One of the units already seeing cutbacks is Microsoft’s sagging browser business. A report in the Seattle Times says 180 contract workers were told last month that their services would not be renewed. Just yesterday, researcher Net Applications reported that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser registered 68 percent market share in December, down from 74 percent in May.

If this is true, and I think it is likely as CNBC is a rather reputable source of business news, I predict Trident’s days are numbered. As I pointed out back in November, Balmer suggested they might look at WebKit. I should note I do not think this will have any impact on IE 8, which is nearly complete. They could of course choose Gecko which would save them from needing to work with Google and Apple (which might freak out some government regulators).

The other very real option is to either license Opera’s Presto engine, or simply buy Opera which would give them some strength in the mobile market. I think Microsoft would prefer to buy simply because of the mobile implications. Opera has a decent foothold in the mobile market. They would still have the expense of developing a rendering engine but instead of playing catch up they would be much more “ready to play”. This would save them the overhead expenses of trying to cram several years of development to simply catch up to the other browsers. Since Presto is proprietary they still can utilize their other proprietary technologies without leaking any code to the open source community. As I said in the past, keeping things proprietary is important to Microsoft’s web strategy.

Poor standards compliant, performance, bugs lingering for years, security issues, are all issues that have plagued this rendering engine. The final nail in the coffin might end up being a recession and the need to cut costs.

Of course it’s possible Microsoft may not be renewing these contractors since IE 8 is nearly done and it will simply slow down IE 9 development, but I don’t think it’s likely considering the speed the competitors are going. I don’t think Microsoft will fall asleep at the wheel a second time.

So I’d like to adjust my statements back in November regarding Microsoft’s use of WebKit. I said before that it was unlikely. If this news is true, I think it’s becomes very realistic they will drop Trident. Maybe it really is as busted internally as we’ve all suspected for years.

There will still be fierce competition between WebKit, Gecko, and Presto regardless of what happens. Innovation and competition are essential to a healthy internet. This in fact makes it much more competitive since the one in last place in terms of supporting the latest in standards would suddenly catch up overnight.

Enough speculation for now. Lets see what turns out to be fact, and what turns out to be CompSci Fiction.

Edit [1/3/2009 @ 9:40 PM EST]:: Via Asa, apparently the layoffs were actually the MSN Homepages team, not the IE team as CNBC suggested.

“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.”

Let me say I highly doubt Microsoft would switch to WebKit or Gecko at any point in the near future. The most obvious reason is it would cause a massive bruised ego. It would be an undeniable admission that they fell asleep with a monopoly during IE6. A business Tortoise and the Hare. I don’t think they would want to do that. They are still trying to change the public opinion that Vista stinks, while they aggressively try to fix Windows. Will they be successful there? Who knows. They are however listing to customers and working on things like boot time, but I digress. This is a company culture thing.

Besides for that, it would mean Microsoft would loose some control over the rendering engine. Control is very important to them. The reason IE exists is to bridge Windows and the web. A browser without proprietary extensions means the web is completely portable (runs on any OS). This isn’t very beneficial to Microsoft, who coincidentally sells operating systems. Microsoft needs to bring Windows to the Internet as much as it needs to bring the Internet to Windows. Otherwise the operating system becomes even more irrelevant and any old internet appliance will suffice. Even if it ran Mac OS X or Linux.

Eventually Microsoft’s business may be in cloud computing and the OS and software for it may just be a legacy products, but today it’s still a decent sized business that they care about.

They could implement proprietary extensions on top of WebKit to their hearts content or simply fork WebKit and use it as a starting point for IE 9. Either way, they will have new issues regarding changes to WebKit in the future since it’s not exclusively theirs. This approach will also create angry developers who have yet another IE rendering engine to deal with since it won’t be pure WebKit. Their own developers will have to be familiar with an even larger code base. With larger code bases comes more surface area for security issues, though there would be at least some help on the WebKit side.

Another option is for them to simply use WebKit as another rendering engine in IE now that each tab is a separate process. Very simple on the surface since it’s just embedding WebKit into IE. However, this could be very complicated since there needs to be communication between processes (marking links as read, iframes etc.), a somewhat consistent UI (features in browser chrome need to work in all rendering engines), and of course plugins (NSAPI vs. ActiveX). I’m just scratching the surface here. It’s complicated. Netscape’s approach (Netscape to multiple engines really didn’t work out since users didn’t know what the hell that even meant.

These approaches don’t make much business sense either. It would be easier to just bundle Google Chrome or Safari instead of iexplore.exe. They could leave the MSHTML alone since other applications depend on it. That would be cheaper and accomplish the same goal. If the goal were to simply provide a better browsers. As I mentioned before, it’s to provide hook into the Internet.

Personally I found this quote to be much more fascinating:

Ballmer began his answer philosophically, saying Microsoft will need to look at what the browser is like in the future and, if there is no innovation around them, which he thinks is “likely”, Microsoft may still need its own browser because of proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.

“There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service,” he said.

