Will Microsoft Open Source Internet Explorer?

Microsoft is an entity with some of the deepest understanding of computer science on earth. Unlike the more recent, more trendy companies, this company's very roots are in programming languages, and to the extent that any complex technology (the browser in this case) would be open sourced by it, we should encourage it whole-heartedly. Yes Microsoft is late to the open source party, but let's encourage it to open up more of the most experienced coding technology available to the planet. In general, I cannot be anything less than impressed with the new Microsoft, from open sourcing.NET, to Babylon.js, to free Office on Mobile, to a better command line experience in Windows 10. Yet with all these recent moves I also cannot fail to remember that the definitive C compilers and MASM drove the entire x86 industry, and that experience is invaluable.

This company is a new company, and I personally am paying a lot of attention to it having been a hater for a long time. The latest IE is a decent effort if you leave out Bing (which remains awful) and open sourcing it should be encouraged and applauded if it were to occur. As much as I love Firefox, IE is in my experience a far more stable and credible long term competitor to Chrome. For an example of some of the unsung quality behind IE, it is the ONLY browser that sends SVGs to a printer as vectors and not a screen-raster rendering. This is a small detail but points, to me, to the underlying quality that IE represents. For other Microsoft doubters: typescript, or the almost single-handed effort that Microsoft has put in to defeating large botnets.

I think this is bound to happen in the next five years. There is no longer a competitive advantage in keeping IE closed sourced.

IE doesn't need to be open sourced. It needs to be euthanized.

Also, we don't really need the entire application open-sourced. There might be an argument to be made for open sourcing Trident (the rendering engine), but only for the purposes of figuring out what in the hell is happening under the hood that's causing things to work so poorly. If any part of IE were open sourced, I imagine that at least modern versions of it are written on top of .NET which is also open source now, so maybe it would be made to work on multiple platforms? This is a bad thing. As I said before, we need less IE, not more.

IE users aren't asking for it in the same way that .NET users were. People use IE mostly because they don't see any reason to change.

What most web developers are more familiar with are the myriad ways to get around the inner workings of Trident, so that their websites can work from a more-or-less even playing field.