“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.

One thing I do question is if webmasters will read it, at least where it matters. Most large companies have a contact form, or an email address, but it’s often forwarded to customer support, or sometimes just into a giant bin where a handful get processed. Will the information get to the people who need it? I suspect it will for small companies who read all the email they get from the web. For large companies, I doubt it, and that’s where I think it matters the most. The bigger sites that the majority of the web visit.

Regardless, it’s interesting to see, for me in particular since I wrote reporter. I suspect the best efforts are still to encourage the industry as a whole to adopt best practice. Considering the move to go mobile, and be more flexible on the front-end, using standards is just becoming more of a requirement. I think that will ultimately end up being the winning effort. It’s already winning as newer sites are generally pretty good when it comes to standards. The old ones will take time.

With Safari 3 and Opera 9.5 out, Firefox 3 taking off, IE 8 coming soon, it’s pretty obvious that standards are the future.

David Baron has a must read blog post. Since the bulk of these older sites are on intranets, why not just allow administrators to enable compatibility mode on intranets? Seems like a perfectly logical solution that doesn’t hold back the web, and allows them to achieve their goals.

Daniel Glazman has another idea that I think is very valid.

• Microsoft should freeze, and I really mean it, its current IE6/IE7 HTML 4 engines, and drop that META tag idea.

Ditto. That needs to be a very deep and reliable freeze though.

Essentially the argument by the IE team is this: Rather than fix the problem, lets create a larger problem so the smaller one isn’t very noticeable.

Yea, that’s how I parsed the blog post. For anyone who disagrees, perhaps I interpreted it wrong because they didn’t select the correct parser because they didn’t include the following:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8;FF=3;raccettura=serious;OtherUA=4" />

All joking aside it’s an insane idea guaranteed to set things back.

The problems web developers face are pretty simple:

• Archaic html/js often written by Java/C++ developers in the late 90′s early 00′s who knew nothing of html/js but wrote the backend and by definition were expected to figure out the frontend. Code is massively FUBAR and was designed for IE exclusively. Those currently maintaining it have no idea what to do to fix it and don’t want to bother.
• Genuine attempts to keep up with standards but growing frustrated with lack of good browser support for them (looking at you IE 6, and partially at IE 7).
• Half hearted attempt to keep up with standards, but figure all the cool kids use an XHTML 1.1 doctype, so why not?

There are others, but most fall into these 3 categories. Microsoft’s fix doesn’t help anyone of them. It just means more broken sites and more knowledge of different issues in various versions is needed. Let IE 6 die already. Mozilla put Firefox 1.x to sleep already. Encourage it to die. IE 6 was released in 2001. It’s perfectly acceptable at this point to EOL it. There’s a viable alternative for Windows XP which is still supported. IE 7, Firefox, Safari. All of which are free. Killing IE 6 once and for all is the first step to fixing the problem. It will get rid of lots of ugly “hacks” on the web and let developers start to move on. And on towards getting ready for IE 8.

What happens if my page is set to use 1 rendering engine, but I want to include a “widget” designed for another? In the age of embedded content this raises a whole new set of issues. Not everything is Flash. What if this JS widget is designed for IE 7 and my page is designed for IE 6? The web right now is at least encouraging people to keep up, and providing incentives (better cross browser compatibility, reduced QA and triaging issues). This new scheme just fragments the web. Many of those embedding these days don’t know a thing about html, js, or web standards and compatibility. How do you explain what they need to know? Or does my code really need to be able to handle all cases an embedder might throw? Does anyone else see the burden this creates?

As Robert O’Callahan so awesomely points out, it can’t be easy for Microsoft to maintain either. If they have so much time/resources on hand, why not just work on fixing bugs, furthering the web standards work, and starting an evangelism team to contact problematic sites and encourage them to start fixing issues. Worked for little old Mozilla with < 5% market share at the time. I’m guessing with Microsoft’s market share, they could likely do better.

Why not do like WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera do and start providing nightlies so developers can actively track issues? Why are web developers left in the dark through most of the process? It doesn’t seem like anything is really a closely guarded secret. You can keep the UI stuff private and just release updates to the rendering engine. That’s essentially what WebKit does. CSS3 isn’t exactly a business secret. Then once things are late in the game, web developers are shown what they need to deal with. The model the other players use is so much better from a developer perspective. I regularly test sites I take care of in nightlies. Not every day or even every week, but I keep up on it. Web developers have had over 1 year to see what Firefox 3.0 was cooking up. Various blogs have covered changes, as well. IE 8? Radio silence for the most part. Exceptions for things like this.

There must be a better way. Come on Microsoft, help fix the web.