It seems like I'm not the only person underwhelmed by the recent Internet Explorer 7 beta release. Alex Russell, one of the guys behind the brilliant Dojo Toolkit, has a blog post entitled How IE7 Can Avoid Irrelevance which lists a number of places where Internet Explorer is deficient when it comes to DHTML/AJAX development. He writes

At a minimum, dynamic web apps need the following out of IE and JScript in the very near future:

• Memory leaks need to simply disappear
• Fix the cache+gzip bugs
• Give us getters/setters in JScript or give back watch()
• Fix the event object. Pass it in to DOM handlers by default. Also, offsetLeft and offsetTop are so ambiguious as to be useless. Give us currentTarget.
• Bump the limit on the number of concurrent HTTP connections if those connections are initiated after onload (either via XMLHTTP or other methods)
• Today, allocating more than 5K objects or so brings JScript to its knees. Object allocation cost needs to be O(1)
• Either revive (and start to fix) VML or give it an SVG-Tiny+DOM facade
• Give us a persistent, string-keyed, local cache in the MB range (5-10MB/domain seems a good start)
• Fast DOM queries. CSS selectors or XPath, we don’t care. Just give us a way to say “get us all DOM node objects matching this”
• A way to toggle the box model on a per-element basis without switching doctypes. The CSS 3 box model spec seems a good starting point

If Microsoft is to re-build any credibility around their browser, they need to show us the goods. CSS fixes won’t suffice this time around.

This is a pretty good list and it contains a lot of the features Jon Udell mentioned that he would like to see in future versions of Internet Explorer in his post Further adventures in lightweight service composition . The only thing I'd change about Alex's post would be to rename it How IE8 Can Avoid Irrelevance. I've worked at Microsoft long enough to know that by the time a product hits beta 2, the only kind of changes you are going to see are fixes to major [as in crashing] bugs, security fixes and low cost cosmetic changes. I can only hope that it doesn't take us another five years to see the next version of Internet Explorer

On the positive side, it looks like Dean Hachamovitch who runs the IE team not only has read Alex's blog post but posted a response . That's a good start. .

 

Ken Levy has a blog post entitled From product manager to product planner where he writes

After working as a product manager in the developer division for the past 4.5 years, I've decided to accept an offer to work in a new position at Microsoft. Starting in March, I will be a product planner working on developer community efforts in a new group within the Windows Live division.

I'll definitely miss the regular interaction with VFP team members and the great Visual FoxPro community. I've also had great experiences working with the WebData XML team on the XML tools story for Visual Studio 2005, doing some community work with the VB team, and helping with content for Channel 9 both in front of and behind the camera. I expect to continue to do interviews and be interviewed for Channel 9 from time to time ongoing since it is such a great site for community efforts and transparency.
...
I can't say much about my new role just yet. To get an idea of just some of the developer centric things I'll be working on in the Windows Live team, check out the recent 21 minute video by Robert Scoble on Channel 9 interviewing my new manager, Windows Live group product planner Scott Swanson...MSN Messenger APIs

Given that I was one of the folks who pitched Ken on coming over to work on the developer platform activities in Windows Live, I'm glad to see him come over. When I was on the WebData XML team I saw Ken do great work in evangelizing the XML tools we built for Visual Studio 2005. I can't wait to see what he does for the various APIs we plan to develop around Windows Live.

 

The Associated Press has an article entitled Microsoft Changes Blog Shutdown Policies which states

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. is tightening its policies regarding shutting down Web journals after its much-publicized shut down of a well-known Chinese blogger at that government's request.

The Redmond software company, which operates a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that the changes will include efforts to make the banned content available to users elsewhere in the world even if Microsoft decides it has a legal duty to block it in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site because it received a legally binding notice that the material violates local laws. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's top lawyer, said in an interview that it will depend on the circumstances of the shutdown as to whether the new policy means that an archive of the blog will remain available elsewhere, or that the Web blog's author will be able to continue posting information to users outside the country that ordered the blockage.

