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Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers
by ecoffey 17y ago
Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers and other OS bits and parts.
No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).
- ironsam 17y agoBut then they couldn't render with Direct2D and DirectWrite, which has potential to be a valuable improvement.
- statictype 17y agoProblem is, a lot of custom software depends on ActiveX controls and other plugins that work in IE but not anywhere else. Until WebKit or Gecko start wrapping activex (not likely and doesn't seem like something they should be spending time on anyway), IE will continue to have significant usage - at least within companies. Also, there's the pride issue of dropping their own rendering engine for one sponsored by Apple.
- ecoffey 17y agoRight, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces, but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-) (indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would celebrate!