Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Nov 2008 09:45 UTC, submitted by mlauzon
Most of the popular browsers these days are based on one of the two open source rendering engines - khtml/WebKit and Gecko. The most popular browser, however, is based on proprietary technology: Internet Explorer. Even though IE made some progress during the past few years, it's no secret that it took Microsoft far too long to counter the success of Mozilla's Firefox. Currently, Microsoft is working (and thus, spending money) on Internet Explorer 8, and this prompted an audience member during a keynote by Steve Ballmer to ask an interesting question: is it worth spending money on IE, with so many open source engines readily available? Ballmer's reply may surprise you.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
Microsoft doesn't have endless developer and maintanance resources. Competition is getting tougher for them, and for example, their security record with web browsers hasn't been good at all. They might really do this, or at least consider it seriously.
Apple is a commercial proprietary company too, much like Microsoft, and they use Webkit, BSD base for their proprietary OS etc.
It would be a big paradigm change for Microsoft, of course, and thus it would be big news, but in many ways it could make sense too.
But naturally it might also never happen. Maybe that would seem more probable too for now.