"Some of this, I think, we just have to recognize is evolving technology and changing law," said Smith, speaking by phone from a Microsoft-sponsored government conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

MSN Spaces, which allows users to post journals, pictures and other content on the Internet, boasts 35 million users, including 3.3 million in China.

The company has maintained that it is important to be able to provide users in other countries with such tools, even as it insists it is bound by local laws when it operates in those places.

"We think that blogging and similar tools are powerful vehicles for economic development and for creativity and free expression. They are tools that do good," Smith said. "We believe that it's better to make these tools available than not, but that isn't the end of the discussion, either."

This is good to hear. You can also get the news straight from the horses mouth from the press release Microsoft Outlines Policy Framework for Dealing with Government Restrictions on Blog Content.

 

If you are a regular reader of the Internet Explorer team's blog then you should know that IE7 Beta 2 Preview is now available.

I've used it for about 10 minutes now and I'm still having difficulty getting used to the changes in the user interface. They seem like rather gratuitous changes to me, the browser now seems unfamiliar although I assume that I'll eventually get used to the new look and feel.  My main interest was in checking out the RSS support in the browser and so far I've been unsatisfied by the experience. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like when subscribed to a feed. 

The general RSS reading experience is rather unsatisfactory. There are so many features I take for granted from using RSS Bandit that I find the RSS experience in IE 7 to be disappointing. No search folders, no aggregated views of items within a category, no ability to flag items, no options to email an item or post it to my favorite social bookmarking site.  I couldn't even figure out how to mark individual items as read or unread. I found it to be pretty unusable as a replacement for my current RSS reader. 

PS: For some reason since upgrading to IE 7, all the HTML mail in Outlook now hurts my eyes to look at. Does IE 7 flip on ClearType by default or something?

 

From the official Google Blog we find the post All buttoned up which informs us that

As the Google Toolbar has gotten more popular, the greatest source of ideas about new features has come from our users. The breadth and variety of these requests is so large that it's hard to satisfy everyone. But then we started noticing engineers on the team had cool hacks on their Toolbars for doing customized searches on our internal bugs database, corporate employee directory, etc... We were barely done asking ourselves whether it was possible to offer this capability in the new Google Toolbar beta when one of the engineers started designing a feature called Custom Buttons. Here are some of the coolest aspects of Custom Buttons and why I think they're a big deal:

1) Simple API: The term API is almost a misnomer -- it literally takes seconds to make one of these. I just can't resist the urge to make a new one every time I run into new website. A couple of simple steps and voila - a new button's sitting on your Toolbar (check out the Getting Started Guide).

2) Flexibility: The simple inclusion of RSS & Atom feeds (and particularly allowing the update of toolbar button icons through feeds) has allowed for buttons like a weather button and a mood ring button.

3) Accessibility: Most users don't even need to make buttons. It takes one click on our buttons gallery or on a website that offers them to install a button for your favorite sites. And the custom buttons we built to search our intranet showed us how valuable a customizable toolbar can be to organizations, so now there's an enterprise version of Google Toolbar that can be securely deployed across a company.

I use the Google toolbar quite frequently when performing searches and one of my biggest gripes is that it doesn't give me the option of using Google Music Search for my searches. So when I found out about the new version of the toolbar, I downloaded it out and clicked on "Add Search Type" which took me to the Google Toolbar Button Gallery. Guess what? There's no option for adding Google Music Search to my list of default search types.

So I tried reading the documentation on Getting Started with the Google Toolbar API so I could figure out how to add it myself and came up short.  The entire API seems to assume that some stuff gets installed in my right-click menu in Internet Explorer which doesn't seem to be the case. I wonder if I need to reboot to get the changes to show up? Bah. Now I feel irritated that I just wasted 15 minutes of my time on this. 

 

Joe Wilcox, research analyst for Jupiter Research, has a blog post entitled What AOL Explorer Means to Microsoft which touches on a topic I've discussed in previous blog posts. He writes

In IE 7, Microsoft makes revolving a search term through several different search engines a fairly easy process. The approach makes sense for a platform provider, but it may not be the best for MSN Search--or is that Windows Live Search, now?

