[MIX06] IE Standalone - Update

I talked with Dean Hachamovitch (the IE General Manager) a few times at Mix06 about why I feel Virtual PC is not a complete or practical solution to web developers who need to migrate from IE6 to IE7. I recommended a few alternate ideas in the very likely case that they just can't support a side-by-side install of IE in the near future. I think this is an important issue - it's a first experience sort of thing for web developers, many of whom have only ever supported one version of IE. I'm quite at home with VPC, but I don't think we should expect that from web developers who feel inconvenienced to have to use a PC in the first place. It's important that web developers learn to like IE, and first impressions are important.

I was very happy with his responsiveness on this issue. Dean was of course very  busy at this conference, but took the time to respond to me in a thoughtful manner. I feel like he appreciated my point, and I'm optimistic that we might see something here.Dean is definitely the right person for this very difficult job.

I asked someone else - I won't mention his name, since it was kind of an informal question - just how bad an idea it is to run IE in the unsupported standalone mode . Does it just make the program unstable? Or will it trash my registry? Ignite my motherboard? The answer was that it's just an unstable program. Shouldn't damage the computer in the least. Good to know.

Published Tuesday, March 28, 2006 6:02 AM by Jon Galloway
Filed under:

Comments

# re: [MIX06] IE Standalone - Update

Well here we have a symptom of a company producing a product that doesnt have to care what its customers have to deal with.

Thats the biggest reason why I've started using Firefox...

Just think... Firefox has no massive tendrils intertwined with the OS... Its a fantastic thing.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 11:01 AM by Eric Newton

# re: [MIX06] IE Standalone - Update

Eric -
Based on my recent interaction with the IE team, I disagree. I think the IE team cares very much what its customers have to deal with, now more than ever. They've got a wide spectrum of customers, most of whom have no reason to run multiple browsers; they just want their sites to work. There are a lot of pros and cons to working version 7 of any popular software program. I think if Microsoft were building IE from scratch today it might be a much different product, based on a better idea of what customers want.

The more I learn about this IE standalone thing, the more I believe the constraints aren't in the rendering engine, they're in the network layer. While I can see some big benefits to running multiple versions of the browser on one machine (mostly for development), I understand why they want to run a single network layer per machine.

While Firefox supports running multiple versions side by side ( http://www.jeroencoumans.nl/journal/multiple-firefox-versions ), it's not completely simple, and the tradeoff is that security flaws which have been fixed in the newer version are still present in the older version.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 11:56 AM by Jon Galloway

# Run Multiple Versions of Firefox Side-by-Side (8 Ways to Sunday)

PingBack from http://www.adammessinger.com/2006/03/29/firefox-stand-alones

Sunday, October 29, 2006 5:23 PM by Run Multiple Versions of Firefox Side-by-Side (8 Ways to Sunday)

Leave a Comment

(required) 
(required) 
(optional)
(required)