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.

[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.

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: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+.