Announcing Internet Explorer Feedback
Many customers have asked us about having a better way to enter IE bugs. It is asked "Why don't you have Bugzilla like Firefox or other groups do?" We haven't always had a good answer except it is something that the IE team has never done before.
Context & Ripple Effects
The IE team is formalizing what until now has been improvised. During the IE7 Beta 2 cycle, bug reports piled up in informal channels — CNET counted them under the banner that IE 7 bugs abound, and FeedDeveloper's Nick Bradbury published his own feedback on IE7 Beta 2 because there was nowhere else to put it. A month earlier, critics were arguing flatly that Microsoft doesn't care about its blogger critics.
What changed with this announcement is the admission behind it: customers kept asking why IE has nothing like Bugzilla, and the team's answer had been simply that it never done it before. With Firefox confirmed to be pulling users away from IE since late 2005, the feedback gap stopped being a process quirk and became a competitive liability the IE team chose to close.
First-order effects
- Beta testers and independent developers like Bradbury now have an official entry point for IE bugs instead of blogging their findings and hoping someone at Redmond reads.
- The IE team inherits a public triage commitment: bugs filed through the new channel are visible to the same customers who asked for Bugzilla-style accountability.
Second-order effects
- Every future IE release will be judged against Firefox's Bugzilla workflow, so any backlog or silence in the new channel becomes citable evidence for switchers already moving from IE to Firefox.
- Other Microsoft product teams face the same customer question — why does IE get a feedback channel and your product doesn't — pressuring broader adoption inside the company.
Third-order effects
- If the channel holds, Microsoft's browser development shifts from closed beta cycles toward community-visible iteration, a structural concession to the open-source development model its main rival runs on.
- Browser competition moves beyond feature checklists to development-process credibility, where transparency itself becomes a retention tool for users deciding between IE and Firefox.
The trend: Competitive pressure from Firefox is pushing Microsoft to import open-source development practices — public bug tracking chief among them — into products built under a closed model.