Microsoft considers adopting WebKit for Internet Explorer | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft considers adopting WebKit for Internet Explorer

appleinsider.com

56 pointsrlm35 comments

It makes sense.

Apple did not chose it because they are commie hippies.

They are a cut throat for profit company and they chose it because it is a free and good code base.

And that makes development cheaper and faster - good for any for profit company,

There is also no giving up of control to speak of. You can fork any time you like, and you can do what ever you like. You lose no control.

So why wouldn't Microsoft do it?

Pride, not invented here syndrome, internal politics, what ever, I just don't think we'll see it happen any time soon. But I hope to be proven wrong.

If you were Apple, you would want to decrease the costs of switching to a new browser. The same's not true for Microsoft.

MS would also face a considerable cost in emulating the various IE brokenness in a WebKit-based browser (and accurate emulation would be very important to a lot of people).

If Microsoft adopts WebKit, they'll probably keep IE7 emulation mode in, as it is now in IE8. I doubt they'll try to port IE bugs to WebKit; there's just too many.

God, I wish it was a possibility. But this headline seems specious. Ballmer's saying that for the time being Microsoft is staying the same. Them "considering" the route means nothing for current development.

If Internet Explorer become a WebKit browser I'd cry with joy.

Yes please.

Though this was apparently an off the cuff remark. I'll believe it when I see it. I also take anything reported by AppleInsider with a grain of salt.

Simply: no, microsoft is not considering adopting WebKit for IE.

This appleinsider article, and others like it, took an out-of-context statement by Ballmer and stretched it into a farce.

I happen to live in Seattle and have friends who work on the IE team. IE8 sports a completely new rendering engine built in-house. It ain't webkit. My friends claim that when it is finished the new engine will render things, y'know, in a standards-compliant manner. Personally, I'm not holding my breath :-)

I don't really care much about their desktop browser, but dear God I hope they do something about the mobile one. It's truly awful.

I actually like WinMo 6 for the most part, but find myself using third-party browsers, which is not nearly as seamless an experience as it is on the desktop.

Well you're in luck, they're bringing the IE6 engine to Windows Mobile:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10039152-56.html

That is the worst idea ever, IE6 is such a piece of junk.

Yes but trust me, it's an improvement for Win Mo.

I'm sad to say it but this doesn't make sense. Strategically, the easier it is to develop web applications, the less people are dependent on Windows. It is to Microsoft's advantage to make web development as hard as possible. Therefore they will try to break compatibility whenever possible.

Correct!

But lots of web development tools/frameworks are smoothing out the browser differences.

Dojo and JQuery are commoditizing the browsers!

I still don't understand why everyone subscribes to this conspiracy theory...

Microsoft builds web apps. Lots of them. The IE issues suck for those teams too. Microsoft is building an online version of Office which needs to work in IE, FF, and Safari. They are also building a huge collection of Live services web apps. Why would they make it harder on themselves?

Inaction doesn't require a conspiracy - it would take a lot of resources to fix IE, so if it's not in Microsoft's interests to fix it, they won't. (I don't agree with lacker that they break it intensionally)

Microsoft isn't in the business of revolutionizing the computing market anymore. It's in the business of sustaining a billion-$ enterprise based on on the status quo.

Because it helps them: most of the IE suckage comes from needing to support IE along with the real browsers, which is proportionally a bigger cost for a smaller competitor than them. IE being so much slower than everything else also helps keep the idea that web apps must be slower than desktop apps alive.

You're not addressing the main argument. The harder it is to develop web software, the more people rely on Windows and Office. Making it harder for their small web apps division to get their work done is not a big deal, compared to the danger of cannibalizing Windows and Office sales.

What are the advantages for Microsoft if they were to make the change to WebKit? I know developers would love it, but is it really worth giving up complete control on their end? When it comes down to it they have their own best interest in mind, not developers'.

They would have a faster and more compliant engine than they seem to be able to build themselves.

And "giving up complete control"? We're only talking about the rendering engine, not the rest of the browser. And WebKit is open source, they can just fork it if MS is unhappy with where it is going.

