3 ms·
> Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Office had their own browser rendering engine that didn't rely on anything in IE. I'm not sure what the situation is no
by c5karl 8y ago
> Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Office had their own browser rendering engine that didn't rely on anything in IE.
I'm not sure what the situation is now, but for a long time Outlook used MS Word, not MSIE, to render HTML email messages. Word is a terrible web browser, so that made it next to impossible to design templates for things like email newsletters that would look & behave sensibly in Outlook.
- chrismorgan 8y agoOutlook 2003 switched to the IE renderer, then for what I consider to be terrible reasons they switched back to MSO in 2007, and still use it in Outlook and even Windows Mail now. (The reasons I recall were bugs in the editor and security—.) For people that aren’t in the know: the MSO engine is basically a very incomplete and quite buggy implementation of the HTML 3.2 specification. From where I stand, it looks like the entire thing is a binary blob that essentially hasn’t been touched at all for over twenty years. Literally. Microsoft switching back to MSO breathed new life into an entire industry of people with esoteric, hard-won knowledge about the eldritch affairs of HTML for email. Without it, HTML for email would not be such a disaster. (Sure, there are other awful email clients, but Outlook is by far the most terrible that is used much these days. If it had tightened its game, other bad clients would have been much more like to fix theirs too.)