> I was wondering if any of you have any specific questions, queries, or > comments regarding the development of IE, and more specifically, IE7 > which may, or may not, come with Longhorn (before... if we're lucky)
Hmmm, where to start :) The questions I'd put to them.... in no particular order.... 1) The obvious: will they conform to W3C standards and/or the prevailing interpretations therof, eg. fundamental box model rendering differences? How about other stuff like PNG support? This question will probably be covered extensively here so I won't elaborate :) 2) Will they be separating the web browser from the OS rendering engine? I have heard that IE's rendering engine is actually the same as that used to render the interface for most MS applications. I've also heard this is the major reason IE is such a massive security problem. 3) Will IE7 have a new code base/rendering engine, ie. a greenfield approach; or does it adapt/reuse existing code? Do they see this as a major new release, or just more of the same? 4) Will they be adding better/easier user customisation features; eg. easy-to-access colour/font customisation, robust page/text zoom, etc? 5) Will they be getting rid of the "friendly error messages" which are the bane of support staffs' lives? Or at least putting the real error code at the top of the message so that it's visible in screenshots? 6) Where does IE fit into MS' overall product strategy - is it a major part or just a sideline? Would MS truly care if everyone started using Opera/Firefox/etc? 7) Will they be maintaining IE's habit of opening documents like MS Word, PDF, etc inside the browser window, or at least making it a user-configurable option? 8) Are they still planning to restrict IE7 to the Longhorn release, or will they relent and offer IE7 as a standalone/upgrade for other versions of Windows? 9) Do the developers use standard versions of IE themselves? I'm sure they'll say yes, but it's worth asking :) I'm thinking here of Lotus Notes programmers who customise their client software to the nth degree then can't understand why everyone else hates the system. Don't know if any of those questions would interest anyone else.... but there you go :) h -- --- <http://cheshrkat.blogspot.com/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
