IE7 Team Chat Transcript

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Microsoft has posted a chat transcript from February 9th, in which the IE7 team answered questions about the browser from developers and other members of the public.

Though the chat was largely dominated by questions that have been answered elsewhere, there are a few tidbits of information worth noting.

First, it looks like Microsoft is still working on a few rendering changes, and the final list of supported CSS features is still not known:

Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert):
Q: Will max/min-height/width will be implemented in final release of IE7?
A: We knew that min/max-width/height would be even more important with the overflow changes. We’re working hard to get it in to IE7, but we can’t promise support for it just yet.

It sounds like Microsoft is planning to implement a public bug tracking database, so that developers have a centralized place to report and document work-arounds for rendering issues in the browser:

Anurag [MSFT] (Expert):
Q: I’d like to see a public bug triage system similar to bugzilla… wouldn’t this help you weed out duplicate feedback?
A: We are working on implementing a similar system. Thanks for the great feedback.

We have confirmation that there will be no JavaScript fixes in IE7. It’s especially depressing that we still have to put up with the nonstandard and painful event processing model:

Dave Massy [MSFT] (Moderator):
Q: In your blog posts you haven’t discuessed Javascript changes too much (with the XMLHTTPRequest being an exception), will you plan to improve your JS support? Will you add support for standard methods like obj.addEventListener(), obj.watch()?
A: We aren’t expecting any additions to JScript in IE7. We have heard the requests and want to concentrate on script engine improvements in the future. We know we have plenty of work to do here :)

We also have what seems to be a commitment to a release window for IE8… though I’m not holding my breath:

Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert):
Q: […] Will IE8 be released before 2010?
A: Yes, IE8 will be released before 2010.

And finally, I particularly enjoyed this quote:

Chris Wilson [MS] (Expert):
Q: Is the IE team worried that firefox share is increasing exponentially while IE can’t revise and ship new versions because they are bogged down with OS dependencies?
A: No.

Fair enough, I guess!

Kevin YankKevin Yank
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Kevin Yank is an accomplished web developer, speaker, trainer and author of Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL and Co-Author of Simply JavaScript and Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Kevin loves to share his wealth of knowledge and it didn't stop at books, he's also the course instructor to 3 online courses in web development. Currently Kevin is the Director of Front End Engineering at Culture Amp.

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