Replacing Trident

As many of you will have noticed, Microsoft has a wiki page for enhancements to IE. Apparently, they made it a wiki because “there’s no way we can currently scale to support the volume of requests on the forums” – in other words, IE is so terrible that they can’t cope with the level of complaints ;-)

I was reading through the suggestions, and thought that basically, what everyone is saying is that MS make IE do all the stuff Firefox does. “Why doesn’t someone just say that?”, I thought. Well, they did :-) Although I wouldn’t call the idea “outrageous”.

It’s a fair bet that the internals of Trident, the current WinIE rendering engine, are a mess. Just like Netscape with 4.x, if you evolve a codebase too fast, eventually it get too fragile to extend further. IE was competing in the browser wars too, remember? Microsoft would be foolish to rewrite IE from scratch. So, if they were to hop codebases, they have two realistic options – Tasman, the MacIE engine, or Gecko.

I don’t know much about Tasman, so won’t speak about it, but Gecko would be an excellent choice. Would it be harder to re-implement IE extensions on top of Gecko (or even deprecate them!) than it would to implement modern web standards on top of Trident? Interesting question.

Microsoft’s well-known allergy to the GPL wouldn’t even be an issue – they could use the code under the terms of the MPL, as Netscape does.

12 thoughts on “Replacing Trident

  1. Will joke comes true?

    Many months ago Marcoos wrote a faked news about Microsoft importing Gecko as IE’s engine. Most of readers enjoyed quality of that joke (because it’s not avaible now :( you must belive me that the news looked very proffesional) and the subject was fo…

  2. Have you looked at the Mozilla code lately? Its a mess, mainly because it was growing fast to catch up with IE.

  3. You forgot an option: KHTML (as used in Konq and Safari).

    However, one thing to bear in mind that points strongly towards Gecko is that it’s (AFAIK) the only other engine that has anything close to the contentEditable support that Trident does. MS can’t afford to go sharply backward in any area, especially one that’s relied on by so many Content Management systems. A Hyatt blog comment a long time ago said that this would be a significant amount of work to add to Safari, and since I’ve never seen a WYSIWYG editor on MacIE that wasn’t Java-based, I doubt Tasman had any support either. Gecko would need a significant amount of work to support it to IE’s level (on divs as well as iframes, for example) but certainly much less than any of the others.

    Doron makes a good point though. Did the CSSFrame Constructor issue mentioned in the Mozilla roadmap ever get fixed?

  4. “It’s a fair bet that the internals of Trident, the current WinIE rendering engine, are a mess. Just like Netscape with 4.x, if you evolve a codebase too fast, eventually it get[s] too fragile to extend further. IE was competing in the browser wars too, remember? Microsoft would be foolish to rewrite IE from scratch.”

    There are three gaping holes in that argument.

    1. Microsoft isn’t in a browser war at the moment. So even if it was foolish to rewrite a rendering engine from scratch during a browser war, that wouldn’t apply now.
    2. At the beginning of the last browser war, in IE 3.0, Microsoft rewrote the rendering engine from scratch.
    3. In the middle of the last browser war, in IE 4.0, Microsoft rewrote the rendering engine from scratch.

    So, why would Microsoft be “foolish to rewrite IE from scratch”? There may be reasons, but they’re not those you gave.

    As for Tasman, it was quite standards-compliant, four years ago. But it was slow on OS 8/9, is even slower on OS X, and so far has only been developed for Mac OS. It would make more sense to use KHTML, which has better standards compliance, better performance, and is already known to work well on Windows.

    (On preview: Gerv, mate, you know I love you, but your link styling is teh suck.)

  5. I was trying to make a post in the channel9 forums but apparently you have to use the rich text editor available under IE to get post to format properly. My main issue is that I can’t figure out how to get a simple line break to show up when I’m posting using the simple text area available to non-IE browsers. Anyone know how to format a post on channel9 without IE?

  6. It would make more sense to use KHTML, which has better standards compliance, better performance, and is already known to work well on Windows.

    Since when has KHTML been known to work on Windows (other than via Cygwin)?

  7. eggz – since iTunes 4.0, including the Music Store, was released for Windows. (If Gerv’s link styling wasn’t teh suck, you would have seen the hyperlink I made in my previous comment.)

  8. fwiw, I read recently that micros~1 had been in contact with Opera folks. Sorry, I don’t recall where I read it (thus, I cannot provide a link) but, Hey!, it must be true … I read it on the internet.