Ballmer "Interested" In Open Source Browser Engine

Da Massive writes "'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?,' asked a young developer to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Sydney yesterday. 'That's cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky,' Ballmer said. Then came the startling revelation that Microsoft may also adopt an open source browser engine. 'Open source is interesting,' he said. 'Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.'"

Comments

At least he's honest.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"We will continue to build extensions". That definitely deserves a whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag.

Re:At least he's honest.

[Anonymous Coward]

What would be much more interesting would be if Microsoft adopted an Open Source renderer--not by adopting an existing FOSS renderer--but by opening up Trident.

This would:

• Undermine Firefox and Co. by taking some of the Open Source wind out of their sails
• Still support Microsoft's original goal of tying people to Windows--Trident is such a b!7$# to port to different operating systems that Microsoft wrote a whole new rendering engine for the Mac port of IE

Microsoft already makes it trivial for third parties to incorporate Tasman into their applications, so I don't see MS having anything to lose through this.

I would support this if it makes it possible for third parties to push in security fixes and compatibility fixes (let's make CSS actually work right!).

Re:At least he's honest.

[jd]

I'd rather not see an entire rendering engine in one huge monolithic chunk. Part of the reason that web standards outpace browser development by so much is that most engines are very hard to extend. What's wanted is a "standard" API for a data-to-data transformation engine. Instead of the W3C producing a proof-of-concept browser like Amaya, all they need do is produce a proof-of-concept transformation engine instead, which can then be used also to verify proof-of-correctness. (Any other transformation engine for that same transform will produce the same output for the same input.)

Sure, they can still have their own web browser, but they don't need to re-write it when they add to the standard, they can just slide in another engine.

How would this work, in practice? Well, my thought is that each opening tag and either explicit or implicit closing tag would be assigned a numerical value that would be assigned by the W3C, much as the IANA assign port numbers. Each engine would then register what numerical values it supports.

The browser would then consist of five parts: network I/O, a preprocessor which converts tags to ID, a set of engines which would "compile" the page from a "high-level" format into a much "lower-level" portable format, a rendering engine which converted the portable format into a much more specific format, and then a display engine which displayed the results.

The primary advantage of this sort of arrangement is that things like CSS could then be easily replaced in a browser. It would be much more pluggable than the Mozilla engine or the libwww engine. It would be much more customizable. A major plus, given that very few browsers conform the the whole standard and all conform to different bits. If you could rip out modules from a browser you didn't like but did support a tag or feature you needed, this would not be a problem.

The secondary advantage is that it would be possible to provide support for non-SGML-derived tag-based systems, such as TeX, Postscript, and so on, natively. At the moment, you can include a link to a .ps file on a web page, but it's very hard to embed it, and completely impossible on most browsers to embed it in a way that integrates completely smoothly with HTML or would allow you to include active hyperlinks within it (unless an independent postscript viewer supported them). By compiling the whole page from all kinds of formats into a single, unified format, anything that is possible in one format becomes possible in all formats.

This isn't how web browsers are written, though, and it doesn't seem likely that this is how web browsers will be done in the future. Which keeps document types isolated from each other and keeps browsers from fully supporting any of those document types.

Re:At least he's honest.

[zobier]

Another Ballmerism from his visit down under that made me facepalm:

Steve Ballmer has publicly belittled Google's fledgling mobile phone platform, saying the world's largest search engine ad broker is low on Microsoft's list of mobile competitors.

At an investor briefing in Sydney today, Microsoft's chief exec said Google would not have an easy time convincing handset manufacturers to adopt Android, its brand new Linux-based mobile platform.

"They've got some smart guys and hire a lot of people - blah-di-blah-di-blah," Ballmer said of his rival. "They start out way behind in a certain sense, and we'll see how they do."

Then he added "I'm not giving them a hard time" - before continuing to give them a hard time.

Emphasis mine

Some possible problems, here?

[Duncan Blackthorne]

Hasn't IE been a fully integrated part of Windows since, what, all the way back to Windows 98? If they start using some open-source code for their browser, will the architecture of the OS still have IE as such an integral part, or will it become a separate application again? Also, is it really such a good thing to have Micro$oft active in the open-source community? Forgive me, but talk like this makes me a little nervous.

Re:Some possible problems, here?

[denttford]

FTP. No, not a solution for the average user, but on a fresh install of XP, I'll often just ftp Firefox (and then install noscript, abp, flashblock, etc. and restart) in order to download the other stuff I need to keep the computer in a relatively useful state.

