[gojomo]

A great rant by a practitioner who wants progress to go faster, ideologies and committees be-damned.

But, a little revisionist about why browser innovation slowed. It wasn't Microsoft yielding to standards demands that slowed their pace; it was Microsoft's de facto victory in (for a time) neutralizing the business possibilities of competitive browser development.

It took a while for alternate models that could sustain further browser evolution -- the Google placement payments to Mozilla, Apple's sponsorship as a complement to their other platforms -- to grow to take the place of the original Netscape dreams.

Hewitt's prescription seems right, though: a bit of healthy disdain for waiting for standards bodies before deploying new things, and some added respect for even those proprietary offerings -- like Flash -- that kept expanding capabilities and user expectations when browsers didn't.

[isleyaardvark]

The revisionist history stood out to me as well. We're supposed to believe that MS stopped developing IE6 because "the DOJ and web standards commies intervened", and it was just coincidentally at the same time they killed of Netscape in market share?

We're supposed to believe that the W3C (founded in 1994), and the Web Standards Project (founded in 1998), had to work for years and just coincidentally managed to browbeat MS into stopping development on IE at the same time MS beat Netscape? That they were even capable of "bullying" a company like MS into stopping development on one of their products?

My own exposure to web standards was Zeldman's first "Designing With Web Standards" book, published in 2003. My experience has been that the standardistas have spent most of their time trying to push MS to further develop IE to support standards (which it still lags at), not trying to hinder innovation.

[tumult]

My impression of IE is that Microsoft stopped developing it right at the point when they realized "Oh shit! If this gets any better, it could replace Office!"

[btilly]

And ironically they stopped after it was just good enough to do so. With the critical piece being XMLHttpRequest. Which they added so that they could implement Outlook on the browser.

[zaatar]

I don't know much about the past, but in at least the past 3 years, Microsoft has been incredibly committed to IE development and enabling it to be more standards-compliant than ever. They've been consistently pouring money, time, manpower, etc. into making IE the best browser that's out there. This is one excellent example of the fruits of our labor: http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

And no, I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer; it's just my personal opinion.

[pbhjpbhj]

They've had to put some resources on to IE as they didn't bother for the previous 8 years and the stench of the rotten putrid corpse of IE6 was even starting to get to them.

When a single someone can make a tiny javascript file that fixes nearly all the rendering problems in your browser (Dean Edwards, IE6.js, IIRC) then it starts to look really bad for your abilities as a multinational megacorp that's supposed to employ some of the finest programming minds.

My impression is that it's still a pretty small team, if only they'd done it consistently over the last 10 years.

[mtarnovan]

IE9 is still alpha, so why compare it to Chrome 4, FF 3.6 etc instead of Minefield, Chrome 5 etc. ?