So I was looking around for news on IE7 today. I was curious when it was going to come out so the world could get rid of their CSS hacks. I found this blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/, which is designed to keep everyone up to date with IE 7.
As I read the blog, the first post is about their new Developer Toolbar. This toolbar is just coming out of Beta and guess what? It is a copy of the web developer toolbar done by this one guy for FireFox. Is there a mention of it? Nope. Why are they releasing it?
The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it.
Ok, the key line is the first one: “The developer community has asked for a long time”
To me, this translates to ‘We have heard you rant to us for a long time, and to show that we are gracious and nice, we are going to give you what you have asked for’. But why? Why now?
FireFox, that is why! They see people rave about the cool and useful plugins for FireFox, they want some of that energy back. Is there any mention of FireFox on the blog, not really.
Not mentioning the original innovator is something I really dislike. I understand why they do it, and people will probably keep doing that for quite some time. I still don’t like it.
Microsoft has billions and billions of dollars. They have tremendous resources. They give us a Developer Toolbar for IE, AFTER some guy hacks something together in Javascript for a FireFox extension. Why? Because web developers like it, and use FireFox. How long has Microsoft had to address this issue? 5 years? The guy on the IEBlog doesn’t mention FireFox at all for all the features they have copied cold. Hey, Microsoft and IE team, this is pathetic.
(Note: this is a slam against Microsoft, but even ‘Apple’ could have a similar story told about them.)