We build Internet Explorer. I know, right? Ask Us just about Anything.

How you ever consider rebranding and changing the name of Internet Explorer?

We briefly considered Ultron, but the lawyers said no.

Ooooh I'm torn. You've got the references, but you work on IE.

Cognitive dissonance. It's okay to love us - the IE we work on is probably not the IE you remember ;)

-Jonathan Sampson

I'm more for Windows Internet Ubber Browser 2014 SP1 Ex+ (But seems like I'm not responsible for IE marketing...)- David

I've always had this question in mind too. The IE name has been so widely denigrated that even if they make it the best browser in the market, I think its reputation will affect the distribution and adoption of the browser very adversely.

It's been suggested internally; I remember a particularly long email thread where numerous people were passionately debating it. Plenty of ideas get kicked around about how we can separate ourselves from negative perceptions that no longer reflect our product today.

-Jonathan

Why did you decide to stick with the same name then?

The discussion I recall seeing was a very recent one (just a few weeks ago). Who knows what the future holds :)

-Jonathan Sampson

Do you believe the reputation of Internet Explorer is something you can change?

I hope so. Sincerely. A lot of things are changing. We announce the end of support for too old versions of IE or for out of date ActiveX control. This is a first step to reduce fragmentation which is really a pain for web developers (Which I'm part of :)) - David

And we are changing ourselves also:) I'm going to a lot of web events just to gather feedbacks and really try to improve IE! - david

David, you say you're changing yourselves. Why are you still a jerk? - Bob Donald, 4th Grade

I'm changing..But the journey is long :)

Please say you know this guy

I do not know him but I took that as a joke (Hopefully this is :)) - David

Hmmm.... well you just moved internet explorer up a notch in my book. Now you are at notch one...

That's a great progress! - David

We also announced better integration with www.caniuse.com to help developers know what and when they can use specific features - David

Ending support is great and all, but it has not changed corporate standards of using IE8, because apps they use have not been updated in years, and don't work on newer versions of IE due to lack of backwards compatibility. The pain (and at least that part of public's IE perception) will not end until something is done to force the companies away from that browser.

Edit: I'd like to note also that changing browser mode or emulation is not 100% effective, and if there's even one piece of the system that doesn't work, IT departments will not approve an upgrade.

For this specific topic, we released EMIE (Enterprise Mode IE) that allows enterprise to use IE11 but with a specific sandbox running IE8 for specific sites. This is a cool feature that most people don't know about

If you don't stop being so reasonable and having all the right answers I'm going to actually have to give IE another shot. Stop it.

Hear my voice....Install IE11...Install IE11..... - David

Alright, but only because I imagine you have a very sultry voice.

You should be disappointed :) - David

Why should i jump ship from Firefox to IE??

Sell me over

I don't think it's a matter of selling you on IE a much as ensuring that you're familiar with the changes that have come to the browser. Many developers still view IE as oldIE but when they take the time to actually use it, leverage the features and see the improvements, in many cases they change their perception of the browser.

The best way to determine which browser is best for you is to actually give them a run. - Rey

The best way to determine which browser is best for you is to actually give them a run.

But that's how you got your terrible rep in the first place.

We feel good about our browser and recommend that you check out our latest release. You might be surprised. - Rey

As a developer, the "leverage the features" mindset is why I dropped IE as a serious player a long time ago. We don't want to "leverage your features" we want you to conform to existing web standards.

This is something we've been actively doing for some time now. Each successive release of Internet Explorer has seen more and more adoption of existing web-standards.

Our team actively works with Google, Apple, and Mozilla (among others) on developing new standards for driving the web forward.

As an example, just about a month ago we found ourselves having a discussion about response media - after a few minutes we decided to reach out to Google for some joint-discussion.

If there are any standards you feel we're trailing behind in support, please feel free to email me directly (josamp[at]microsoft), or reach out on twitter: @jonathansampson.

-Jonathan Sampson

I don't think it's a matter of selling you on IE...

See, that's a big chunk of why IE is in the state it's in.

Here you've got a customer, /u/NekoQT, specifically wanting objective information from Microsoft, something to convince him to jump ship. Microsoft's response? "Oh, we don't need to sell you on it...."

Yes, Microsoft. You do. Especially when the customer specifically asks for it.

That just about perfectly sums up much of what's wrong with Microsoft these days.

With a product as complex as a browser, every user's going to find something unique that they like (or don't). So giving something it the ol' college try is probably the best way to find the things you like. But, I'll share some of my personal favorites:

• Tracking Protection - install a curated list (like EasyList, by the makers of Adblock Plus) to help reduce the ability for sites to track you. I get a bit creeped out and annoyed when I buy a something and then start seeing ads for that same thing on other sites.

