Submitted by 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.
Ballmer was speaking at a Power Developers event in Sydney, Australia, when someone asked the following question:
Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?
From an economical standpoint, this is a very valid question. Developing Internet Explorer surely costs the company money, money that could be spent elsewhere if the company picked one of the open source rendering engines. Apple did the same thing back when it started working on Safari. Ballmer thought this was a “cheeky” question.
“There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service,” Ballmer said, “Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.”
While I’m sure we won’t see IE/WebKit bundled with Windows 7, it could be that Microsoft is considering an open source rendering engine for beyond IE8 and Windows 7, maybe because they’re realising that the money and manpower they put into IE8 do not pay off well enough. Obviously, at this point, it’s all mere speculation, but interesting nonetheless.
What is next?
Ballmer looking into using the FreeBSD kernel and building Windows in VMs on top of that??
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.
mmm…
I do not think should thing could occur actually….
MS wants “everything written at home”, not because they like to reinvent the wheel, but because they want to have total control on every line of source code their business build…
“I do not think should thing could occur actually…. ”
It’s the best thing that could happen to the web, Safari, Konqueror and IE using the same rendering engine. MS couldn’t mess with it too much, because the don’t own the code, and any changes they make would need to be available.
Doing this would leave just 3 different major rendering engines to code for, Webkit, Gecko and Opera, and would make web devs lives so much easier
While I dont disagree with what you are saying I think the post prior to yours was saying how difficult it is becoming especially nowadays with so much competition and innovation…basically pressure from open source for Micrososft to maintaint that sort of hardline stance. And I agree 100% with that post as well!
I’m not sure how true that is. I’m certain that they license code (or buy it outright) from other proprietary vendors. Adobe and Apple, two other proprietary vendors also do that quite regularly. The only difference here is that they would be licensing code from an open source vendor. It’s a much smaller paradigm shift than many realize. It just makes good business sense, unlike clinging to an ideologically based, prejudice against open source software.
Which is more secure; Trident or Webkit? Webkit is open-source, but then its biggest sponsor is Apple; they’ve never designed a secure piece of software. Ever. Except maybe A/UX.
Trident has had so many security problems during the IE 6 period, but then Microsoft completely overhauled it along with Windows.
I think Microsoft will stay with their regular web rendering engine and it’s probably the better move.
Apple didn’t design Webkit either. Webkit is just a fork of KHTML. Designed by KDE.
No contest on the security front. All of the malware out there on the web that attacks via a browser does so via Trident, and none of it does so via KHTML/Webkit.
“Apple didn’t design Webkit either. Webkit is just a fork of KHTML. Designed by KDE. “
Please give the credit to who it is deserved to. Apple created webkit, starting from the code base of KHTML which was pretty much limited (it did not render correctly a LOT of web pages, it was unstable and relatively slow, but it was a small and clean code base that Apple was looking for to start upon) before Apple created webkit.
By itself, the first version of webkit that Apple built for Safari 1.0 was already a big change from the original KHTML and rapidly webkit became a complete independent project that was growing much faster as it was managed (and still is) by Apple.
Again webkit was born with Safari 1.0 and all the work on the initial version was done by Apple. And yes it is derived from KHTML but webkit is not a simple fork of KHTML (please don’t say non sense), this a major rework of the code base and a large addition of features was done compared to the original KHTML.
Edited 2008-11-07 14:47 UTC
But it is a fork…it started as a fork of the source code.
Apple forked KHTML and created WebKit
Holy crap. Yes. WebKit was “originally” a fork of KHTML/KJS. That’s where it ends. The growth, scope and size of WebKit Project dwarfs KDE’s projects tenfold. With WebKit we now have 4 distinct ports and growing.
Fine, hide behind your fanboyim all you want. Webkit was and still is a fork of the KHTML Engine and libraries.
once a fork, always a fork…
Konqueror still uses KHTML, and it was one of the first browsers to pass the Acid2 test…
Ok, Apple has done a good job building WebKit, but the “design” and the foundations, are still KHTML merit.
bwahahaha, you are a moron, and widly blinded by propaganda.. khtml has always been really fast, and quite adhering to standards.. it wasnt untill much later when webkit was adopted by other people that crapple themselves, that they were forced to stop making direct crapcode. and cleanup from their own damage has taken quite some resources..
