Next to chanting ‘developers, developers, developers’ once again at a Sydney developer conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that he thought the idea of using open source application framework WebKit as the rendering engine for Internet Explorer (and its mobile counterpart) was “interesting” and that the company “may look at that.”
According to Techworld, Ballmer specifically said:
“Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.”
While that would make perfect sense if you ask me, it would be a huge mistake to jump to any conclusions based on those words. It’s highly unlikely that Microsoft would endorse an open-source product in such a big way, and I can’t imagine them working on the same code base together with Apple either.
Still, embracing WebKit as the foundation for future versions of IE would be welcomed by many a developer. Using WebKit would enable the company to leverage the framework’s standards compliance and impressive speed, while still enabling Microsoft to extend IE with proprietary extensions.
WebKit was originally derived by Apple from the Konqueror browser’s KHTML software library for use as the engine of Safari 1.0. It’s now being used by Nokia and Apple for their mobile browsers, and Google Chrome and the Android browser are powered by WebKit as well. Firefox on the other hand has its own rendering engine called Gecko.
Firefox, Safari and Chrome keep taking bites out of Microsoft’s market share for web browsing at a rapid pace. As ReadWriteWeb recently reported, Mozilla claims an impressive 20% worldwide market share for Firefox.
On a sidenote: Ballmer apparently also admitted at the event that Microsoft got delayed with the transition from IE6 to IE7 during the development of Longhorn, which later became Vista.
“But I don’t want to go there.”
Smart thinking.
Update: ZDNet Australia has a video of the full Ballmer speech. For the WebKit comments, jump to the 38:45 mark.
IMO, Microsoft should considering WebKit for IE since IE has a lot of bugs especially IE6. It’s like a nightmare for designers and developers.
It would certainly make life easier for us web developers but I won’t hold my breath, I can’t see them dropping the work they have put into IE7/8.
>>Firefox, Safari and Chrome keep taking bites out of Microsoft’s market share for web browsing at a rapid pace
I love offhand comments like this. They are often, like this one, nonsense. Firefox is the only one taking any real marketshare from IE. Safari has pretty much flatlined. It actually went down slightly last month. It remains decent but it is note “rapidly” doing anything. Chrome is back to earth at .7% which is not even really a bite. Opera has more share. IE competition is Firefox.
I Agree with whatUrunning. Even though MS is starting to slowly open torwads open source (take intgration of JQuery in VS for example) I really doubt we’ll see IE using WebKit or any other open source technology at its core in a few years.
You all over look the security implications of a single rendering engine used in every browser. Imagine a security flaw within WebKit, and how easily it would be to exploit such a flaw on a global scale if every browser vender adopts it. Diversity in code and in market share help protect us all from the bad guys.
There are many reasons why all the browsers shouldn’t use the same rendering engine. But protection from exploits is not one of them. If all the browsers use the same rendering engine, and it gets exploited, then many 10s of millions of users are at risk. And if all browsers use different rendering engine, and one gets exploited, even then many 10s of millions of users are at risk.
When an exploit is found, does it matter if 50 million users are at risk vs 100 million users are at risk?
they should just buy Opera
All I can say is…please!?
That’s a shame, because IE’s rendering engine will only become more and more and more cluttered and terrible. It’s already crap, it’s only going to become more crap as it is developed further.
WebKit and Gecko are widely considered the “correct” rendering – in other words, they render with correct standards and without idiotic bugs. It only seems to make sense to move to that, because people are dropping support for IE6 because of how much fail it is.
lol maybe they are giving up on developing their own. webkit is good
In this case I think “we may look at that” is executive-speak for “I’d like to tell you what I really think of your bone-headed question, but there are reporters present.”
we may look at that” is executive-speak for “I’d like to tell you what I really think of your bone-headed question,
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Pre-IE7 I really hoped that Microsoft would consider implementing Gecko as there rendering engine (it was already open source and webkit wasn’t available at the time.) It never made sense to me that they would continue to devote resources to improving a broken engine when there was a really good one that was freely available. I understand that legacy support was an issue, but now that they’re committed to supporting standards and providing multiple engines (the current IE8 beta uses a total rewrite as I understand it) it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to throw away money on their own engine which will always be playing catchup. Let open source developers do the work for you, Microsoft.
Microsoft will continue to lose market share to WebKit based browsers unless they significantly change IE. It is a piece of junk.
Why Microsoft won’t conform is quite interesting. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to continue building browsers based on a flawed engine. I know for a fact that some people are just too lazy/afraid to use any browser than the one that came with their copy of Windows. They’re probably just leveraging on that.
Maybe it’s time that designers stopped designing for IE, forcing users to migrate to other browsers.
“It’s highly unlikely that Microsoft would endorse an open-source product in such a big way”
Robin, do some homework.
http://weblogs....-microsoft.aspx
You’re talking about the Developer division. Say what you want about the OS and Office divisions, the Developer division makes some great tools.
Call Scott Guthrie, he’ll give you a straight answer.
They should include IE in the WebKit and get rid of all the existing issues which are nightmare for developers.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
I lived to see Ballmer considering OpenSource a viable option for Microsoft’s products…
What happened with “Linux (and OSS) like a cancer” thing?
damn I feel good!
I concur with A.Faith..
I seriously think that Microsoft should take a step back from Capitalism and switch to Socialism. It’s high time that they open some of their products as Open Source.
Although not a fan coding to IE’s rendering eccentricities, it will be good to have it separate in the market from this point. MSFT can *never* move towards a shared architecture with IE. They will, and must, maintain a separate set of tools to keep focus on their “whole product” value proposition (.Net, C#, WPF, etc). I never thought I’d say this, but MSFT needs to pursue an independent path for the benefit of the overall market’s innovation growth. MSFT has to get the right mix in the next few years of standards support plus MSFT added value. I hope they do. Weird saying that since I really think MSFT has been one of the great hindrances to innovation since probably the mid-90s (I know others would argue the opposite, but that’s a IMHO). But that time is past.
Thanks for the interesting comments. Hope some body from MS listening.