where the PSS Engineer isn't able to debug/sort out the issue themselves, they get escalated to us, on the Product Team - I've done tons of investigations myself, and we funnel the information back to the caller via the PSS, so they're not dealing with 10 different people but rather, maintain a single point of contact.

In this case, I not only exchanged email with Joel, but also with Ross Boucher of 280 North behind the scenes, and within the same day, narrowed down the bug to our JScript engine. A trouble ticket was generated the same day I learnt of the problem, and that's how we were tracking it. You could get the exact same service by calling our 1-800 support desk albeit the support folks will have to go through their script to make sure the mistake isn't human error at your end, to begin with ... sure, it'd be great if all your issues got resolved within 30 minutes of us hearing about it, but the reality is that it may sometimes take longer than that. You're spinning it absolutely the wrong way if you imply that having "insider connections" is essential to getting a bug report investigated.

Joel and I (and others internal to MS) worked hard to get a startup's problem resolved as soon as we could; I can't believe you're actually complaining about it.

Wow, impatient, aren't we? See: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/content/notepad-new-site-notepa...

  "The site is built by Drupal, some new features are added in the site, such as newsletter and multilingual system, and more functionalities might be added if need. It's not yet complete, and it'll be done ASAP."

Google said that the list excludes, "adult sites, ad networks, domains that don't have publicly visible content or don't load properly, and certain Google sites".

See: http://www.google.com/support/adplanner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Any chance you'd make iPhone apps out of these?

Are you working somewhere? I've found many of the bigger employers have mentor programs within the organization ...

They probably didn't email it because people would then complain of spam. The industry standard is to grab an email address to make only a one-time notification.

All this is irrelevant anyway; Wakemate will get crap no matter if they remain silent, or write blog posts, or send email, or update twitter as long as a physical product is not out in the wild.

I'm actually in support of the Wakemates on this one; I wouldn't have sent out an email either.

My biggest problem with them is their empty promises; more than once, they've said, "really soon", and apparently that means nothing to them. It's important they say what they have to say ("won't be ready for six more months"), rather than what they think the customers want to hear ("coming really soon"). Be precise, not vague/subject to interpretation. "Six months" may be "soon" in a certain context, but as a customer, to me "soon" means "the next 10 minutes". They should instead be more precise.

It feels like they take me for a fool; I do understand and accept that projects slip schedules etc., but I don't enjoy being exposed as a naive fool every few months when the Wakemates wake up and make a "coming soon" blog post. In their last blog post, they said, "coming soon, but this time we learnt from our mistakes, so our projected ship dates are even bogus, we are actually going to beat the dates we posted!" -- http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/04/01/first-units-shipping-new... -- so now my expectation is that they in fact beat the date they posted, and if they simply met their second commitment, I'd still feel like they screwed up! This is them setting themselves up for failure. Further, they invalidated the brownie points I would have handed out ("wow, they promised date X, but they actually beat it; maybe they're not so lame after all!") ... if Wakemate shipped right now, they still don't get the brownie ... ("they promised they would beat the Sep 2010 date, and hey, they just beat it. whatever") ... kinda sad side-effect which probably wasn't thought out before they made the blog post.

After all this mess, there is no space left for sympathy; "oh, building hardware is hard!" - sure it is, but if you make me look like a fool in the process, I don't really care if it's hard or not. The value of setting expectations is vastly under-rated, in my opinion.

Edit: And the blog post title could not have been more inappropriate - "WakeMates are shipping!" was the title - I clicked that to see where to get my tracking information, and instead I'm told "Oh, wait until Sep 2010". I mean, really guys?!

Amazing! It's funny how if Wakemate hadn't screwed up, the world wouldn't be justified in demanding periodic updates! I mean, do you really ask Posterous to give you bi-weekly updates? I just hope the Wakemates realize that (a) the bar is significantly higher because they're YC-backed (b) every day they spend not putting the product in a customer's hands, they're setting themselves up for more work (such as sending bi-weekly status updates) which may not even be common under normal circumstances, or risk pissing off more [potential] customers.