KHTML was rendering a lot of stuff very nicely already at the time Apple took it. Sure, they have done a lot of nice stuff with it but you could say the same for KDE and now also GNOME (WebKitGTK) and Google (Chromium) who all contribute more to the main codebase than just the “ports”. Btw, KHTML is based on the original GtkHTML
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GtkHTML
GtkHTML was forked from KHTML!!
Not correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Some quotes people may find interesting:
That is the interesting one, isn’t it? If Konqueror lies, and pretends to be another rendering engine than it really is, websites work fine with it.
For the real history of it see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_KHTML_and_WebKit
Most of the work that Apple did to turn KHTML into Webkit actually involved getting to work with OSX and Cocoa.
Wrong. Apple designed WebKit. Apple didn’t design KHTML/KJS. WebKit has gone far beyond the focus of KHTML/KJS. WebKit is nothing like KHTML/KJS.
With the latest KDE you’re seeing the code base going back to KDE and fixing KHTML/KJS, not the other way around. You have former contributor of KHTML/KJS focused on WebKit and working at Apple, amongst other corporations.
In a year either KDE moves to WebKit or they become even more of an afterthought with Konqueror.
Yes I know, Webkit was forked from a KDE project (KHTML), but Apple has a bad record for security, and they contribute a heck of a lot of code to Webkit (probably the biggest contributor). And Webkit is getting a new Javascript interpreter, contributed mostly by… Apple!
Webkit is not a big target as it currently has minimal use on open-source platforms and almost no use on Windows. Just because it hasn’t been attacked, does not make it secure. I definitely have more faith in the security of KHTML, if it still exists, than I do Webkit.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unforking-…
“Now, after years of split, KHTML and Webkit are coming together once again.”
Edited 2008-11-08 10:36 UTC
Microsoft Releasing it under an open source licence … pigs may fly
Actually Ballmer can say any thing
Someone inside Microsoft just programs he says:
e.g.
for (int i = 0; i < 14; i++)
ballmer.say(“Developers”);
Edited 2008-11-07 16:12 UTC
“It” = what? The MSHTML enigne? Another open source html renderer, now, _that_ would be what we all really need
It’s the same old MS after all, you need to look at the whole coment and spot the important part.
“Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.”
This I interpret as. “For us, HTML is not the important part of the browser and using open source for this may could be a alternative to perhaps save some devlopment cost. But the important thing for our busniss are the (proprietary) extensions for IE(creating a lock in on our platform/thecnology).”
It sounds like the usuall embrace and extend MS has done for years.
That sounds pretty right to me also.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is precisely those proprietary extensions for IE that make it such an unmitigated security disaster.
I think MS learned from its mistakes (proprietary extensions are one of them)….
Their last versions of their products point to the other side, trying to be 100% compliant with standards (for example, IE8 or Visual C++ 8)
Those propriatary extensions are not designed to create “lock-in” (or at least they haven’t been since the netscape years), they are there specifically for use in other MS apps. A good example of this is XMLHttpRequest (the X in AJAX), which was created and designed for OWA, and later adopted by the rest of the world.
9 times out of 10 if something works in ie and doesn’t work in anything else, it is just due to ie rendering bugs, not propriatary extensions. Some of the extensions are actually a good idea (like XHR), but most are just for eye candy. There is also word coming from the IE team that in upcoming releases, propriatary extensions will be handled in the same way as they are handled in other browsers, with the browser prefix (like moz- or khtml-)
And that isn’t even going into stuff like how it is a deployment platform (for oneclick and xbaps in .net)
After reading Ballmer’s response, it sounded more like he was politely saying “No, that’s never going to happen” with added “we may borrow ideas from webkit if we like them”.
Ballmer being polite? Now that’s newsworthy!
I meant ‘polite’ in terms of keeping the PR people and shareholders happy rather than adhearing to social etiquette.
of course he said “interested”.
after all – Microsoft did make public statements in the past saying they were taking open source seriously (to some level of degree). Ballmer doesn’t want to contradict to PR statements made by his own company.
That was an epic troll.
You play Spore too?
i think based on those comments and MS’s and Ballmer’s tracker record, that they’d buy out a browser. I just don’t see them using webkit even if they fork it.
that pretty much leaves mozilla/firefox to be bought by MS or Opera, i think Opera would be easier to buy.
