SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- Microsoft's chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was asked a 'cheeky' question (his words) at a Power to Developers conference questioning why Microsoft should continue developing its own HTML rendering engine when free open-source and standards-compliant alternatives exist.
The quote that caught everyone's attention, according to a post by AppleInsider: "Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."
Our take? Yeah, right. Microsoft's Internet Explorer may be behind the advances in Firefox (powered by Gecko) and Webkit-powered browsers like Safari and Chrome, but it's unlikely the team behind Internet Explorer would abandon years of development and what currently stands as the most popular rendering engine on the planet. Besides, as Ballmer reflected, there is plenty of proprietary technology, like .NET and Silverlight, that would be difficult to build-in and promote if Microsoft were to relinquish control of the rendering engine.
Web developers can dream though. Internet Explorer is well known as the least standards-compliant browser on the market. It continues to annoy web developers who have to add caveats in its code to work around Explorer's idiosyncracies. If it were to adopt Webkit, web developers could ditch the caveats and code one page for all standards-compliant browsers.
It would be nice to read more into Ballmer's quote, but the reality is we're stuck with accommodating Internet Explorer as long as it's baked into standard Windows installations. On the plus side, IE 8 looks like a very promising upgrade.
[via Techmeme]
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