I'm wondering if maybe Microsoft will be forced to an internal browser war of sorts. Microsoft's IE development clearly is focused more on corporate customers and not introducing too many disruptive changes there. AOL is going after consumers with its browser. I don't see how Microsoft can effectively compete, protect its turf and extend opportunities for MSN and search with IE development so corporate focused.

Microsoft needs to more seriously treat the consumer and corporate browser markets as separate opportunities. In one sense, Windows Live seeks to resolve the consumer problem by offering consumers more products and services. To get there, Microsoft is going to have to draw and even clearer line between IE as a platform and corporate product and IE as throughway for consumer products and services.

It seems pretty obvious to me that if Microsoft is serious about Windows Live, then it doesn't make much sense for our Web browser to be tied to the operating system division with its long ship cycles and focus on making corporate customers happy (i.e. keeping disruption to a minimum). I said as much in my previous post on this topic; Mac IE's Death: A Case for Microsoft Disbanding or Transfering the Windows IE Team. I'm glad to see that some analysts are also beginning to point out this hole in our Windows Live strategy.

 

A few weeks ago I had a chat with Robert Rebholz about folksonomies, RSS and information overload. It was a rather fun discussion and he let me know about a tool he'd built called the OPML-o-mater. The way the tool works is described below, 

The OPML-o-mater delivers a personalized list of RSS feeds in an xml format called OPML. OPML files can be imported by any competent RSS Reader/Aggregator.

You want the feeds from the OPML-o-mater because they're known quality feeds -- at least they were when we entered them. Even if you already have all the feeds you need, it might be worth a look to discover if we've one or two you didn't know about.

In general it works this way:

• We've tagged the feeds.
• You select the tags that describe your interests
• The OPML-o-mater finds and displays feeds associated with the tags you've selected
• You pick the feeds you want
• Press the generate OPML button
• Save the OPML file to your local machine
• Import it into your feed reader

More specifically, we've tagged all the feeds. The first column of the OPML-o-mater lists the tags. You select a single tag from column one that describes an area of interest for you. Column two displays the tags that were also used anytime the tag you selected was used to describe a url (bear in mind that a single feed/url may have many tags associated with it). In column three the feeds associated with the selection made in column one are displayed.

I think this is a very interesting way to solve the "How Do I Find Interesting Blogs?" problem which plagues users of RSS readers today. I currently am subscribed to 158 feeds in RSS Bandit. Given that there are tens of millions of blogs out there, I am sure that there are literally thousands of blogs I'd love to read if I just knew about them. The tough question for me has been how to find them and then how to integrate that process into RSS Bandit in an automated way. 

What would be cool would be for the OPML-o-mater to evolve into the equivalent of http://del.icio.us/popular/ for RSS feeds and then for it to expose an API that tools such as RSS Bandit could integrate into part of their user experience. This idea is interesting enough that I wish I had the time and dedicated server resources to build it myself.  

 

The live.com folks recently blogged about a recent change to the site to support inline images which states

we've been listening to your feedback and one of the main things you've been asking for has been more pizzazz on the page. we just shipped something that hopefully adds a little bit of that :)

now you can view embedded images in rss feeds inline on your live.com page:

- if you have 5+ headlines you get a smaller image that rotates every 20 seconds

- if you have 1 headline you get a larger image

 

we'll let a picture do the rest of the talking :)

As you can tell from the screenshot, the change definitely jazzes up the look of the page.

 

Sometimes I've seen the U.S. media take the simplistic view that "democracy" is the answer to all of a country's problems. I often chuckle to myself when I notice that in many cases the term "democracy" when used by the American press is really a euphemism for an American friendly government and way of life.  This is one of the reasons why I am unsurprised by the inherent contradiction in stories like Bush Says U.S. Won't Deal With Hamas which is excerpted below

Stunned by Hamas' decisive election victory, President Bush said Thursday the United States will not deal with the militant Palestinian group as long as it seeks Israel's destruction.

"If your platform is the destruction of Israel it means you're not a partner in peace," the president said. "And we're interested in peace." He urged Hamas to reverse course.

