Earlier quoted context omitted.
IE is deeply integrated within windows. Rewriting everything for webkit may be costly.
If I recall correctly there's some weird incestuous relationship in the HTML rendering in Outlook, Word and IE. I agree it's almost definitely technically infeasible.
An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
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Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#32I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#33No 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).
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I love how they say IE is no longer an "outlier." They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
They did show how IE8 is orders of magnitude slower than its competitors - that display of honesty shocked me a little.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#35Here 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…
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#36Microsoft can replace IE8, but can they replace IE6?
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that they can't. Give Microsoft a compelling business reason to build a great browser that also supports IE 8,7, and 6 rendering modes, and I bet they'll do it.
Isn't reclaiming the 20-30% market share they lost to Safari/Firefox/Chrome reason enough?
They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
Re: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I recall correctly there's some weird incestuous relationship in the HTML rendering in Outlook, Word and IE. I agree it's almost definitely technically infeasible.
Nope, Outlook now uses the Word rendering engine, since it's part of the Office family. Totally makes sense right?
I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...