Microsoft Drops the Ball with IE

Any Microsoft employees that are supposedly working on IE these days should be ashamed of themselves: As I noted yesterday, Microsoft hasn't demonstrably improved the product, from an end-user application perspective, since 1998. Reader Terje Sten Bjerkseth (and subsequently, several other readers) sent me a link yesterday (see the URL below) that presents Microsoft's take on the future of IE, and the news just went from bad to worse. When asked in a recent online chat about the next release of IE, Brian Countryman, an IE program manager, said, "As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 [Service Pack 1] SP1 is the final standalone installation." The reason? "Legacy OSs have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," he said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS." Sadly, this perspective is skewed and suggests that Microsoft believes IE is somehow at the "zenith" of the Web browser heap. But as I also mentioned yesterday, IE lacks basic--yet important--features, especially automatic pop-up ad removal, that virtually all its competitors have, and adding any of these features wouldn't require changes to the base OS. The problem, in my opinion, is that Microsoft believes that the browser is functionally complete and can only be improved by adding eye candy made possible by the next underlying platform (Longhorn, in this case). That's baloney, and as several readers mentioned, suggests that IE development is important only when Microsoft can use the product to steal market share from other browsers.

WinInfo is a good list to be on if you're interested in Windows developments and Apple putdowns but it is a bit too frequent for some people (weekday-ly). It is available here.

That link he mentioned.