Office applications Toolkit

Microsoft creates public bug database for IE

Published: 27 Mar 2006 13:50 BST

Microsoft is for the first time encouraging people to give public feedback on Internet Explorer, with the creation of a bug database for the next version of its browser, IE 7 beta.

The company admitted that customers have often asked why it doesn't have a public bug database, something that is standard practice for open source projects, such as Mozilla's Firefox browser.

"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," wrote Al Billings, a member of the IE project team, in a Microsoft blog on Friday.

"After much discussion in the team, we've decided that people are right and that we should have a public way for people to give us feedback or make product suggestions," he wrote.

The bug database is accessible from the Microsoft Connect site and can be accessed by anyone that has a Microsoft Passport account. Security bugs and problems with earlier versions of IE should not be logged in the database, said Billings.