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In the interview, we discuss everything from Web Standards support in IE7, to whether or not IE6 will auto-update to IE7. Enjoy!
Full transcription of the interview
RC: Hi, my name is Ryan and we are here with Chris Wilson from Microsoft and we’re just gonna ask him a couple of quick questions, and so over to you, Chris.
CW: Thanks, Ryan. So, I’m Chris Wilson and I’m the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team, on the platform and Security side of the Internet Explorer Team.
RC: Okay, so the first question I have for you is, “What new feature are you most excited about in IE7?”
CW: That’s a really hard question for me to answer, obviously, because I’m really close to it and there are a lot of features that I absolutely love. I think that as a user, probably the feature I’m most excited about is our support for RSS and our integrated feed subscriptions, feed reading, the integrated platform that does the sync engine and everything, that gets me really excited. I think as a developer, the best thing really is all the work we’ve done on standards support, all the fixes were done but as a user certainly the RSS platform is pretty exciting.
RC: A quick question about that RSS support, is that going to be similar to what people are used to in Firefox, when you subscribe to a feed in Firefox? Could you tell us just a little bit about what that’s actually going to be like.
CW: Sure. The user experience is actually somewhat similar for feed discovery, y’know, you’re browsing a web page and it has an RSS feed then a little RSS icon lights up, in fact it’s currently the same icon even that Firefox uses. The feed reading experience is kind of similar, the really exciting thing that we’ve done though is that we’ve built a platform not just for Internet Explorer, with RSS feeds, we’ve actually exposed APIs in both Win32 and the .NET frameworks platforms so you can actually write applications that use all of these feeds and they all share this common feed list, common store, common synchronisation engine. Like, I have a screensaver installed on my machine that automatically picks up all of the photos that are in my RSS feeds and uses them as a screensaver, so my contacts post new photos to Flickr, and I automatically get them on my screensaver. It’s pretty cool.
RC: That is so exciting! I mean it’s going to just break it wide open. Wow, cool. The next question I have for you is, tell me a little about your involvement with the Web Standards Project, I know that we at Vitamin are really supportive of what you’re doing and excited about it so I’ll just give you a chance to defend yourself.
CW: The Web Standards project, y’know, I’ve actually worked with them, peripherally at least, for a really long time, I mean, almost since their inception. I’ve talked to Zeldman a lot back in the day and I think lately, for the last year / year and a half, it’s been really exciting because we’ve really managed to build a relationship where the Web Standards Project helps advise us on what web developers and web designers really want and need, and help to prioritise that, and it’s not really necessarily that we don’t care about standards or anything like that, it’s really that we need help in prioritising what’s most important. We had a lot of requests and a lot of them are really very grand requests in both senses of the word. They’re good requests, but they’re huge, and we really need some help to figure out what’s the most important to make people’s lives easier in the web development community, so I think that our relationship with the Web Standards Project has been great to help figure that out, help us to prioritise and help get the message out too that we really do care and we’re trying to do better.
RC: The last question that I have for you is, “Is IE going to auto-update to IE7 and how do you feel about that?”
CW: Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. That’s not our goal. We really do like to offer users choice. It is a different user interface, some people will be really jarred by that. I think that we certainly want to encourage everyone out there to, um, I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it. As nice as it would be to blast it onto everyone’s system I don’t think that can happen, so.
RC: Alright, well that’s it, so thank you for joining us, I appreciate it.
CW: Great, thank you, Ryan.
Transcribed by Scott Morris
Is there a transcript available?
This interview was pretty boring. Why not ask some more probing questions about the software developement going into IE? The decision making process at MS? How did they find out what was important to web developers? What does MS have planned for the future after IE 7?
Thanks Crhis for this interview, which was in fact interesting, even though I would have liked more information about their future implementation of web standards such as CSS.
Anyway, cheers Chris.
Thanks for telling us all types of things we already know about.
Why not ask more probing questions about the software development going into IE?
“We hear about Firefox and Opera 9 and decided to wait and steal their good ideas just like we did when we made our first release of DOS.”
How did they find out what was important to web developers?
“We read all the complaints and decided to see how more complicated we could make so that out MS Web developers could get higher pay and add MS Web Development Certifications to our names.”
What is planned for the future after IE7?
“After the 3-4 service packs, we’ll wait to see what firefox and opera do, then we’ll let you know.”
Comment 1 already asked for it: will you make a transcript available ? Not everybody is able to listen to / understand sound based information.
Thank you.
[…] The IE team have Today announced on their blog that IE7 (Seven) will be pushed out to Windows XP users using MS automatic update (contrary to what Chris Wilson told Vitamin). This will happen some time in the fourth quater of this year. […]
[…] Vitamin has an interview with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer Platform team at Microsoft. They’re not calling it a podcast, but I’m going to. (Being a podcaster myself, I’m capable only of speaking in hip web terminology.) At just over 5 minutes, it’s a quick and easy listen. […]
[…] Vitamin have posted an interview with Chris Wilson, Group Program Manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. […]
Thanks for the transcript. Hopefully you will continue doing this in the future!
That wasn’t deserving of the label interview. This Ryan Carson is letting a member of the IE team “plug” their lame product on a Vitamin, a standards oriented site.
Internet Explorer 7 makes almost no improvements over past IE implementations of the DOM, CSS, (X)HTML, SVG, or nearly any other spec you can think of. Why didn’t you bring that up when talking about the Web Standards Project, rather than make a fool of yourself wowzering over RSS support?
This interview really brings Vitamin down a notch in my view.
Chad, whether you like IE or not isn’t relevant, I’m afraid. The majority of the world uses IE, so as web professionals, we have to be interested in IE.
When we get the chance to sit down for a personal interview with the project leader of the world’s biggest browser, it’s a good opportunity to give you insight into what they’re up to.
Your right, nobody cares about my views on IE. My point is that if you are doing an interview, ask some questions your audience might care about.
Gushing over an RSS feed icon isn’t something Vitamin readers are interested in.
Chris Wilson: It seems to be that you must be a lying snake to work at microsoft, as I suspected:
“Is IE going to auto-update to IE7? I think that the first thing really is that we can’t really force it on users. …I do believe that we will offer it through Windows Update, but it won’t be an automatic silent update, certainly it won’t be like you come in one day and suddenly your computer’s running IE7 rather than IE6. Certainly we have to ask the user if they really want it.”
Well, today, November 1, it is a “high priority update” which means that if your system is set to download install them automatically, what will happen is exactly the opposite of what you said. You are a liar, Chris Wilson.
I’ve gotten numberous letters from web app providers instructing the prevention of the auto update to IE7 because the apps are not fully compatable with IE7. That’s fine with companies with a small number of systems, but what about the companies with thousands of systems that will be unable to run certain web apps? Huge amount of company down time, lost productivity, lost revenue. Great work microsoft. Just spectacular.
I think you did a great job of pointing out the major strengths and weaknesses of the book.