• F12 Developer Tools - in previous versions of IE, our tools were sub-par to say the least. We just overhauled these and they're awesome IMO. I especially like the UI Responsiveness tool which helps developers eek out those last few FPS on their site.

• Tab/Favorites/Frequents roaming - going from IE on my laptop, to IE on my phone, to IE on my Xbox, having my opened tabs & favorites roam with me wherever I find myself browsing the web is great.

• Chakra - our JavaScript engine has the fastest SunSpider scores out there (yes, even better than Chrome/V8).

• Touch - at first I was skeptical, but I love having a laptop with a touch screen. We spent 3 years architecting our input pipeline such that we can provide stick-to-your finger smoothness (I worked on this, so I'm biased!). We have the lowest latency and generally run at 60FPS panning/zooming, even if the page is busy spinning the CPU (because we use 3 threads and GPU acceleration). In my experience (and our testing), IE is the best browser on Windows, if not any OS, for touch.

-Jacob

Personally, I think the touch scrolling in IE is far and away the best on a touch laptop. -Charles

This is actually a got question

I personally use IE just because of:

• Full sync between tablets/phones/pcs(tabs/history/passwords)

• It's extremely quick compared to current version of chrome

• Scrolling is smooth as butter

IE gets a lot of hate but seriously it isn't slow anymore, only dark side of it is addons, where Firefox and Chrome is simply "outplays" IE.

I worked on our most recent scrolling changes, glad to hear you like it! We've got even more performance improvements for scrolling on the way!

-Matt Rakow

What flavour was the cake that Mozilla send you? Also, why did they send you a cake?

It was a delicious marble vanilla/chocolate cake that /u/mbrubeck sent us from Baked Custom Cakes in Seattle. It was to congratulate us on shipping IE10. We started this tradition when we sent them a cake for Firefox 2. It was probably the best damn cake I've eaten. -Jacob

How do you feel about the fact that most people reading this AMA aren't using your browser?

Challenged :)

Anton

This is only during war that you can become an hero! - David

Which web browsers do you guys use? Be honest, I'll know if you're lying.

Honestly: IE11 / Chrome 36 / Firefox 31. I develop for the Web:) - David

On my machine I have installed:

• Internet Explorer 11
• Top Secret Internet Explorer
• Chrome, Canary
• Firefox, Aurora, Nightly
• Opera

I use them all daily; for the sake of the web and interop :)

-jonathan

Top Secret Internet Explorer

Microsoft Ultron confirmed.

Crap! We're done!! - David

NetPositive, occasionally - Frank

IE11 for home/casual use, IE/Chrome/FF/Safari/Canary/Aurora for work use.

-Matt Rakow

IE11 and Chrome

Anton

Hello!

I just came across this yesterday. Why is item global?

This is only true in IE:

typeof(item) === "function"

The window object is also a framelist, window === window.frames, and our framelist has an item method. So window[0] === window.frames[0], window.frames.item(0) === window.frames[0], and item(0) === window.frames[0] – JDD

Don't understand any of that but this dude has my exact same initials. I'm sold

Is that you, Jonathan Daylor Dhomas???

Edit: First gold and it's going to my head. Off to /r/lounge to make it rain

http://imgur.com/sIOsGs1

I lol'd.

-Jonathan Sampson

Offering VMs through http://modern.ie is a huge step for cross browser testing. However, it is a bit of a pain to run an entire virtual machine for one particular application. Do you have any plans to improve cross browser testing outside of using an entire virtual machine?

Yes definitely. We've partnered with Browserstack to offer a few months of their cross browser testing service for free.

Azure's Remote App Preview is something that we are really interested in and investigating ;-)

Anton

What is a feature of IE that you feel is overlooked but very helpful?

I love seeing developer expressions when they realize how feature-rich the F12 Developer Tools are. The tools team is putting a lot of effort in improving and innovating in the browser tools space and it's great when developers experience them. - Rey

It's seems like IE is mostly playing catch up these days with Chrome and Firefox. Are there any plans in the works to innovate?

I think all browsers implement things in a different order. For IE10, for example, we added touch features and new CSS layouts like CSS Grid. In IE11 we added new media features for streaming videos without plug-ins amongst other things. Of course, we also want to add support for new features that are becoming standards. You can follow the roadmap at http://status.modern.ie/. What do you want to see next? --Adrian

What's the biggest issue you've ever found in your browser?

