Future for IE
With all the advances made in IE, is it frustrating that there are still sites that treat IE as a legacy browser? (We've seen this with Google, Flickr and other major sites.) "There are a bunch of sites that try to detect the browser and try to special case them. That's why you hear us talk about getting the same markup. When you hand IE the same markup as other browsers, you get great performance and interoperability.
"There are a bunch of sites that say 'oh, it's IE, I want a legacy mode; here's some code I wrote in the 90s.' Our approach to that has been to build a better browser, provide better developer tools - and we have this compatibility view mechanism. As we find sites with compatibility issues we have to shim them," he explains.
"A sufficiently motivated and technically savvy user can go into the developer tools and try other browser agent strings [to see if a site works]. We try to do some of that with the compatibility view list."
Ironically, the rise of Android is making things better. "It's been great that you have so many different devices come into existence because sites are having to do a better job of dealing with all the different things hitting them. And that becomes a benefit for IE."
If IE 11 is so good, will we see it on other version of Windows? After all, Steve Ballmer was busy on the first day of Build pushing Xbox and Windows Phone as part of the Windows family.
"We work very closely with the Xbox team and the phone team and you can expect everything you see here is working in a secret Batman cave somewhere in Redmond," joked Hachamovitch.
More seriously, he told TechRadar, "We've been very clear about our support for Windows 7. IE 11 will be available for Windows 7." But the one thing he wouldn't even hint at was a date for the Windows 7 version of IE 11.
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