Microsoft's IE Chief: The Browser Is Only As Good As the OS It Runs On

eWEEK talks with Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's top gun on the Internet Explorer browser team to go deeper on IE10.

What was the issue with the timing of this preview? It seemed to take some time. There was a lot of progress and then it seemed to come to a halt. What gives?

We have always had the point of view that we build a browser for the OS--taking advantage of all of the underlying performance of the operating system. In the case of IE10, we built an entirely new browser that takes advantage of all of the great advances in Windows 8. As IE10 was finalized for Windows 8, we worked to bring the performance enhancements in IE10 and Windows 8 to Windows 7, and this involved quite a bit of work and time.

 What are you doing with Adobe on IE10 for Windows 7 regarding whitelisting and Flash?

Customers generally expect that the primary device they walk around with should play the Websites they rely on. In some cases, this involves Flash, so we’ve been working closely with Adobe to make sure that customers using Windows 8 devices have a good experience on their favorite sites.

While any site can play Flash content in IE10 for the desktop, only sites that are on the compatibility view list--also known as the CV list--can play Flash content within the immersive experience. We place sites with Flash content on the CV list if doing so delivers the best user experience for those sites. For example, is the content designed to be responsive to touch? Does it work well with the on-screen keyboard or affect battery life? Do visual prompts comply with the user experience guidelines? There is a lot of information on this and guidance for developers that want to submit their sites for the CV list on MSDN.

What are your thoughts on TypeScript, Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript? Is the IE dev team using it, playing with it, testing it, kicking the tires?

Yes, we’ve been playing with it and it looks very promising in terms of making it easier to build large-scale JavaScript applications. This is just one of many things we are doing to make JavaScript programming easier, and we continue to work closely with the industry on ECMAScript 6. For instance, we recently shared additional details on our proposed Internationalization API.