I work on composition and rendering, so my bugs in pre-release builds tend to be pretty severe from a symptom perspective (e.g. "Uhhh... GMail isn't rendering today, what did you break").

We'll catch super-severe bugs like that before we ship of course :)

-Matt Rakow

A bad hang in our WebGL renderer that would have affected 90 million machines. We found it before we shipped & added additional testing - Frank

Are there any plans to revamp the extensions stores and the like for IE (to match Firefox/Chrome)?

Is there an overhaul for the desktop version of the IE UI in the works?

Will you guys/gals get off the Windows release cycle soon and release monthly updates to IE (more than just bug fixes/security patches but features like Chrome/Firefox)?

Any chance that IE will become platform agnostic?

Any chance a uservoice/bug report system for the community will release?

WebRTC support anytime soon (maybe with Skype support)?

I'm a big fan of IE but after using it as my daily driver some of the above would make it a lot easier to maintain as my go-to browser. Small bugs here and there can be annoying and having no way to suggest features or report bugs can be annoying. I never know if you guys will work on/fix anything I have on my mind (or other users minds I'm sure). Since you guys seem to be much more open I was hoping this could be a way to get a glimpse of the future.

Edit: Added two more questions

Edit 2: Grammar

Sorry for the delay (long response!).

Are there any plans to revamp the extensions stores and the like for IE (to match Firefox/Chrome)?

With extensions, what we're working on now is making sure that users are up to date as out of date extensions can cause performance, security, and other users. So we've just announced that we're going to start prompting users when they have out of date AX controls, like Java.

Longer term, we're very aware that our extension ecosystem and store could use some love. In our modern browser UI (in the style formerly known as "metro" :-)), extensions aren't even allowed at the moment. I personally wish we had a good RES equivalent, for example. Part of the problem is that C++/COM just aren't what developers want to build extensions with. We're still looking into this and haven't completed our plans, so it's still too soon to project whether we'll invest here. But definitely on our radar (and has been for previous releases).

Is there an overhaul for the desktop version of IE UI in the works?

Again, another place that could use some love--it's more or less the same as IE9 desktop. We're the IE platform team, so we're not UI experts. If we did change things, what would you like to see?

Will you guys get off the Windows release cycle soon and release monthly updates to IE (more than just bug fixes/security patches but features like Chrome/Firefox)?

Your wish is our command! Starting with IE11, we've been shipping more than just security & reliability features via the existing monthly "Patch/Update Tuesdays". Last week we shipped new F12 Developer Tools, WebGL Instancing Extension, and the groundwork to support WebDriver. We'll continue to use this approach. Read more

Any chance that IE will become platform agnostic?

We don't have plans for that at this time. For the platform, enabling developers that use Macs to test sites easily in IE is important to us. That's why we've launched modern.IE and provided free VMs and other tools to do so. We've also partnered with BrowserStack and SauceLabs to offer additional tools to make testing easier. We're always thinking about how we can make this even easier as we know there limitations with these tools. We've got some ideas and experiments.

Any chance a uservoice/bug report system for the community will release?

Yes. Stay tuned! :-)

WebRT support anytime soon (maybe with Skype support)?

http://status.modern.ie/?term=webrtc.

It's not clear yet when we might ship this, but we are working hard in the W3C ORTC Community Group and the IETF working groups on improving the specifications. You can see our prototype implementation of ORTC here: http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/prototypes/object-rtc/object-rtc/info

Since you guys seem to be much more open I was hoping this could be a way to get a glimpse of the future.

Check out IE Developer Channel which previews the platform to come. We'll definitely provide previews beyond just the platform too, once we have something to show. -Jacob

edit: I a word.

If you could improve one thing about IE, what would it be?

The public perception... http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/372/923/b53.png

I would really love to see us be able to ship at a quicker cadence, this would allow us to address issues (and add new features) we find in a more timely manner. We're getting there, but we admittedly still have a ways to go. - Greg

What would you like to see developed as a web standard? What should the next steps be after HTML5 and CSS3?

WebVR is one of the standard I would love to see developed. We did some cool stuff with [www.babylonjs.com](www.babylonjs.com) and Oculus Rift but a standard is clearly needed here - David

http://status.modern.ie/karaokewebstandard 'nuff said :) - Charles

Do you like turtles?

I do.

-Jonathan (in zombie face-paint, obviously)

Only the blue ones ;) - David

You've recently hired Rey Bango back to Microsoft and into the IE team. What was it that you saw in Rey? Was it this dance video that he sent in?

Clearly, Rey's stellar dance moves served as huge motivator for us. Thankfully, he's able to complement them with a good understanding of IE and web development but the primary impetus was to build up our IE dance crew to compete on So You Think You Can Dance.