> They would have a faster and more compliant engine than they seem to be able to build themselves.

I don't believe it's a lack of ability - Microsoft could easily produce a standard complaint browser. Adopting WebKit doesn't necessarily they would keep it compliant.

Given how important IE is to the Operating System in general, I doubt Microsoft could do this technically - not without breaking a raft of things... Given the incompatibility bumps with Vista I'll suspect they're would be seeking a more conservative path for the moment.

"Microsoft could easily produce a standard complaint browser"

So why don't they? Is it to hold back the web so that they milk their desktop applications like Office a little bit more?

Not sure - suspect it's because up until recently there wasn't much to compel them to.... Probably that combined with a lot of legacy to support.

That's a really sad state of affairs though. Just because you have the most market share, it should not mean you stop innovating - It does seem like this is exactly what happened with IE6 though, and why IE is the total mess that it is.

If Microsoft had actually embraced the internet as a new exciting medium, instead of just releasing IE to kill off mozilla, perhaps they would have been one of the ones leading new development, instead of trailing hopelessly behind all the time.

I don't know what the answer is for IE, I can't see them giving up any control, they'll most likely muddle along with their own quirks and bugs while there's a slow but steady shift in users onto the new crop of browsers.

Download IE8 beta 2.

It has event bugs all the way back from IE6. It's not even close to compliant, except for the most complained-about things.

DOM 2 event support and other javascript issues are easy to work around. If you use any kind of framework like jQuery then you usually don't even have to worry about them.

That's a silly argument. The creators of the framework really have to worry about them.

IE8 seems to be worse than the rest. Once again my site is broken in IE8. Just like it was in IE7 when that came out. They can't even keep the same basic functionality as previous versions.

So multiple incompatible branches of IE and then multiple incompatible branches of WebKit? Mozilla 5.0 (Internet Explorer; Microsoft; webkIEt (like WebKit (like gecko))). No thanks.

Multiple incompatible branches of WebKit is still better than the current situation.

Multiple incompatible branches of webkit in an ecosystem that still has multiple incompatible branches of IE doesn't sound better, as it geometrically grows the number of renders that need to be tested against. There are some things that I wouldn't wish on even my worst enemies, and while multiple incompatible branches of webkit sounds like it would be better, it's still an undesirable situation.

If Microsoft uses webkit, I'd like to think it's because they have realized that a consistent web browser experience from a developer point of view is enabling across the industry, not because they just want to leverage all the hardwork of other companies and open source developers just to get a leg up on their marketing. The last thing I want to hear is Microsoft marketing saying "We use Webkit, the same engine that powers other browsers like Apple's Safari" and the masses eating that up, but when we, as developers, know that isn't the case.

the day microsoft marketing says "We use Webkit, the same engine that powers other browsers like Apple's Safari" is the day they die (death by flying chair)

From Microsoft's POV, the calculation comes down to whether browser rendering engines have become commoditized. Proprietary differentiation gives them no advantage unless customers prefer their version to the commodity one. I'm guessing Microsoft will be watching the success of other WebKit browsers carefully, along with their expenditures on the rendering engine vs. those on the browser chrome itself. If it turns out people are abandoning IE, or if they're spending most of their resources just trying to keep up with WebKit in standards compliance, they'll switch.

I don't see it happening. Webkit is LGPL, and Microsoft have always been anti-GPL. It'd be a major shift in their position to suddenly embrace it out of nowhere.

The Internet Explorer's Trident engine is slowly but surely catching up with its competitors, so it's less of an issue than it was a couple of years ago. Let's not forget IE8 passes Acid2. The real problem for developers it that users aren't upgrading from IE6 fast enough, and that's not going to change whether Microsoft embrace Webkit or not.

That would be awesome if this happened. It makes a lot of sense too; proprietary HTML/JS parsing engines aren't necessarily a competitive advantage these days...

I read it as "Microsoft may look at Open Source" not "Microsoft may look at WebKit"

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