Microsoft’s former Internet Explorer chief has left the company

Dean Hachamovitch — the man who oversaw the development of Internet Explorer for 10 years — has left Microsoft. Hachamovitch announced the news in a short blog post, in which he said he was “ready to enjoy a different point of view on both tech and life,” 24 years after he joined Microsoft. In an interview with GeekWire, Hachamovitch said that the company “really has changed a lot” since he joined in 1990, and that he was “overdue a change.”

Hachamovitch joined Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team as its general manager in 2003. IE was riding high at the time, having put the nail in Netscape’s coffin, but the success meant that Microsoft’s browser suffered from a lack of active development during the period. Three years later in 2006, as Microsoft’s browser was losing ground to competitors such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Hachamovitch publicly took the blame for IE’s failings. “We messed up,“ he said at a Microsoft conference. “As committed as we are to the browser, we just didn’t do a good job demonstrating it.”

Hachamovitch was reassigned from his position on the Internet Explorer team late last year, moving within the company to become chief data scientist as Microsoft broadly reorganized its Windows team. He had made more aggressive attempts to improve the browser, trumpeting IE’s increased security and its adoption of HTML 5, but saw the public perception of Microsoft’s product lagging behind its rivals’. Under Hachamovitch’s guidance, the Internet Explorer team was reluctant to adopt advances championed by competitors, such as Chrome’s browser extensions. The next Internet Explorer release, IE12, looks set to incorporate such features.