In case you were wondering, that was Rey answering that question. The rest of us would prefer not to see him dance :)

[deleted]

We implemented the HTML5 parser in IE10. The standard doesn't mention conditional comments so they aren't supported. -- Adrian

Conditional comments really aren't necessary anymore. If as a developer you focus on building to web standards and leverage feature detection instead of UA sniffing or conditional comments, you should be able to build and maintain standards-based sites that work easily across modern versions of IE and cross-browser. - Rey

I realize you're not experts on the UI, but seriously, why is it that Metro IE overrides any zoom settings that I have?

I want my internal display on the Surface at 125% and my external display to be 100%. If I set the Surface to 125%, it switches the external to 83%. If I switch the external to 100%, it switches the Surface to 150%.

I'm all for stuff like this as default, but maybe let me override the app instead of letting it continue trying to outsmart me?

(Not that it's as relevant in Metro apps, but the desktop scaling factor is 125% on both the Surface and my external monitor).

I definitely feel the pain on this one too, and we're working to improve multimon support (including appropriate overrides).

IE11 was the first version where we added automatic scale factor switching when dragging across monitors of different pixel densities (previously you would have retained a single zoom level, which can be hilariously wrong when dragging between a Retina screen and a standard-definition monitor). Our focus was primarily on getting a reasonable default behavior in our first iteration, but there's definitely a need for better customization.

-Matt Rakow

Internet Explorer has been available since 1995. How much legacy code do you deal with on a day-to-day basis? Does it impede the development of hot new features?

We have rewritten a lot of the browser internals over the past 15. The amount of legacy code depends on the area, but it is not an impediment. Some of the older code is actually quite good :)

• Frank

What cool features does IE have that most people don't know about?

One thing I really love is our UI Responsiveness feature in the Developer Tools. It records everything, and helps you debug web-applications with insane granularity. If you're a web developer, you should definitely check it out.

-Jonathan Sampson

As a user I really like Flip Ahead when using a touch device. As a dev, the UI responsiveness tool. Taking snapshots and doing diffs has helped me a lot finding memory leaks in websites

Anton

Definitely the events breakpoint in script debugger (And the prettyfier is great also) - David

We actually update it pretty regularly: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/14/announcing-new-f12-dev-tools-features-in-august-update.aspx - Frank

Can i have a free Internet explorer ? wait that's not a surface AMA.

Will internet explorer be ported on Android or iOS ? Microsoft has low market share with windows phone and because of that IE mobile has also low market share. Microsoft seems to want all its services to be available everywhere (see office on ipad) IE for Android would be logical.

Will you continue to improve your own engine or "surrender" to webkit ?

Right now, we're focused on building a great mobile browser for Windows Phone and have made some great progress lately. So, no current plans for Android/iOS.

We are committed to improving our own engine. We love the fact that the web was built on multiple competing (yet interoperable) platforms and believe that this is how it is going to move forward into the future!

-Charles

What's your favourite JavaScript trick?

I love the closure space trick for making real private variables. I even did a blog about this one :) - David

It's hard to pick a favorite. I dig that many built-ins work on generic objects, e.g. Array.prototype.map.call(nodelist, ...). I also dig method compilation using Function(...), and using ES6 Set as a way to resolve unique values of an array. – JDD

You guys have done a fantastic job building Internet Explorer to what it is today in versions 11 and 12. Have you had a hard time defending IE from "developer hate"? What has that been like?

Thanks! I guess by "12" you mean the Dev Channel... Really appreciate the comments. Most "dev hate" I've seen is passionate, but also directed at versions like 6 and 8 - which I think we all admit leave much to be desired. In recent years we've seen a lot of defenders on our blog, so while it takes a thick skin at times, it feels like a lot of the community realizes the work we've done recently. -John

Hi. This isn't a question. It's a recommendation. STOP WITH THE FUCKING POPUPS. I'm not talking about web popups, I'm talking about THIS. Stop getting in the way of what I want to do. A browser should facilitate my access to the web, not hinder it with a bunch of bullshit. You know what happens when I start chrome? It fucking loads. Instantly. And switches focus to the location bar. It facilitates. Get on board or loose more market share.

This is a totally fair point and we are aware of it, too. Internally, when we talk about this topic we refer to the places where we are too "chatty." We are taking inventory of all the places we do this to do a better job of just getting out of the way and letting you get to your sites...! -Paula

When is Internet Explorer going to get a UI overhaul? It's so far behind the competition at the moment and yet its stayed the same.

