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There might have been a team but it seems like all that team was created to do was to maintain the IE6 codebase. That is pretty much stagnated development. At t
by swang 14y ago
There might have been a team but it seems like all that team was created to do was to maintain the IE6 codebase. That is pretty much stagnated development. At the time Microsoft was essentially giving web developers the middle finger because really, what were our alternatives?
Why did IE7 ever get released? Simple, because of Phoenix, aka Firebird, aka Firefox, aka competition. Without that I doubt Microsoft would have ever updated IE or bothered to rewrite IEs rendering engine (which didn't work well until maybe IE9). If not for the new competition into the browser field we would probably still be asking them to fix alpha transparency in PNG files.
So what I'm getting at is, they could have started IE7 anytime they wanted to after IE6 shipped with XP. Stagnation because of team shakeup is just an excuse. I doubt IE7 would have taken that long if Firefox was released right when XP came out.
- yuhong 14y agoAFAIK they did add user features during that time like a pop-up blocker (look at the Longhorn 4000 builds and XP SP2). But the rendering engine and most of the other things that matter to web developers was I think left unchanged except for minor bugfixes.