Wednesday 19 December 2007

Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Smiley

During the past week’s drama related to Microsoft’s lack of transparency and problems with working groups and browser vendors, it literally pained me so to have to keep my mouth shut when I knew there were some very good things happening.

I’m glad Bill Gates truly took the time to look into the communication issues, because to quote the man himself from our conversation last week: “There’s not like some deep secret about what we’re doing with IE.”

From the IEblog today, Dean Hachamovich writes:

“Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release. We will blog more on these topics . . .

For IE8, we want to communicate facts, not aspirations. We’re posting this information now because we have real working code checked in and we’re confident about delivering it in the final product. We’re listening to the feedback about IE, and at the same time, we are committed to responsible disclosure and setting expectations properly. Now that we’ve run the test on multiple machines and seen it work, we’re excited to be able to share definitive information.

Would jumping up and down and saying “I told you so” be in order? No, because I couldn’t tell you so. However, I have long been saying that some good things are happening up in Redmond. I applaud the developers who had to keep their mouths closed due to NDA’s and did so under heavy scrutiny, and I applaud all those at Microsoft working hard and proving that they not only hear developer’s needs but understand them and are truly working to make a difference.

Bravo, IE Team, for the hard work and most especially for finally getting the go-ahead to restart this much needed conversation.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 14:07 | Comments (105)