As many of you will have noticed, Microsoft has a wiki page for enhancements to IE. Apparently, they made it a wiki because "there's no way we can currently scale to support the volume of requests on the forums" - in other words, IE is so terrible that they can't cope with the level of complaints ;-)
I was reading through the suggestions, and thought that basically, what everyone is saying is that MS make IE do all the stuff Firefox does. "Why doesn't someone just say that?", I thought. Well, they did :-) Although I wouldn't call the idea "outrageous".
It's a fair bet that the internals of Trident, the current WinIE rendering engine, are a mess. Just like Netscape with 4.x, if you evolve a codebase too fast, eventually it get too fragile to extend further. IE was competing in the browser wars too, remember? Microsoft would be foolish to rewrite IE from scratch. So, if they were to hop codebases, they have two realistic options - Tasman, the MacIE engine, or Gecko.
I don't know much about Tasman, so won't speak about it, but Gecko would be an excellent choice. Would it be harder to re-implement IE extensions on top of Gecko (or even deprecate them!) than it would to implement modern web standards on top of Trident? Interesting question.
Microsoft's well-known allergy to the GPL wouldn't even be an issue - they could use the code under the terms of the MPL, as Netscape does.
Posted by gerv at June 23, 2004 09:23 AMWhy don't Mozilla contact them officially?
Posted by: Boogie at June 23, 2004 11:55 AMHeh, old news ;)
http://gemal.dk/archives/000040.html
Have you looked at the Mozilla code lately? Its a mess, mainly because it was growing fast to catch up with IE.
Posted by: Doron at June 23, 2004 12:12 PMYou forgot an option: KHTML (as used in Konq and Safari).
However, one thing to bear in mind that points strongly towards Gecko is that it's (AFAIK) the only other engine that has anything close to the contentEditable support that Trident does. MS can't afford to go sharply backward in any area, especially one that's relied on by so many Content Management systems. A Hyatt blog comment a long time ago said that this would be a significant amount of work to add to Safari, and since I've never seen a WYSIWYG editor on MacIE that wasn't Java-based, I doubt Tasman had any support either. Gecko would need a significant amount of work to support it to IE's level (on divs as well as iframes, for example) but certainly much less than any of the others.
Doron makes a good point though. Did the CSSFrame Constructor issue mentioned in the Mozilla roadmap ever get fixed?
Posted by: Stuart at June 24, 2004 02:27 PM"It's a fair bet that the internals of Trident, the current WinIE rendering engine, are a mess. Just like Netscape with 4.x, if you evolve a codebase too fast, eventually it get[s] too fragile to extend further. IE was competing in the browser wars too, remember? Microsoft would be foolish to rewrite IE from scratch."
There are three gaping holes in that argument.
So, why would Microsoft be "foolish to rewrite IE from scratch"? There may be reasons, but they're not those you gave.
As for Tasman, it was quite standards-compliant, four years ago. But it was slow on OS 8/9, is even slower on OS X, and so far has only been developed for Mac OS. It would make more sense to use KHTML, which has better standards compliance, better performance, and is already known to work well on Windows.
(On preview: Gerv, mate, you know I love you, but your link styling is teh suck.)
Posted by: mpt at June 25, 2004 03:32 AMI was trying to make a post in the channel9 forums but apparently you have to use the rich text editor available under IE to get post to format properly. My main issue is that I can't figure out how to get a simple line break to show up when I'm posting using the simple text area available to non-IE browsers. Anyone know how to format a post on channel9 without IE?
Posted by: wg at June 25, 2004 07:49 AMIt would make more sense to use KHTML, which has better standards compliance, better performance, and is already known to work well on Windows.
Since when has KHTML been known to work on Windows (other than via Cygwin)?
Posted by: eggz at June 25, 2004 12:52 PMeggz - since iTunes 4.0, including the Music Store, was released for Windows. (If Gerv's link styling wasn't teh suck, you would have seen the hyperlink I made in my previous comment.)
Posted by: mpt at June 25, 2004 02:25 PMmpt: What about Hyatt saying that it is _not_ Webkit that is used to render the Music Store?
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_06.html#005666
fwiw, I read recently that micros~1 had been in contact with Opera folks. Sorry, I don't recall where I read it (thus, I cannot provide a link) but, Hey!, it must be true ... I read it on the internet.
Posted by: Sailfish at June 25, 2004 06:54 PMBenoit: Fair cop. I'll go back to keeping an eye on the SourceForge project, then. :-) (See also the fairly active GNUstep port.)
Gerv: Much better. Blue, even! Excellent.
Posted by: mpt at June 27, 2004 12:52 AM