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Ugh, really? Perhaps the author hasn't checked the latest market share statistics for Internet Explorer? If FireFox couldn't kill IE when it was the technologic

Ugh, really? Perhaps the author hasn't checked the latest market share statistics for Internet Explorer? If FireFox couldn't kill IE when it was the technologically superior browser, then why would Chrome kill Firefox? I'll tell you why: Google has lot's o' cash and just might start paying OEMs to install Chrome in place of IE. That's something that Mozilla can't do (at least, not on the same scale as Google), and most people use the browser that's installed for them anyway. So what should Mozilla do? Well, here's a thought: once Google starts paying OEMs to install Chrome, Microsoft is going to have to take a long, hard look at what they're doing in the browser space. Once they do that, they'll find there's no compelling reason to keep draining resources into the black hole that is Trident. That leaves them two choices: WebKit or Gecko. WebKit might be the obvious choice, since it would bring them close to feature parity with Chrome, and isn't controlled by an ex-arch-nemesis. On the other hand, the Mozilla foundation could write a couple of nice, soothing, "I'm sorry for that whole anti-trust litigation deal" letters to Ballmer. That way they could swap one sugar-daddy (Google) for another (Microsoft), give Microsoft the rendering engine they so desperately need, and continue to develop XUL and Firefox off on their own.

thristian 18y ago
> Once they do that, they'll find there's no compelling reason to keep draining resources into the black hole that is Trident. That leaves them two choices: WebKit or Gecko. That is totally never going to happen. Gecko and WebKit are both totally useless to Microsoft, because they're good for nothing except browsing public internet sites. The last time Microsoft upgraded Trident's standards support (with IE7), they got bitten badly by all their business customers' intranet sites breaking. With IE8, they've pretty much promised to include the IE7 revision of Trident with every future release, so that none of their paying customers ever have to upgrade their intranet apps ever again. As for pouring money into the black hole of Trident, they've already stopped that - I believe the new 'standards mode' engine of IE8 is a wholly new contraption, unfettered by all the legacy quirks that bog down WebKit and Gecko.

thristian 18y ago

> Once they do that, they'll find there's no compelling reason to keep draining resources into the black hole that is Trident. That leaves them two choices: WebKit or Gecko. That is totally never going to happen. Gecko and WebKit are both totally useless to Microsoft, because they're good for nothing except browsing public internet sites. The last time Microsoft upgraded Trident's standards support (with IE7), they got bitten badly by all their business customers' intranet sites breaking. With IE8, they've pretty much promised to include the IE7 revision of Trident with every future release, so that none of their paying customers ever have to upgrade their intranet apps ever again. As for pouring money into the black hole of Trident, they've already stopped that - I believe the new 'standards mode' engine of IE8 is a wholly new contraption, unfettered by all the legacy quirks that bog down WebKit and Gecko.