Is version 8 the final Internet Explorer?
Could Internet Explorer could be the last Microsoft browser based on the Internet Explorer engine and in its place a new browser based on WebKit or on Microsoft’s own Gazelle engine? That’s what many industry commentators are suggesting.
Ever since Microsoft revealed details of its (http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/7135.html)Gazelle project last week – which is a prototype of a brand new, ultra-secure browser engine – there has been wide speculation that Microsoft is planning to ditch its IE engine in favour of the more secure alternative once IE8 is out the door. Some have even suggested that Microsoft is keen to get rid of the IE brand which has consistently drawn unfavourable attention from anti-trust investigators. And yet others have suggested that IE would be better off adopting the WebKit engine which is open source and used in competing browsers such as Apple’s Safari.
To date no-one is sure if Microsoft is indeed planning to drop the IE engine, but there could be many advantages to doing so. Increasingly over time Microsoft has been working to make its browsers as standards compliant as possible. In the early days of the Internet the company pursued a strategy to ensure it controlled the Internet’s development by setting its own standards on what could and couldn’t be done on the Internet. The result was – and still is – Internet Explorer 6, a browser that many web developers today resent. And rightly so. It still has a significant market share among browsers but is no better at rendering web pages than it ever was.
Today, Microsoft is clearly pursuing a more open standards approach to the Web and its IE8 browser is one of the most standards compliant to date. If this is indeed the company’s future direction then it makes little sense for them to continue plowing resources into building a browser that could just as well be done using open source software. Or does it?
There are a number of reasons Microsoft might still want to hold onto the IE engine. One of those is ActiveX, which may not be as widely deployed today as in the past, but there are still many corporate clients that rely on the technology. The other reason is that the Web is fast becoming the operating system of the future and Microsoft won’t want to allow itself to be reliant on third party software to run its applications.
Microsoft is already developing a new browser engine in Gazelle, which is being optimised as an ultra-secure platform to protect users from, in particular, cross-site scripting attacks. Initial news on Gazelle is that while it is indeed more secure it is also significantly slower than existing browsers. And a slow browser is not what Microsoft wants.
While it makes sense, in the commoditised world of Web browsers, to rather adopt an existing platform such as WebKit than to continue ploughing resources into browser development, chances are that Microsoft will eventually phase out the IE engine and replace it with something similar to Gazelle. It’s just not in Microsoft’s nature to allow themselves to ever be at the mercy of a third party.
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