So the George Bush of the propriety software world, Steve Ballmer, was in Sydney talking to Microsoft developers when one clearly gifted individual stood and asked the following ...
"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?"
Ballmer's reply? "That's cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky".
He then went to to say
"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service," No surprise there then.... but then came...
"Open source is interesting, Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."
So is he saying that Microsoft could one day ship a WebKit based browser? From the earlier comment that would require Microsoft to develop WebKit to work with their extensions and plug ins and would they give them back to the Webkit project. Would the WebKit dev's want the changes to be back ported? Could they even be backported without Microsoft giving away details of the inner's of IE.
Interesting questions which will probably never have to be answered.
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