Ballmer "Interested" In Open Source Browser Engine 410
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.'"
At least he's honest. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some possible problems, here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems reasonable to me. (Score:4, Interesting)
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:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Some possible problems, here? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:The third "E". The other browser. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Some possible problems, here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:At least he's honest. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org].
This would:
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!).
With Apologies... (Score:2, Interesting)
The browser war between Open and Closed, which is now in its three hundredth and twenty-sixth year has at last come to an end. There are no standards compliant websites left to view and few standards compliant browsers left to view with. The Internet has become so polluted with deadly viruses and proprietary code that it can no longer be viewed. There is no place on the Internet that is immune. The last surviving programmers for the manufacture of standards compliant code have been destroyed. Codebase improvements are rapidly diminishing and when they are gone, we must die...
Re:Some possible problems, here? (Score:3, Interesting)
I just got thinking. So let's say Microsoft doesn't include the new IE in it's next Operating System -- how do you get it? "Sorry, you do not have Internet Explorer installed. To download, please visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]"
You don't need a web browser to transfer files from the internet, even via http.
Re:I don't know what to make of this (Score:4, Interesting)
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:At least he's honest. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 credit to IE8 though (Score:2, Interesting)
As a web designer, the nightmare of my day is having to check my code against IE, Firefox, Safari, etc. Most of all was IE. That crap [IE] could really screw with you. The fact that a complex page design almost always couldn't accommodate both W3C standards and IE has made many days almost unbearable. Now I understand, "Well then don't program for it," and trust me I would love to live that idea, but the truth is company execs don't give a rat's ass. A lot of people use IE, and you're page has to work accordingly.
Anyway, my point is that IE8 beta 3 has shown some great improvements with CSS, XHTML, JavaScript support. Finally there will (should be) support for the pseudo :hover, etc. I've already seem some great improvements in complying with W3C standards. Though not up to par with its competitors, Microsoft has actually put some effort into this one that I haven't seen before.
It looks like someone working there ran across this page [gtalbot.org], or one like it, and thought it was finally time to make a change.
Re:At least he's honest. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another Ballmerism from his visit down under [theregister.co.uk] 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
Re:Some possible problems, here? (Score:1, Interesting)
Right. And what little 'integration' there was removed in Vista -- Explorer no longer uses Trident for UI components and ActiveDesktop is dead.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What Microsoft did to Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
would you accept patches from them? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seems reasonable to me. (Score:4, Interesting)
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:The third "E". The other browser. (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, exactly how IE4 eliminated Netscape in the first browser war. By burying them in the W3C.
I think what people overlook is that the standards process favors the "big guy" over the "little guy" -- assuming the big guy is paying attention. It will take some time for Microsoft to catch up, but it's a real possibility that they could they could pull ahead of Mozilla/Webkit/Opera within a couple years.
Re:Some possible problems, here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is, from today's point of view, a total waste of ressources on all sides (read: a paper tiger).
At least 50% of all computer users are completely clueless and will use whatever came with their PeeCee.
The blue e is "the internet" for them. For once and for all. Joe Sixpack doesn't know and doesn't care that he can remove his blue e or "upgrade" it to a red fox. Why should he? All the sites he goes to work more or or less on the blue e and even if they work less - he's unlikely to notice notice that the boxes don't align or that the rounded corners are off.
Microsoft will keep the lions share of the browser market unless one the following happens:
a) Windows loses significant market share (Linux on the desktop anyone?) ...) start blocking IE and tell Joe Sixpack to "upgrade to the red fox".
b) Windows ships without a webbrowser pre-installed. Instead there is a small widget after installation that asks the user to choose a browser to install ("Ooh, look the cute fox").
c) *Major* sites (CNN, google, porn,
Re:At least he's honest. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Interesting)
(or there would be, but it wouldn't use TCP/IP.)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)