Yes, I could use IE and go straight to mozilla.org, but off the bat, it loads msn.com and I have no desire to expose IE7 or worse, IE6, to the mercies of the scripts and ad providers on the page.

P.S. releases.mozilla.org is where you want to go.

Re:Some possible problems, here?

[hairyfeet]

Actually since Win2K it has been integrated enough that removing it completely makes the OS a big unstable mess. Before that in Win9X you could use IEradicator to strip it out and the OS would actually run faster. But if you try removing it completely with Nlite or XPLite now you will find that the OS stability goes right in the toilet. Whether because they did integrate or simply made sure it has enough system calls attached to it to make the OS unstable I don't know. Maybe with Win7 they'll release an OS that'll be able to be stripped down to the bare metal like Win9X was with 98lite. I personally hope so because I'd love an OS running DX10 that was as bare metal as possible simply for playing games.

Seems reasonable to me.

[jellomizer]

Microsoft won the Browser Wars but failed to achieve its objectives in victory. The war against Netscape was to insure that all apps either network based or not needed Microsoft Windows with IE to run the apps. With such failures such as Active X which never really made it past the Intranet and Extranet application. What happened was web developers for the most part designed as much using open standards (or at least plugins that were more universally compatible) and then were able to make apps that run well on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD or whatever just as long as you have a fairly modern browser. What was probably really surpassing to Microsoft most of this. Even decided to give the apps a step back in functionality (just recently for the last couple of year the AJAX method with DHTML became fully functional, or at least 85% there) just to keep compatibility.
What killed Microsoft objective more then anything was the insecurity of Active X and the general habit for people when asked a question is to answer yes and get it done. So now Microsoft is spending millions of dollars in IE development without really getting any major competitive advantage out of the deal. Sure you may have 90% of the market but only 5% of that market actually doing IE Only things you are just wasting your money.
Going to an open source rendering system just seems a way to keep up with the time. By joining the Jones you don't need to keep up with them. Just like with Safari or Chrome all the company needs to do is maintain the browser in features and UI (stuff that closed source companies have seem to shown they have an advantage over open source) and use someone else's Open Source rendering engine (Following specs and making things like rendering engines are what Open Source Developers are good at) So what Microsoft accomplish is a new objective. People will want to stick with Windows because they Like IE over the others.

Re:Seems reasonable to me.

[Kjella]

Microsoft won the Browser Wars but failed to achieve its objectives in victory. The war against Netscape was to insure that all apps either network based or not needed Microsoft Windows with IE to run the apps.

Was that it? I thought it was their objective to do their damndest to make sure network applications never took off in the first place by cramping the browser as much as possible and deploy Win32 thick clients instead. Considering they killed Netscape, crippled Java and delayed webapps by refusing to improve IE6 for years, I'd say they were wildly successful. ActiveX was simply to fool all those in the dotcom wave to give an illusion of freedom while still being tied to Windows, like a dog on a leash. For years I heard that you needed to make a "real" application to do this and that. What's happening now though is that they're considering going with the flow to keep control of IE - to for example ship the latest version of Silverlight with it and things like that. The clue is to have two new hooks stuck before you have to let go of the first one, rather than lose it completely.

Re:How?

[Darkness404]

I know, but some of the people who are determined to hate Linux or OS X say that their bank, work, school, grandma won't work without Active X or that their bank, work, school, grandma won't render correctly with Firefox/Safari/Chrome.

Re:The third "E". The other browser.

[Merusdraconis]

Ballmer pretty much confirmed (was there yesterday) that was the strategy later on in his answer - to beat the standards bodies to new features. The entire strategy they presented was building a new Microsoft-only Web stack built on .Net, and then trying to lock people in with IE8+.

Re:I don't know what to make of this

[dreamchaser]

There is no reason at all that they couldn't integrate an OSS web rendering engine into Windows just as tightly as they have done so with IE.

Re:What Microsoft did to Apple

[IntlHarvester]

Apple were evil because they claimed they owned fundamental GUI concepts through copyright. They threatened to sue the entire industry to prevent any other computer from having a "WIMP" (windows icons mouse pointer) interface.

Microsoft didn't break the agreement. In fact, the courts found that Apple signed away certain IP rights to Microsoft in return for what turned out to be killer apps for the Mac Platform (Word & Excel). Therefore Microsoft won the case -- with some minor exceptions like the Trash Can.

Later on another court case (Lotus v Borland) ruled that "Look and Feel" couldn't be copyrighted, making the whole Apple legal effort irrelevant, and opening the way for other companies to make Mac-like GUI interfaces.