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Not too long ago, I posted a thread in the Coffeehouse asking for your IE9 questions for Dean Hachamovitch, VP of Engineering for Internet Explorer. Thank you for asking such great questions, Niners! We didn't have time cover all of them, but we did manage to get through several of them (and there was some redundancy, too, so I took the liberty of choosing the questions. Also, I didn't ask any of the snarkier questions (though I probably could have, since Dean can handle it) and Dean did not want to see the questions before they were asked (which is commonplace among many executives). He's OldSchool9 that way and that's great!).
Link Removed was released today and inside of it is one of the world's fastest JS engines (according to Sun Spider test, IE9 PP7 is faster than all other browsers out there...). Chakra, the IE9 JS engine, continues to evolve! Hats off to the Chakra team. Interestingly, Dean isn't overly excited about this news (though, obviously, he's thrilled) since JS execution speed is but one part of the overall performance story, which is actually divided into several pieces, not just two or three (see Jason Weber's quick chat on the overall performance characteristics that combine to form a user's experience of blazing fast web surfing, and Link Removed).
Here are the unedited questions Dean answered in this morning's conversation in the IE engineering building. Thank you, Dean, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to engage Niners' questions and concerns in an honest and open way. There is bonus footage at the end, too Link Removed
I recommend watching all of this as the flow is nice and the questions lead into one another nicely. Great job, Niners! This is a 51 minute interview, which is a long time in VP Time. Dean's a big fan of yours, Niners.
[Questions begin at 00:14:15, asked in the order listed below]
CKurt:
How you do personally feel about the way the HTML 5 standard is progressing? It's talking such a long time to form, it's slowing down the evolution of the uniform internet and causing more and more fragmentation between browsers. Is it not?
Bas:
What if the HTML5 standard changes/is finalized within IE9's lifetime and before IE10 is out. What's going to happen? A patch?
JoshRoss:
Windows 7 had a tremendous amount of telemetry captured from the beta users and that information was immensely valuable. Was or is there any telemetry data collected from current or past testers?
Exoteric:
How do you measure Internet Explorer stability and when it's ready for RTM? Does the beta have any kind of telemetry for latencies: when the GUI freezes, when a page takes a long time to load, etc.
How many test cases do you have for IE9 at this point?
ZippyV:
Will we be able to write javascript or .net plugins for IE? We need an easier way to interact deeply with the browser but writing native plugins is too difficult and accelerators can't go deep enough.
Nazmus1992:
Are you anxious to see if Mozilla actually sends in a cake to the IE team when IE9 ships?
Do you plan to have IE score a 100 in the acid3 test?
Typhoon87:
Will platform previews continue after RTW release so we can see where you are heading for the next release? You seem to be about a 6 week or so window for the platform previews currently.
Any possibility of smaller update window between releases? eg will we be likely to see IE 9.1 or 9.5 that is smaller in scope but quicker to market?
US Archer:
What improvements have been made around touch support? Is the UI fully baked in this Beta?
What is the state of webslices, something you still encourage site developers to implement? For IE9, it would be really useful if we could preview these from the pinned site icon.
AndyC:
Does the IE team still feel like they're playing catch up or are they now at a point where future versions of IE might start to drive new ideas once again?
Link Removed
More...
Link Removed was released today and inside of it is one of the world's fastest JS engines (according to Sun Spider test, IE9 PP7 is faster than all other browsers out there...). Chakra, the IE9 JS engine, continues to evolve! Hats off to the Chakra team. Interestingly, Dean isn't overly excited about this news (though, obviously, he's thrilled) since JS execution speed is but one part of the overall performance story, which is actually divided into several pieces, not just two or three (see Jason Weber's quick chat on the overall performance characteristics that combine to form a user's experience of blazing fast web surfing, and Link Removed).
Here are the unedited questions Dean answered in this morning's conversation in the IE engineering building. Thank you, Dean, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to engage Niners' questions and concerns in an honest and open way. There is bonus footage at the end, too Link Removed
I recommend watching all of this as the flow is nice and the questions lead into one another nicely. Great job, Niners! This is a 51 minute interview, which is a long time in VP Time. Dean's a big fan of yours, Niners.
[Questions begin at 00:14:15, asked in the order listed below]
CKurt:
How you do personally feel about the way the HTML 5 standard is progressing? It's talking such a long time to form, it's slowing down the evolution of the uniform internet and causing more and more fragmentation between browsers. Is it not?
Bas:
What if the HTML5 standard changes/is finalized within IE9's lifetime and before IE10 is out. What's going to happen? A patch?
JoshRoss:
Windows 7 had a tremendous amount of telemetry captured from the beta users and that information was immensely valuable. Was or is there any telemetry data collected from current or past testers?
Exoteric:
How do you measure Internet Explorer stability and when it's ready for RTM? Does the beta have any kind of telemetry for latencies: when the GUI freezes, when a page takes a long time to load, etc.
How many test cases do you have for IE9 at this point?
ZippyV:
Will we be able to write javascript or .net plugins for IE? We need an easier way to interact deeply with the browser but writing native plugins is too difficult and accelerators can't go deep enough.
Nazmus1992:
Are you anxious to see if Mozilla actually sends in a cake to the IE team when IE9 ships?
Do you plan to have IE score a 100 in the acid3 test?
Typhoon87:
Will platform previews continue after RTW release so we can see where you are heading for the next release? You seem to be about a 6 week or so window for the platform previews currently.
Any possibility of smaller update window between releases? eg will we be likely to see IE 9.1 or 9.5 that is smaller in scope but quicker to market?
US Archer:
What improvements have been made around touch support? Is the UI fully baked in this Beta?
What is the state of webslices, something you still encourage site developers to implement? For IE9, it would be really useful if we could preview these from the pinned site icon.
AndyC:
Does the IE team still feel like they're playing catch up or are they now at a point where future versions of IE might start to drive new ideas once again?
Link Removed
More...