Simon Willison’s Weblog

You mean there IS an IE team?

15th January 2004

Robert Scoble went to lunch with the head of the Internet Explorer team—yes, they still exist, despite having released nothing but security patches for over two years.

Robert says that the team is looking to work with community members to improve Internet Explorer. If this means dialogue, or even some feedback on what they’re up to, this is a very good thing. Less promising is Robert’s follow-up comment on the topic of improved CSS and PNG support (by far the most requested developer feature):

Another thing that the commenters generally aren’t thinking of is “how to get adoption.” I keep pointing out that if we fixed the CSS and PNG issues, you still wouldn’t be able to use those for years. Why? Cause consumers (and companies) really don’t care about those issues and won’t download a new version just cause you fixed one or two issues.

Believe us, we know. That’s why we want these issues to be fixed as soon as possible—so we can deploy sites that take advantages of these standards before the oil runs out and human civilisation disintegrates in to a mass of warring tribes more interested in canibalism than visually appealing web sites.