Ballmer has a habit of giving completely nonsensical answers and double-dutch in reply to questions he finds difficult. This means absolutely nothing.
Gates banged on about this for years and zilch has happened. Everyone assumed in the 60s and 70s we would have a HAL 9000. There is a lot about speech and intelligently making responses, and making sense of them, that simply can’t be programmed right now because it is far more complex than people realised.
I’m afraid your OEM licensing scheme does not scale up to the number of devices that will need to be sold to make this work. Manufacturers need the software to be dirt cheap.
The last point applies, as does the thorny issue of DRM which is simply incompatible with consumer wants and needs of streaming content to whatever devices they want. Inevitably, a rule will appear somewhere that says “You can’t do that” and everything will fall apart.
Ahem…
http://tinyurl.com/6nvnfy
http://tinyurl.com/5oxr65
http://blogs.msdn.com/chuckop/
http://tinyurl.com/6z4pgu
( This post was dictated. )
You actually dictated those links?
Either way, there’s a huge difference between being able to dictate for the computer and to have it actually understand things, which is what I think the grandparent post was referring to.
An while we’re posting links, here’s one I find somewhat relevant to speech recognition:
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/30/gates
Dictation has been around for some time, and Microsoft certainly weren’t the first to do it or even produced the best software for doing it. What I’m talking about is not dictation, and is what the majority will demand from speech recognition.
Having a computer understand speech, interpret speech into actions that haven’t been pre-specified (important) and be able to converse meaningfully back through speech is an entirely different matter. This is why the speech recognition you point to in those links simply hasn’t taken off on a big scale as a means of interacting with a computer.
This wouldn’t be the first open source technology for Microsoft to endorse. Technologies such as Kerberos have been implemented in Windows for some time now.
Cheers,
Mike
Let’s just hope they would treat webkit better than kerberos then, because that’s one of the things that Microsoft has gotten lots of criticism for.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2000/0511kerberos.html
Yes, I agree. I was just saying; I can’t help but think that the “well, we’ve taken this approach before – we can do it again” has a chance of coming up more than once as Microsoft finds themselves in situations where they are “lagging behind”.
Personally, I think the more they do this and the more fingers pointed at them acknowledging what they are doing, that good will come – not any significant degree, but enough to make one smile.
Cheers,
Mike
MS will definitely keep IE around. They might use WebKit as a rendering engine but they will stick to developing IE since they plan to compete with Google for web applications. Having their own browser makes it easy to push Silverlight web applications. I could see MS moving to WebKit and somthing like the Spidermonkey Javascript engine. They would add their proprietary GUI, ActiveX, and MS specific web application functionality. Moving towards more rich content Silverlight applications will allow them to offer benefits for IE users. They might embrace WebKit but they will tweak their browser so it benefits MS users, such is the proprietary way that keeps them in business.
You do realize that Silverlight is cross-browser and cross-OS compatible, right? It has nothing to do with IE.
Wow. I didn’t realise that Microsoft had open sourced .Net and had downloads for multiple platforms, and where they had open sourced media codecs so that in the event of Microsoft losing interest in producing codec packs for non-Windows platforms Silverlight can keep some semblance of staying cross-platform? The reference Silverlight platform will be IE and Windows because that’s where the new features will turn up first.
You see, you can repeat the above as often as you like, but the caveats will remain.
“Ballmer: Microsoft ‘May Look’ at WebKit”
Honestly who really cares?
Oh, just every single web developer out there. Besides that, true, not many people.
Well, not in the “wow they use webkit”-way but users would surely care about the “wow I did this page on windows and it looks 100% the same on Mac/iPhone/Android/KDE/Gnome/…”
…just looks a little odd in Firefox is all… 😉
Edited 2008-11-09 00:20 UTC
ah! Anyone thinking Microsoft could (or maybe “should”) switch from current IE engine to WebKit doesn’t live on planet Earth but somewhere in outer space…
I find it ridicolous even to think about it. It’s more likely that Microsoft completely wipes IE off of any Windows version than MS switching to another engine. This is news from nothing: Ballmer only said that they will “look” at WebKit as improving support for Web standards is (new) Microsoft policy.
But replacing engine… ah! That’s funny! The leading browser of the market replacing its engine with that from competitor? What next? Windows asking permission to use OS X kernel?? 😉