Journal: News & Comment

Good for Molly, good for Microsoft, good for the Web

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In an objective sense, it's great that Molly Holzschlag is joining the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft to "provide resources to Web designers and developers [...] as they work toward a more standards-oriented goal" and to "work with Microsoft as well as all browser and tools vendors."

Still, I have to admit, guiltily, that I was sort of happy during the years that Microsoft dropped the ball (and left it dropped) on updating Internet Explorer, between version 6 (in 2001) and version 7 (late last year). The gap left by IE's stagnation allowed competing and better browsers like Firefox and Safari to flourish and erode IE's dominance, which has helped advance standards-based web development and avoid fragmenting the Web too drastically.

Practically, IE remains by far the most-used web browser in the world, so any efforts to improve how well it works—as well as how other Internet tools operate—are good, and if anyone has the web geek street cred to make things happen from within Microsoft, it's Molly. (Never mind that I didn't like one of her books back in 2002; I suspect its ramshackleness was more because of rushed publishing deadlines than anything else.)

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