What is Microsoft doing with Internet Explorer (IE)?

Between August 1995 and October 1997, Microsoft released four versions of the browser. We then waited nearly two years for version 5.0 to arrive in 1999, then two-and-a-half years for version 6.0 in October 2001. Since then, nothing, except a constant stream of security fixes.

It's a matter of great frustration for web designers. Everybody knows that Microsoft won the browser wars and that IE, for whatever reason, is the most popular by far. Back in the heady days of frenetic browser development, it also took the lead in supporting web standards such as Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Security issues aside, IE was among Microsoft's best products. Those days are long gone. The W3C, official guardian of web standards, is steadily advancing specifications, but IE is seemingly frozen in time. It is now well behind in important areas such as CSS, XHTML, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG). Without improvements in IE's capabilities, most web designers cannot take advantage of new technology.

At a developer event in London last month, I spoke to Chris Anderson, who is a lead Microsoft developer for the .Net Framework. He explained to me that Microsoft is actually nervous about tinkering with MSHTML, the page-rendering engine in Explorer. The team realises that the system has many quirks and foibles, but also knows that web designers deliberately work with and around these characteristics.

MSHTML is also amazingly tolerant of what is technically incorrect HTML content. If Microsoft alters its behaviour, many web pages will no longer look right. So they are inclined to leave it alone, and concentrate on other ways of improving what Microsoft calls the "internet experience". True enthusiasm is reserved for rich internet clients - essentially Windows applications that access XML web services.

It's another twist on a familiar refrain. Other reasons Microsoft has hinted at for not developing IE are that it makes no money from it, and that it wants to tie upgrades to new versions of Windows, so you will have to upgrade the operating system to get improvements.

However, there seems to be considerable debate behind the scenes, and despite the apparent lack of activity there is still an IE team at Microsoft.

Here's my contribution. If Microsoft has any desire to be seen as a good internet citizen, it has to bring IE up to date with current standards; or formally allow the product to decline and provide a more up-to-date browser such as the open source Mozilla for Windows. That means not only new usability features like tabbed browsing or pop-up blocking, but a redesign of the MSHTML rendering engine itself.

I appreciate the problems posed by legacy code, but there are ways round such difficulties, and frankly until Microsoft updates its standards, page designers have no incentive to fix their broken code.