Don’t bet on a WebKit-based Microsoft Browser

The Tech blogs are all a buzz this morning with a revelation that Microsoft may be considering adopting WebKit to use as the rendering engine in Internet Explorer. While I hate to rain on their parade, this will not happen, at least any time soon. Considering that Microsoft is in the process of preparing to release IE 8 within the next year or so, and the release cycle of Internet Explorer has been far and few between it will likely be years off before we see another release of IE.

In addition to the long release cycle, Microsoft has invest significant amounts of money and time into .NET and its tight integration with IE, which is notorious for not working with or rendering well with other browser rendering engines. Even if Microsoft went entirely AJAX for all of their web-based products, there is massive amounts of code from other developers out there that are tailored to run on IE. Microsoft would even have to rework many of their core products to use another rendering engine, an example is Outlook Web Access. OWA is puedo AJAX-based, but it still maintains separate versions for IE and other browsers, not to mention that many of the MMC snapins rely on IE for rendering key components. Would they have to rework these too? Finally, could you imagine Microsoft working on an open source code base that they share with not only the general public, but Apple, and Google?

What I could see Microsoft doing in the short term to test the waters is releasing an unofficial addon that allows you to manually choose to render a page in WebKit. This is much like the IE 8 betas have for rendering as if it were IE7. This would allow them to gauge the demand, as well as test functionality with a new engine, without having to rework, much of their core products. If this were to happen I could see it being released much like the PowerTools have always been released, without official support.