It must be an interesting moment in a software developer's career when you're offered a job on the Internet Explorer team. On one hand, regardless of how small your contributions are, your work will be used by millions of people around the world. On the other hand web developers will treat you as guilty by association until the very end of your career.
I can't resist this one, can I please have a go? I know you didn't specifically ask for my opinion, but perhaps it gives some food for thought. Forgive me if this is more off-topic than you would like.
As someone who joined the IE dev team relatively recently, I must say I had much of the same ambivalence you express in your first sentence. To add to that, I was a Mac user and moved from the Bay Area -- not exactly the bastion of Microsoft love -- and still have friends who are skeptical of my move. For me, the decision boiled down to two things:
(1) Web browsers have intrigued me for about a decade, and this gave me a chance to help push the web platform ahead. I love how through a process of public discussion and consensus some of the largest technology companies come together to build these (more or less) mutually compatible and complex platforms (a.k.a web browsers). Notice how I skipped past much of internet history there? You might say that, well, there are other browsers out there that I could have contributed to, and I will then ask which one do you think needed the most help? ;)
(2) Where would my small contribution be able to have the most impact. As you rightly point out, IE remains the most used browser (on the desktop at least) and every line of code I write may some day be exercised by hundreds of millions. I cannot emphasize enough just how fulfilling this is to me. When I was graduating and interviewing, Facebook liked to say that their user to dev ratio was a million to one, and our team easily tops that.
How's it like to be an engineer on this product? Lots of fun and very challenging. Much (as my limited view sees it) boils down to adding new features and/or rewriting older subsystems for performance reasons. Simple enough, but when you factor in about 15 years of legacy code, much of whose functionality has to be maintained (or emulated even in the new subsystems), life becomes very interesting very fast. I _suspect_ Firefox and Chrome are running into some of these challenges with the Electrolysis project (FF) and adding in graphics hardware acceleration (Chrome), which is perhaps why they're taking longer than anticipated.
Do other web developers treat me guilty by association? I don't know :)
I don't see you as guilty necessarily, especially as a relatively new member of the team. Your point about the complex and nasty legacy stuff you have to deal with is good too.
From my perspective, the IE team's priorities are weird. That's all. Yes, the race for performance is super-important as we're pushing our browsers to do more and more but if IE can't DO the same things other browsers do I don't really care how fast it can not do them. ;)
To me it makes perfect sense. For many people, web browsers have very little to differentiate them. Chrome's single major differentiator is that it's fast. If you asked the average person what's different about Chrome— they probably wouldn't care so much about the robustness of the html5 or css3 support— they'd say that it's fast.
Microsoft can attack on that front very aggressively. So they're taking the one thing that most people know is different or special about Chrome, and saying, 'IE is faster. Faster canvas, faster svg.' Seems like a great strategy to me.
I do find it funny that people are still blaming the Microsoft IE team for IE6, even though it's probable that most of the team that made it and marketed it are long gone.
What does that have to do with the team itself? Not including WebM makes sense because they don't want to be potentially liable for patent violations in a few hundred million installs. They do support it via plugins though.
Patent violation claims from the organisation in which they are a key member? Oh please!
MS have stated time and time again that they pay more in licensing fees to MPEG LA than what they make from it. Therefore it'd only be detrimental to other members of the cartel if they go after Microsoft for implementing WebM.
The reason for not implementing WebM are as simple as MPEG LA and Microsoft not wanting the format to succeed.
The people that I know that work on IE seem to take my ribbing of them in stride. When I complained about having to fix IE7 bugs, they suggested that I throw up a "get with the times" banner. Also, I think the whole IE6 team was disbanded and the new IE team looks much different, if it even includes any of the original members.
I really don't understand why people are whining so much about this.
I think native is justified given that (1) they are (finally) JITing their JS and (2) their graphics renderer in using the new DirectWrite lib which is very close to what the WDDM graphics drivers talk. They're saying that they're running much closer to the hardware than they did in the past.
Why are people being so negative about it? Better browsers are better for the web. Period. Exclamation point.
1 isn't exclusive to them, so doesn't add to their point of being "native." 2 comes with a ton of caveats, if I'm not mistaken. Other browsers also take advantage of graphics cards for certain kinds of rendering.
I have no evidence for this, but I think that IE is trying to ride on the positive association people have for "native apps" on mobile phones.
I don't see how exclusivity has anything at all to do with a technical point (I am considering "native" a technical point.)
But I'm tired of defending them.
I honestly just don't understand people's negativity. I'll say it again, better browsers make for a better web. You can laugh at their marketing pitch, but we should all be excited that they put a thoroughbred horse in the race.
When they claim they are the only native browser, then the feature set that defines native better be exclusive to them.
It's not negativity to call bullshit on a claim. There are plenty of things Microsoft could be touting about their browser without making up marketing speak.
It'd be great if they explained the details (just like that) to the more technically apt people (who are more likely to ensure that the software succeeds) rather than just throwing around what sounds like buzz-words.
Yeah you have a point. But as a technically apt person, I ignore the marketing speak and look this stuff up. It's published all over their blogs, podcasts, etc. They have great developer relations and there's tons of info out there.
Taking a random stab: the fact that native apps—i.e. non-webapps—that embed the MSHTML web view control to render some of themselves, will now be capable of using HTML5 features in the pages they display within those controls, might get called "native support": as in "installing IE10 provides native HTML5 support to Windows."
