Reddit – Tim Banks

When the Internet Explorer 9 Beta was nearing release, Microsoft approached Reddit to get feedback from the community regarding the browser. Users of Reddit were able to ask questions that would eventually get answered by the IE development team themselves. They were hoping that if actual users/developers nit picked the beta, they might actually make a decent product.

It has now been a few weeks since the beta came out and Microsoft has answered some of the initial questions. After reading through some of the answers, I have a feeling IE9 is not what I was hoping it would be.

“We believe users are in the best position to make decisions about what software they want to run.”

One reason IE6 stuck around so long is that Microsoft didn’t force users to upgrade to the newer version. Most users do not understand why they need to upgrade or even know how. When there are security reasons involved, there needs to be some sort of automatic update. Just take a look at what other browsers are doing. Why can’t Microsoft follow that pattern?

“We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites”

“we measure ourselves not just on whether or not we have implemented a standard, but whether we can enable developers to write the same markup”

I couldn’t care less what the top 7000 sites are doing. There are standards for a reason and they should be supported regardless if the top 7000 sites are using them or not. How do we know the top 7000 sites reflect what the rest of the web is doing. If standards still aren’t supported there will still be IE only sites that are built and will still only look good in IE9. Why doesn’t Microsoft just support the standards like other browsers and not worry about who is using what.

“we’ve integrated the sites seamlessly into the Windows7; so that your sites become more like native applications and work just like you’d expect”

Unless there is a standard for integrating websites into an operating system, I can see this leading to more IE9 only sites. I can see the advantages of having websites work closer with the OS, but not if it is OS specific. Does Apple have features that only work in OS X?

I haven’t had a chance to read through every single answer, but reading through the first few didn’t sit well with me. I am not a Microsoft. I actually want Microsoft to succeed with IE9. Developers need Microsoft to succeed IE9. So please Microsoft, listen to the community instead of your marketing team when choosing what goes into IE9.