X
Tech

IE9: Driven by the numbers

The last year has been an interesting one. We've had considerably more access into the development processes behind IE9 than we've had for many products, and it's been fascinating watching the inputs Microsoft's used to drive its design process.
Written by Simon Bisson, Contributor and  Mary Branscombe, Contributor

The last year has been an interesting one. We've had considerably more access into the development processes behind IE9 than we've had for many products, and it's been fascinating watching the inputs Microsoft's used to drive its design process. This is a product that's come out of analytics, driven by telemetry from users all over the world.

If you tick the Customer Experience boxes in any Microsoft product you're sending Redmond anonymous data about what you're doing with your PC. That's why Microsoft knows that Windows users spend more than 50% of their time in a browser when they're at home. It's that telemetry that also led Microsoft to choose just which HTML 5 tags, CSS 3 elements and JavaScript APIs needed to be supported from day one. They're in the structure of the most popular web sites, and used by most web applications out there. Anything else was an outlier and a "would be nice" rather than a "must have".

Once the first Platform Previews were out Microsoft was able to start looking at bug reports and feature requests from designers and developers working with its skeletal rendering engine and JavaScript compiler. That gave them over 17,000 pieces of feedback through the company's Connect beta test management web site, from over 8,000 people – 7,500 who were new to the IE9 programme. Testers were thorough, and a couple submitted over 200 reports each. It's something that IE's developers appreciated, and they found the dialogue they developed with the web designer and developer community very helpful while building the browser. It's led to a significant cultural change in the team, and they want to carry on with this type of approach as it's been so fruitful.

Driving development by analytics may seem unusual, but it's an approach that's at the heart of how 2011's Microsoft works. It certainly wasn't something that drove Microsoft through the 1990s, but times have changed – and the tools and technologies for massive number and information crunching are now in place. With large scale internet connectivity it's now possible for Microsoft to see just how their users use a browser, which buttons they click, how they use the menus and how many tabs they open. It's real data too, from real world usage, not the artificial world of a usability testing suite or a focus group in some drab conference room.

Once the beta was released the IE team certainly got plenty of data. There were over 50 million page views on the IE 9 Test Drive site, and more than 40 million downloads of both the beta and the RC, making it Microsoft's biggest beta to date – more than twice the size of the IE8 beta, and with over 2% of all Windows 7 users working with IE9.

Now IE9's been released there's going to be even more data. What effect is that going to have on IE10?

Simon Bisson

Editorial standards