This is clearly an area we are working on - David

How do compatability modes work under the covers? Does it swap the rendering engine? If so could this extensibility be opened up so that you could swap Trident for something like a WebKit rendering engine?

There are lots of different subsystems in IE and they take slightly different approaches. Essentially the code branches based on the document mode. Some of the subsystems run in parallel, some just have code that lights up with newer modes. It wouldn't really work as an extensibility mechanism. -- Adrian

How do you sleep at night?

I usually sleep on my (right) side.

Anton

With IE's trident engine working with the GPU to ensure great performance over competitors, why does the current implementation of WebGL in IE11 seem to lag behind performance wise even in your own tests, e.g., FishGL?

Thanks - we put a lot of effort into GPU performance work.

On some older NVidia & some (Windows 7) AMD GPUs we render WebGL in software rendering mode for security reasons; you might be on a system where IE is rendering WebGL content in software rendering mode. (Take a look at the F12 console; it'll say in there.)

(Other browsers also have GPU software rendering fallback lists; the entries in the lists differ between browsers, as the rendering stack differs; on some computers you might be in hw on one browser and in sw in another.)

We're also still tuning and updating the WebGL renderer (We just shipped an update on Tuesday.) We're much faster than Chrome in some scenarios (Rendering gl.Points on DX10+ GPUs; we automagically do instancing under the covers to speed up rendering.)

...and we have some work to do in other areas / on some hardware; the perf tests are a nice motivator for us and other browser vendors.

We're also working to get GPU driver updates out to as many users as possible so that all Windows browsers and apps get stability, performance and security improvements.

Has there been any internal discussion about possibly switching the internal rendering engine from Trident to WebKit some time in the future? It seems like it would be really beneficial for the web in general, and you could still build your own extensions and control the browser experience.

Sure, we discuss just about everything! But, we don't agree it would be beneficial for the web in general though - the web needs multiple competing implementations to make sure that this great open platform moves forward in a balanced way (that doesn't favor one particular vendor's platform). This is why the W3C process calls for multiple distinct implementations before a standard becomes recommended. :) - Charles

can we get support for WebM? also, as per this blogpost http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx will you be doing similar for Desktop-Modern IE? where sites simply work based on what the browser supports rather than what browser your using.

as well since you are claiming to be a little more open with development, can we get a early glimpse of any new IE UI changes in the works(screenshots etc)

We support Google's plug-in for WebM but today most browsers have support for H.264. It will be interesting to see what happens with future video standards.

We work on the IE Platform team so we're not experts on the UI plans. I know there is lots of experimentation happening - hopefully there will be more to show soon. -- Adrian

Why do you think everyone hates IE?

I think the main reason is because a lot of people's mental image of IE is of really old versions. I hate those versions too.

Like jargoon mentions, we've made a lot of progress in recent years -- if you haven't tried IE11 yet give it a shot and see if you still hate it :)

-Matt Rakow

Batman or Superman?

<Colleen> Totes Batman

Since today most people use smartphones, why haven't you guys made a mobile app yet?

Yep - we've been focusing on building a great mobile experience for IE on Windows Phone. More details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx

-Charles

There has been speculation about an IE12 release date. With the announcement of a cut-off for ending support for IE10 in 2016 do you guys have an "official" date for IE12 now?

Also, thanks for finally implementing flexbox! I'm sad no one else implemented Grid but at least we can finally use flexbox across all the browsers!

Do you guys have plans to implement shadow DOM / web components?

We don't have any info to share on an official date but in terms of things we're working on, your best bet is to keep an eye on http://status.modern.ie/ which we update regularly with features that we're considering and working on. - Rey

How do you feel about all the hate Internet Explorer gets?

I came to IE after 13 years of being a web developer and while it does sting at times it reminds me of why I joined, to help make IE the best browser for end users and developers alike. We will continue to work hard to deliver an awesome experience and I hope our actions will turn the tide from hate to support. - Greg

Why do I have to add tons of websites to a compatability list on iE when I don't with chrome or FF?

I would love to know what sites you have had to add to the Compat View List. In a great number of cases it will actually break sites. But obviously it depends site to site. Many times the site was created some years ago and contains "if MSIE, then do this..." code, which does not work anymore since we fixed a bug or whatever they were working around... -John

Why your team or Microsoft can't release IE updates more often?

We've actually made some big improvements to releasing updates more frequently, even including new features in this months patch cycle. You can read about it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/13/august-updates-for-internet-explorer.aspx

• Rey

What browser do you use at home?

IE and Chrome - David (And my wife only uses IE!)