I really hope someone does a detailed post-mortem analysis on the Wakemates (AndrewWarner?); there's a ton of stuff to learn about how not to do PR/marketing in here for the rest of us to learn & implement. :)

This is the most you’ll find on this topic publicly: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/NicFill/Channel-9-Live-at-MIX...

The link says:

  "Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Adobe currently support VP8, and Safari and IE may at some point."

Microsoft has already confirmed that IE9 will support VP8. See: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive...

The IEBlog (and all other MSDN blogs) is down for maintenance and cannot take comments, which is why the post is on Windows Blog. People can voice feedback via the comments on the blog post should they choose to :)

What you described was not the 'thaw' scenario, but rather, what credit freeze is supposed to do, by design.

The 'thaw' scenario would kick in if you were to legitimately apply yourself for an auto loan at a Hyundai dealership in Florida, and have that loan not be rejected.

FYI: Zumodrive's link at the bottom of the page is broken (zumodrive.om)

I RT'ed that original tweet from @duckduckgo but it doesn't show up on the twitter search page; is that because my tweets are protected? Also, I saw at least one retweet which was from someone who retweeted because of me ...

All this to say, your stats are likely a bit off ... so take it all with a pinch of salt :)

Fact: IE9 Platform Preview #1 released six weeks ago scored 55/100, IE9 Platform Preview #2 released today scores 68/100 on ACID3.

Huh? Quirks mode is never going to change; by definition, it is to maintain backwards compatibility. If a webpage was coded back in 2000, we don't want to break those pages simply because a more modern version of the browser is available.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Overview

If you want to check for a browser version, there are some best practices around it. This should help: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibili...

In summary, use object detection when possible, and if that does not work for you, use something similar to:

  <!--[if lte IE 7]> 
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="ie.css" /> 
  <![endif]-->

Some useful links:

Updated test drive site: http://www.ietestdrive.com/

Updated tests on the IE Test Center: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=110283

IE PP Developer's Guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx

Channel 9 Video Interviews: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/

If you've got any feedback/bugs to report, I'd be happy to hear them. My contact information in on my profile if you prefer to ping me privately. thanks! :)

Agreed, great work embed.ly; it's a pity there's no way of even knowing they have a blog if you navigate to http://embed.ly/ though. Hence, this detailed blog post is basically undiscoverable unless you already knew it existed.

Doesn't reporting your card stolen (which is required to get a new number/card) adversely affect your credit scores?

I don't know much about the past, but in at least the past 3 years, Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there. This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.

Coincidentally, IE's Test Manager just posted on the IE Blog about how we've been dealing with incoming bug reports/feedback during IE8 and IE9. I would encourage everyone to read it, and submit pro-active, actionable bugs, especially the Microsoft haters: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/28/product-feedback...

In addition, I remain always available to the news.yc community (see my profile for my contact info) if you have IE issues to debug. Please don't hesitate to drop me a line!

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) :/

Sorry, but Microsoft hasn't "tossed" IE6 aside. We still support and service it, today. Would you prefer that someone who bought a shrink-wrapped copy of Windows XP at Best Buy 6 years ago suddenly discovers that their computer/browser stopped working as it should, simply because they chose not to upgrade? Would you be happy if Toyota came by and said they refused to fix your car since it was over 5 years old and your only way out was to upgrade?

Trust me, servicing IE comes at a phenomenal cost to us; nothing would make us happier than to have to deal with a smaller matrix to deal with ...

That's correct; I can assure you that we absolutely are testing Bing ... is there something you think we missed? Please feel free to call that out to my attention, and I'm happy to dig deeper for you.

One page version of the article: http://hbr.org/2010/05/how-i-did-it-googles-ceo-on-the-endur...

That's what you think ... :)

No mention of whether they support Google Apps hosted email too. That would be cool to have on top of just Gmail.