Ok. This just makes me sick. Chris Wilson is the platform architect for IE. Me? I'm just a web developer who has been dealing with IE since v4... beck when NN4 was all the rage. I've stuck with each version of IE and I'm using IE7 RIGHT NOW to type this blog post. Chris is so wrong, I don't know where to begin. Hmm... lets start with Windows integration. Chris talks about code-sharing with the OS, but then is busted on the fact that it is TWICE the size of FireFox. His excuse, from my understanding, is that the binary supports multiple OSs. Couldn't you just provide different downloads? One for each OS (XP, Vista, XP64, Vista64)? This is especially true if it's componentized like he claims. That was just a warm up. Now on to my BIGGEST PET PEEVE, standards. Lacking support for Web standards is where things really go south. This would be almost laughable if it didn't totally piss me off. The W3C has overseen the evolution of a number of standards for the web: HTML 1-4.1, XHTML 1-2, XML, EcmaScript (JScript is the MS version), etc. Microsoft personally had a hand in the development of these standards. They even introduced the concept of AJAX (which is the technology that makes Web 2.0 possible, so hat's off to them for this one). Chris argues that "[if we include a new standard correctly] we [will] break a lot of content if we're not very careful." AHHHHH!H!H!H!H!H No YOU WILL NOT. This is complete bullshit, and HE ABSOLUTELY knows this. Let me explain:

1. When he says "break a lot of content" he's mostly talking about Microsoft products (because I'm pretty sure the others don't matter to him). Namely SharePoint, Outlook Web Access, and all of Microsoft's web properties (like microsoft.com, msn.com, msdn.com, expedia.com, etc).
2. Every page on the web is written in some variant of HTML, XML or XHTML (what's delivered to the browser is, regardless of the extension). All of these standards since the beginning have supported a <DOCTYPE> tag just before the HTML tag. Guess what this does? It tells the rendering engine HOW TO RENDER the following HTML. Which means? AT WORST, A ONE LINE CHANGE TO SUPPORT OLD, NON-STANDARD CODE. It's either (if HTML) "--//W3C//DTD [insert version here] Strict" (which means BE STANDARDS COMPLIANT) or "--//W3C//DTD [insert version here] Transitional" (which means USE THE MICROSOFT NON-STANDARD METHOD)

Got it? You can't tell me that the IE platform architect doesn't understand this. It would be ludicrous if he didn't. He goes on to say that web apps just can't be compelling. It's either a simple UI frontend for a server side app (aka ASP.NET, which totally kicks ass by the way) or the implementation of a platform (aka Microsoft only technologies such as .NET 3.0 and Silverlight) which REQUIRES client-side binaries (whether built into IE or not). Sometimes I just get so hopping mad about this. Microsoft should be applauded for a great many things. Namely IIS6 (sp1), AJAX, and ASP.NET 2.0... and I can't even wait for IIS7. But standard compliance in a non-buggy browser (and SMS) are not among their accomplishments. Back in the Netscape Navigator days, they totally kicked ass in the browser space, now it's like they don't even care (IE has become the buggy Navigator of this generation). I guess at least we got tabs in IE7 (even though each tab seems to take up as much memory as a NEW instance of IE, but if it crashes - it takes the whole browser, tabs and all).