5

It's been rumored that IE8 will be Microsoft's final release of IE (When I asked this question, someone pointed me to an article on Slashdot -- Yes, I know, it's Slashdot, but it cited an article on InfoWorld -- in any case, there seems to be some legitimate concern regarding Microsoft's continued support for IE, at least in its present form).

What are their future plans for an HTML-rendering engine?

Microsoft is apparently not making great strides towards making the current Trident engine compliant with CSS3, so I was simply wondering if they are instead looking the replace it with a next-generation engine (I've heard the code-name "Triton") or abandoning it in favor of a competing platform (such as WebKit, as Reed Copsey points out in his answer).

Why the aggressive downvoting? This is a legitimate issue for anyone who is planning on using IE as an embedded control.

Tony the Pony
  • 40,327
  • 71
  • 187
  • 281
  • Hi Jen, I agree with you, that this is potentially a legit question.. however it seems the community doesn't, so either rework it so that it's an obvious programming question, or 'moderate' it yourself. :) – Scott Ferguson Mar 15 '09 at 20:43
  • I heard about this on a podcast (forget which one). IE is becoming so burdened with backwards compatiblity (registry settings, old code, other crap) that it seems to just be getting to the end of its life. I think this is an interesting question. – Andy White Mar 15 '09 at 20:44
  • With the number of applications the integrate IE, this seems legit to me. I would reword the question, though. – Reed Copsey Mar 15 '09 at 20:50
  • Does it make sense to the community to treat this as an opportunity to discuss the exact reasons as to why IE may die a (un?)-timely death rather than speculate? – dirkgently Mar 15 '09 at 20:52
  • How is this a legit question? You can bet no one from MS will reply who is actually qualified to do so. Any answers will be *pure* speculation! – Shog9 Mar 15 '09 at 20:53
  • Seemingly pointless downvoting of legitimate questions seems to be catching on at SO lately. Not a good thing at all. – Tor Haugen Mar 15 '09 at 20:57
  • @Tor: how would you prefer those of us who don't consider it legit to express our opinion? – Shog9 Mar 15 '09 at 20:57
  • @Shog9: That may well be true, but it can't hurt to ask! – Tony the Pony Mar 15 '09 at 20:58
  • I saw something (I think it was a whitepaper) about MS creating a new in house browser that would work better with the new internet applications – Sruly Mar 15 '09 at 21:15
  • not sure how this qualifies as hate speech, spam, or abuse? – toolkit Mar 15 '09 at 21:41
  • @Tor Huagen: This question belongs to here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/321618 – OscarRyz Mar 17 '09 at 20:59

1 Answers1

2

The two most common speculations I've seen are that the rendering engine would be replaced by something based on Gazelle or Webkit. Personally, I think Gazelle is a much more likely possibility.

That being said, I don't think IE 8 will be teh last release of IE - I think it's more likely that it may be the last released of IE using the current codebase's rendering engine and core parsing routines. I would suspect that MS would rewrite their internals, but I would highly, highly doubt that Internet Explorer is going to go away as long as Microsoft is still writing software.

Reed Copsey
  • 554,122
  • 78
  • 1,158
  • 1,373
  • Uh... Isn't Gazelle still based on IE's Trident renderer? Not saying they couldn't write a new one from scratch, but they could do that anyway, with or without Gazelle. – Shog9 Mar 15 '09 at 20:57
  • Good point. The current implementation used the Trident renderer. The gazelle framework actually specifically talks about taking an existing browser and converting it to a "Multi-principled OS". I'd expect any new development to use this, though, which would require changes. – Reed Copsey Mar 15 '09 at 21:03
  • IMHO, they should throw it all out. The chrome part of the browser has gone downhill ever since IE6. Why mess with the back, forward, stop, refresh, home. Terrible. – BuddyJoe Mar 15 '09 at 21:06
  • Tyndall, to each his own –  Mar 15 '09 at 21:10