Microsoft CEO and dancing queen Steve Ballmer has said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within Internet Explorer was "interesting" and added "we may look at that" when questioned about Internet Explorer 8 development.Ballmer was speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in Sydney this week when questions were fired at him by eager web developers. He also admitted the long delays of development between IE6 and IE7 during the Longhorn (Vista) cycle, "But I don't what to go there," he said.
Many companies are adopting WebKit for their browser experience. Nokia has enabled WebKit on their N series devices, Google uses an old version of WebKit in the Chrome browser and Apple uses WebKit for Safari and on the iPhone web browser.
If Microsoft adopted WebKit throughout IE then this could finally mean developers would have a standard for developing web pages. Microsoft could also replace the failed IE mobile browser in Windows Mobile with something that renders pages correctly.
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If they are on about the desktop, this would be a silly move. Business all around the world depend on IE for the intranet integration applications, using technologies that only IE provides (ActiveX, Active Directory, etc). Making such a huge change to the browser would NOT make the enterprise adopt it at all. Businesses have long term investments in IE.
This is a stupid move.
IE7 can run in IE6-compatibility mode? How?
I think he means that most of the time, [the new] IE will use WebKit, making it compatible with most of the Internet. But then when it *does* encounter a site that uses ActiveX, it would drop into Trident. Microsoft wouldn’t have to worry about updating Trident, either. Sites that have ActiveX controls can keep using the current version of Trident, and they should work perfectly. This will keep “enterprises” using ActiveX happy, while simultaneously forcing development of new sites to use WebKit technologies, making these new sites run faster/better/cross-compatible.
If they are on about the desktop, this would be a silly move. Business all around the world depend on IE for the intranet integration applications, using technologies that only IE provides (ActiveX, Active Directory, etc). Making such a huge change to the browser would NOT make the enterprise adopt it at all. Businesses have long term investments in IE.
This is a stupid move.
Erm, why is it a stupid move? They could extend it, mold it as they see fit, and I don't think that (ActiveX, Active Directory .. etc.. ) have anything to do with the underlying rendering engine, or am I mistaken?
That already happened to an extent with the upgrade from IE6 to IE7. Though I am skeptical that they'd ever adopt WebKit for desktop IE.
Then they would have to learn to deal with the change and adapt.
Snap!!
It's ridiculous. I really hope to see Micorosft incorporate Webkit for when IE 8 goes final...although I doubt they will
Maybe IE 9? (but I really hope it would be IE
I seriously doubt it will happen in IE8. I would think it's already too far along in development (at least Beta 2) to make such a fundamental change now. Additionally, business customers don't like abrupt change. Microsoft knows that making such a change would require advanced notice to developers and those customers.
Last edited by OnyxAlien on 07 Nov 2008 - 15:25
Maybe IE9?
Compatibility shouldn't be an issue as IE8 has an IE7 rendering mode (Compatibility View), they could just switch standard rendering mode to WebKit.
Why would you want to keep around a rendering engine which does not properly conform to web standards & breaks many websites out there? Especially when it is one which the majority of the world's population uses.
Trident was developed by Microsoft for use in the Windows version of their web browser, Internet Explorer 4, and included up to Internet Explorer 8. It's been their mainstay.
I'm surprised, I must say. But glad to see MS is so open to other tech out there, especially open source.
It's a shame Microsoft are still thick enough to not realise they cannot make a renderring engine which displays websites as they should be displayed.
It's a very stupid move for them not to incorporate either WebKit or Gecko into Internet Explorer... very stupid!
Well they don't have any better features than Firefox. & they shouldn't brake new websites just to be "backwards compatible" with older sites which were made to work specifically for IE. These older sites should be updated by there developers to conform to web standards! It's not hard to validate your XHTML/HTML & CSS.
Exactly, I am actually pretty happy with IE8's rendering engine, standards compliant pages require virtually no tweaking to work on IE8. Although javascript still pretty slow when you compare it to Firefox 3.1, Chrome and Safari, but it can only improve between beta 2 and final.
Now the real problem is actually the fact that we have IE6 is wide use, IE7 in wide use and we'll be forced to develop for IE8, so now we have to deal with three IE engines to deal with when we're developing our web sites.
That's why switching to web kit doesn't really solve any problems.
Now just add BSD kernel and subsystem and we have another OSX version
Nice to see MS going the right way...
What a completely pathetic, brainless, witless, moronic, totally stupid comment. If that happened, Microsoft would once again be
mired in anti-competition lawsuits from the US DoJ, the EU, and maybe also from the Mozilla Foundation itself amongst others.
You were actually talking sense until that point ... then you spoilt it with gratuitous and ridiculous troll-like flame-bait!
Last edited by DJGM on 07 Nov 2008 - 18:54
And even though they plan to do it, its impossible for IE8 to be webkit-based. There's not enought time for that. Maybe IE9 or 10.
He never meant it this way!
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10723
But then they just wasted all this time perfecting their engine to pass the ACID test? What a waste.
pag
SO IE8 will have to make the market with new other demanding Apps.
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