The Rise and Fall of Transparency in the Development of IE

When the IE blog started up in July of 2004, it brought with it an optimism that the browser everyone hates (or uses out of pure fucking ignorance) would finally have a more open of a process. The IE development team would bring much needed communication with the communities of developers and users to their process of trying to fix the mess Microsoft had dumped on them like so much raw sewage spewing from the bowels of the company.

From that initial posting, Dean (Product Unit Manager of the IE Team) wrote:

"Our goal in this blog is to be a good place, direct from the source, for information about IE. What are we working on? How do we make decisions? Why does some part of IE work the way it does? What keeps us up late at night? What are we thinking of around security, extensibility, and other key areas? Hey, any good tips and tricks?"

Now, I get from this paragraph that they honestly wanted to open the process up to the world to make IE development better in-tune with what users want, and through this, make IE a better browser. Or at least less of a shit-stain on Microsoft's name...okay, less of one of the shit-stains. I guess one place on Microsoft's name that has a little less shit on it than the rest.

The IE blog even kept up this optimistic view, posting about IE7 development. I even praised their efforts, saying:

"While I hate IE and it makes me scream in frustration several times every day, I have a lot of respect for the current IE developers. Hence the link I've posted to the IEBlog. I want people to go there and see how much they've opened up the process. They've started working with the Web Standards Project to try to dig IE out of the fucking shit-hole it got stuck in after the first of the great browser wars."

Now, the last entry I see on the IE Blog that has anything remotely to do with their initial intentions didn't actually get posted by any member of the IE team! Back on April 2, Molly Holzschlag wrote about the people within Microsoft she met with, discussing how to handle the simply immense range of things IE does blantantly wrong, how fucking wrong they did them, and how start making a plan of not fucking their own users and maybe even the web developers as well.

I can only assume that at this point, the IE team took Molly's suggestions, plans, and generally well-informed feedback, and put it on the toilet paper in the office. This way, each and every member of the IE team can do physically what they do to Molly's suggestions and their users each and every day. Every day that they have explosive diarrhea. Every day that they wipe urine away to stop the burning. Every day that they sneak off to the bathroom for a quick jerk-off session at the thought of thousands of people's panic at yet another ActiveX vulnerability that will compromise trillions of dollars of business assets. The IE team has since not had Molly post anything at all, and they have yet to post anything even acknowledging the insight they received over six months ago.

Each and every day that passes without providing some level of feedback or some level of discourse on IE's direction wipes more shit on the users, and makes it all the more obvious that the IE blog had no purpose other than to misdirect the users and developers, just like every other corporate blog out there. It does nothing but whisper in the ears of its readers that of course it will give you a reach-around next time, they just need to fuck you purely for their own depraved, animal needs this once.

Lately, its posts haven't even kept whispering that promise, pretending to give a shit what the readers, users, and developers think and feel. The IE blog has turned into nothing more than a copy of the release notes pinned to security updates, sprinkled with bullshit and laced with marketing.

So fuck them. Nothing has changed. The browser still has no future, and every day that they keep a closed process and a deaf ear to its users and developers digs their grave faster and deeper. The more they fuck us, the harder they really fuck themselves.