At first I was confused by this statement, but then I realized there may be an explanation. Anyway, looking around at Firefox, Safari, Android, Opera, and IE, the one with the least innovation is really IE. Most of the IE 8 features are just variations of what other browsers have done. The rendering engine improvements are mainly catching up. Is that innovation?

Then he mentions proprietary innovation… ah ha!

Gecko doesn’t really resolve any of these issues except making an ActiveX implementation a little easier.

That’s why I don’t think Microsoft will make the jump to an open source rendering engine. Feel free to disagree.

That said, I like what Microsoft has done in regards to making IE 8 more standards compliant and fixing long existent bugs. I’ve worked with the browser and found that it’s much more on par with other browsers on the market than anything Microsoft has ever put out, except perhaps Tasman which was really ahead of it’s time.

Seems like the WebKit guys are well on their way.

By the time Acid3 complaint browsers are the norm, web applications will have a very nice platform of features that they can depend on. These tests really do help coordinate browser vendors to focus on certain issues by providing a good test case that they can all compare (and compete) against.

Robert O’Callahan’s got a got a great blog post on some of his observations of things Mozilla would likely make good use of. He also mentions one thing worth quoting:

It’s worth reflecting that if Microsoft was doing this, they’d likely be hauled before a judge, in the EU if not the US. In fact I can’t recall Microsoft ever pulling off an undocumented-API-fest of this magnitude.

This is a very valid point which I 100% agree with. Microsoft wouldn’t get away with this.

Safari developer David Hyatt (former Mozilla developer from when Lizards roamed the earth) commented about this issue. Essentially he justifies the decision based on it not being a good practice to use some of these methods, and other aren’t even used anymore. This of course raises the question: Should Apple be deciding what other software developers can do, when they themselves can’t follow the same standards? I’d say that if WebKit feels it has to use it, there’s likely others out there in the same situation regardless of “best practice”.

See, I’m not too much of an Apple fanboy to criticize them .

A few months ago Jesse Ruderman introduced jsfunfuzz, which is a tool for fuzz testing the js engine in Firefox. It turned up 280 bugs (many already fixed). Because the tool itself is not horded behind a firewall it’s also helped identify several Safari and Opera bugs. It’s a pretty cool way to find some bugs.

The WebKit team has now released SunSpider a javascript benchmarking tool. Something tells me this will lead to some performance improvements in everyone’s engine. How much will be done for Firefox 3.0 is a little questionable considering beta 2 is nearing release, though you never know. There’s been some nice work on removing allocations recently. So just because it’s beta, you can’t always assume fixes will be minor in scope.

Another test that many are familiar with is Acid 2 which essentially is checking CSS support among browsers. Ironically this one too was released when Gecko is somewhat late in the development cycle.

Efforts like this really help web development by allowing browser developers to have a baseline to compare their strengths and weaknesses. Having a little healthy competition as motivation can be pretty helpful too .

It got me thinking. Is it really about the iPhone? Or is it about mobile standards based browsers (WebKit in particular). What I’m talking about is Android, who coincidentally also uses WebKit. Call be crazy, but Google’s launch of this offering isn’t really about riding the iPhone’s popularity. It’s about being in that new mobile space. You might even say this is being tested on the iPhone, before Android comes around. No longer is mobile limited by a basic WAP deck. This one uses the same technology the rest of the web uses, only designed to look and function well on a small screen by people with giant clumsy fingers.

This space isn’t limited to just WebKit. Gecko has made some headway into the market (mainly via Nokia devices), and is preparing to make a big effort in the near future to bring Firefox Mobile to your phone. Most iPhone sites look pretty decent in Firefox already, the main thing that makes some of them look a little funny is a css property or two it doesn’t support, for example -webkit-border-image which has become pretty popular for sites only targeting WebKit since it’s pretty handy. Some sites also use -webkit-border-radius, which is supported on Firefox, as -moz-border-radius both of which follow the border-radius specs as part of CSS3, but are still namespaced for the moment.

For once we don’t have to learn another silly markup, and be limited by lack of JavaScript which has made the web a better place… for the most part (think Gmail, Google Maps, etc.).

It’s some very cool stuff. I’m really interested to see what comes.

Famous Last Words
OK, I have landed one half of the Aviary Branch. (the browser half). This may cause some difficulty and problems with the build/nightly build machines. I swear it all built on my machine. I am going to proceed with merging the other half tomorrow. Please bear with me.
- Ben Goodger, right before the tinderboxen go up in flames

- Hendikins

I got a good chuckle out of reading that.

WordPress support
Multiple Categories Support
XHTML friendly tags (option)
Edit Templates
“More” Feature has it’s own Tab

The sweetest feature is using Adam Lock’s Mozilla ActiveX Control… still to come. But I can’t wait to check it out.

Wonder why they switched?

One should note it requires 10.3. So perhaps, they are utilizing the smaller package (no need to install WebCore, as it’s ships with 10.3). Unlike Gecko, which has to be included.