Hamas has taken responsibility for dozens of suicide attacks on Israel over the past five years but has largely observed a cease-fire since the election of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian president last year.

Bush left open the possibility of cutting off U.S. aid to the Palestinians. He called on Abbas, a U.S. ally, to remain in office despite Fatah's defeat by Hamas in parliamentary elections. Abbas, elected separately a year ago, said he was committed to negotiations with Israel and suggested talks would be conducted through the Palestine Liberation Organization, a possible way around a Hamas-led government.

I guess that's one way of to finding out what the U.S. government really thinks about exporting democracy. American foreign policy has always been about supporting governments which support its policies regardless of whether they are democracies or brutal dictatorships. Heck, just a few months before the events of September 11, 2001 the United States government gave aid to the Taliban because they took a hard line position in the war on drugs.

Lots of people talk about democracy without really understanding what it means. Spreading democracy isn't about making the more places share American culture, it's about giving people the freedom to choose their way of life. The hard part for the U.S. government is that sometimes their choices will be different from the ones Americans would like them to make.

 

The team I work for in MSN Windows Live has open developer and program management positions. Our team is responsible for the underlying infrastructure of services like Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Favorites, MSN Spaces, and MSN Groups. We frequently collaborate with other properties across MSN Windows Live including the Live.com, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Expo, and Windows OneCare Live teams as well as with other product units across Microsoft such as in the case of Office Live. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume

Program Management Architect
The Communications Core platform team for Windows Live services is looking for an experienced, enthusiastic and highly technical PM to jump start a brand new service that helps developers adopt our platform at a very rapid pace. You will be responsible for building a platform where developers can easily take advantage of emerging technology from our large scale services (e.g. Messenger, Hotmail, Contacts, Storage services) and empower quick schema and API changes for a rapid TTD (Time to Demo!). Designing, developing, deploying, evangelizing and supporting this so called “Sandbox” environment will require excellent cross-group working skills as you will have to interact extensively with business planning, dev/test, operations, and partner support teams. It will also require a high level of technical depth in order to intimately understand and create clones of the back end services involved as well as extensive web services and API knowledge. We are looking for someone with core technical skills, a services or high scale server background; experience with API development, web services and a passion to win developers from the competition.

Program Manager
If you are an experienced Program Manager with strong technical skills and a strong desire to work in an enthusiastic fast paced environment then this job is for you! The Communications Core Platform team for Windows Live services owns the data store serving hundreds of millions of end users with billions of contacts, files and photos. Our systems handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. Our team owns core MSN and Windows Live platforms, including ABCH (storing Messenger and Hotmail contacts, groups and ACLs) and MSN Storage (storing files, photos and other data types). We are looking for a creative, self-driven, technical Program Manager who is interested in designing and shipping the next generation of back-end components that drive this massively scalable service in the midst of stiff competition from Microsoft's toughest competitors. You will be responsible for defining and writing technical specifications for new features, developing creative solutions for difficult scale and performance problems, driving the capacity management framework, working with teams across the company on critical cross-group projects, working extensively with development and test to drive project schedules and ultimately shipping new versions of the service that provide tremendous value for our customers and partners.

Software Development Engineer
400 million address books. 8 billion contacts. A gazillion relationships! That is the magnitude of data the Windows Live Contacts team hosts today (and it is growing fast!). The service (called the ABCH) doesn't just host contacts and address books but provides a platform for building rich permissions and sharing scenarios (sharing objects to individuals, groups or social networks). Now imagine, if this treasure trove of data were accessible via programmable APIs to all the developers in the world. Imagine the scenarios that it could enable. Imagine the interesting applications that developers around the world would build.

This is what we want to provide as part of the Windows Live vision. We are looking for an experienced software developer who can spearhead our effort in providing APIs (SOAP, DAV, REST) to our contacts and permissions service that can be used by third-party developers and ISVs.

The ideal candidate will have at least five years of demonstrated experience in shipping commercial software. The candidate should be a solid developer with above average design skills. The candidate should have a very keen sense of programmability, security and privacy and be willing to go the extra mile to make sure a users' data isn't compromised.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].