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Comment by mouldysammich | Hacker News Reader

itd be neat if microsoft opened up their web engines now that they've moved to blink.

Obviously it would be of great historic interest, but as a living software, just no. Go read this: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/19/modernizing-d...

IE implemented DOM without using tree. No, really. Up to 2017. After reading the article, all my questions why IE was so buggy evaporated and replaced by how could IE work at all.

MSVC up to 2015 also didn't create AST. Unbelievable, I know. The question is not why MSVC's C++ support was so buggy; the real question is how could MSVC implement C++ at all. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rejuvenating-the-micr...

After learning about IE and MSVC, I gained respect for Microsoft developers and disdain for Microsoft. Tightrope walking is amazing display of skill. Letting your employees to commute by tightrope walking for years is amazing display of stupidity.

These are great reads. Thank you for sharing those links.

They made word for the web! That text centric view sounds so much like the way word works _now_

Excellent article on Microsoft's journey of refactoring IE's DOM model. I actually felt sympathy reading how it all started with a linear text-based data structure, which must have seemed reasonable at the time. (In hindsight, a tree should have been the natural shape, and they should have been aware of parsers and ASTs. But can we blame them?) And how the layers of complexity were added, using parallel data structures that needed to be synced on every DOM operation.

By the time the article reached "Modernizing the DOM tree", I could just imagine the years of devs suffering that the whole architecture must have caused.

> According to an internal investigation, from IE7 to IE11, approximately 28% of all IE reliability bugs originated from code in core DOM components.

The second article is quite relevant too, how the C/C++ compiler used token streams instead of a real AST, until 2015! There are parallels to the above issue with the DOM model, how the original design of the data structure was inadequate, so they had to keep adding more layers of complexity. It's understandable how it happened, but makes me wonder if they should have had more experts in parsers/compilers during the design phase.

To give credit where due, both articles describe major successful refactorings of core design. I'm with you, that after learning about their struggles, I have more respect for developers at Microsoft.

That'd be a lot of work (clean up the code, look through everything to see whether things can actually be released and not covered under licenses disallowing that) for .. what benefit to Microsoft exactly? Trident and EdgeHTML are not really used anywhere anymore, or would that just be out of curiosity how things look inside?

There are optimizations and features on old edge that would benefit to be backported to chromium. E.g http live streaming

clean up the code, look through everything to see whether things can actually be released and not covered under licenses disallowing that

AFAIK, IE/Edge was developed only by Microsoft, so there wouldn't be much if any thirdparty code?

Especially if the end result is a closed-source product you still license code you don't want to write yourself. See stories like this one:

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180515-00/?p=98...

https://github.com/microsoft/ChakraCore

Link is to "chakra core", part of the JavaScript engine that powers edge, apparently.

I thought edge was reskinned Chrome, why don't they use V8?

They do, taken from the above github page:

"As you may have heard Microsoft Edge no longer uses Chakra. Microsoft will continue to provide security updates for Chakracore 1.11 until 9th March 2021 but do not intend to support it after that."

FWIW the headline on the page is still present tense and I want expecting the strap longer of a project to be wrong about what the project is.

The old Edge had its own rendering and JS engine.

The new Edge uses Blink for both.

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