3 ms·

The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying sh

The first not what I want, it's the future I think this article is actually predicting (as opposed to IE round two), and I'm saying it won't be such a crying shame. Also not "possible ever" is pretty hyperbolic, considering the lock-in when IE had a monopoly was far stronger than it would be if Chrome/Blink got a monopoly. At the worst we'd have a permissively licensed reference implementation, which is a lot better than trying to be compatible with a closed source blob like IE.

pcwalton 11y ago
Closed versus open source isn't a big deal in terms of difficulty of reverse engineering. It's relatively easy to figure out what IE does; Hixie even clean room reverse engineered IE's entire HTML parsing algorithm back in the day. Having to be bug-for-bug compatible with one engine with no sensible specification is what causes the problems.