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Comment by udp | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand why Microsoft have to invent their own, closed source version of every wheel out there. We already have SpiderMonkey, V8, WebKit, Gecko and they're all open source - why not just use and contribute to those? Why should I be interested in "Chakra" if it's a black box?

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Yeah, and they should get rid of Office while their at it, I mean we already have Open Office, nor should they stop there they should get rid of their closed source operating system, I mean we already have open source Linux distros. They should get rid of Windows 8 and just contribute to Ubuntu!

But that's not the point.

Let's say MS rolled V8 and Webkit into IE. They still get to build their own UI/ux and get to set the default search engine to Bing. They start contributing to webkit and everything gets faster.

There are plenty of things to implement in a browser beyond the rendering engine, so why create a whole new one that web devs need to support?

Removing the operating system tie-in alone would be worth it. Unfortunately MS still lives in a world where people should pay upfront for their web browser.

Please, please - Never let Microsoft contribute code to Webkit. Let them never hire a developer who has even looked at that codebase. As soon as they do, they'll roll their own propietary version, with 'extra' incompatible features, and all the bugs and security holes that come whenever Microsoft touches anything.

That role is actually held by webkit nowadays, with webdev using only -webkit-* css properties (without including the non-prefixed one) and webkit not dropping their prefix once something has been standardized.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#q... for instance

Competition in the browser space is a great thing - it is the reason there is so much progress in the field.

Remember when IE was the only browser worth worrying about? Wasn't development so easy because IE was the only browser you had to support, and IE was miles ahead of its competitors like netscape navigator? The result of that was stagnation, and I would rather not go back there.

We've got Windows and Linux, Apple should just drop OSX.

I'd settle for Microsoft dropping Windows. We already have OSX and Linux. There is no need for anything else ;-)

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