Comments on: WebKit inside Internet Explorer? No thanks

By: Dustin

Dustin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:25:05 +0000

> I hear that last point all the time and it drives me nuts. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 was a nightmare to code for. But that’s simply not the case for Internet Explorer 7 or the recent Internet Explorer 8 beta. At least not in my experience.

What a load of crap! Perhaps you don’t have enough experience coding web 2.0 applications. Sure basic html sites are OK. But I find way too many quirks in IE with completely standard compliant code in all versions of IE.

I was thinking this morning that since IE supports activex, perhaps someone could write a plugin that would use the webkit engine inside of IE. Turns out Google was way ahead of me! http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

By: Doru

Doru — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:48:54 +0000

Off-topic: I noticed that your blog is powered by iis, wordpress and asp.net . I wonder if you ported wordpress for asp.net, or it’s just propaganda ?

By: Doru

Doru — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:43:01 +0000

It would be very interesting if m$ would opensource Trident. That should speed things a lot with the IE development/release cycle, also would help finding and fixing bugs a lot easier. Also that would open up the possibility of porting the engine on other architectures, like linux for example.

By: Mack D. Male

Mack D. Male — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:11:07 +0000

Thanks for the comment Timo. I meant licensing from Microsoft’s point of view. I assume they’d have to put in some code for the backwards compatiblity issue that wouldn’t be open source.

I agree, the question is whether they can keep improving Trident and keep it up-to-dat. I think they can.

By: Timo

Timo — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:08:24 +0000

Licensing shouldn’t be an issue. Webkit is licensed under the LGPL, which means they can include it without problems. Apple is already including the binaries without issues.

Using it wouldn’t decrease competition much, as they’d still be competing to have the best browsing experience, and the best renderer (ie the most up to date version of webkit), and because they are so far behind right now. Besides, there are still two other perfectly good competitors, both of which are moving at a faster pace than IE/Trident. With Gecko being open source, it isn’t going to slow down just because they have one fewer bad competitor. I would be much more concerned about competition if Firefox and Opera switched to webkit as well.

Yes, IE 6 and 7 will continue to be an issue for quite a while to come, but that isn’t a reason for or against this move. The question is, will they manage to keep trident up to the standard of webkit and gecko on their own.

By: Mack D. Male

Mack D. Male — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:04:32 +0000

Hi Bjorn, yes I do make websites, all the time! But like I said, in my experience, there aren’t that many issues. I typically start out by writing HTML and CSS that renders correctly in Opera. I then make any adjustments for the other browsers. Lately, I find I have more issues with Firefox 3 than with IE7. If you’re writing standards compliant code, IE7 does just fine.

Now you’re right that there are still issues, and I’m not denying that, but it’s nothing like IE6.

By: Bjorn Tipling

Bjorn Tipling — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:46:50 +0000

Uhhh do you actually make websites? IE7 is a nightmare. It still has that hasLayout magic crap, the z-order indexing is a nightmare, trailing commas in JavaScript break everything, you can’t dynamically add options to select elements you have to replace the entire select, height issues, positioning issues, float issues, pickaboo bugs, etc etc.

So yeah. IE7 is a problem.