Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessedhillon | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Microsoft continues to make it's own rendering engine.

I get that they need a web browser they can control and distribute with their OS, but why a rendering engine? Especially one that, in my region (SF bay area), runs natively on fewer than 1% of the dev machines I see out there. If somebody were inclined to test their site for IE they'd most likely have to go through the hassle of setting up a VM running Windows just to do it. More and more, I'm hearing people just say "I don't test my work in IE" and being fine with it.

Is there a good argument for developing their own rendering engine, given the existence of two really good open source engines?

View on HN

I'm glad they do. IE9 spurred a lot of competition around GPU accelerated 2D rendering and we all benefited.

Even now, IE11 and 12 are dramatically faster than Chrome on my laptop in terms of how quickly pages load, scroll, etc. Even though I don't use IE as my default browser, I think I probably continue to benefit from their performance work.

Regardless, Trident isn't going anywhere since Windows Store apps built with HTML/CSS/JS rely on IE's rendering engine to run.

They've also pushed the market into caring more about effects on battery life.

I'd be careful and try to recognise that the concentration of Apple-focussed development environments that you observe in the SF Bay area is not a reasonable reflection of the developer community at large. Windows still holds the greater proportion of market share by a large margin. On that note, you should make a point of also asking why Apple needs its own browser, or why Google needed to diverge Chrome from Webkit, or why Opera needs to exist, and so forth. Competition is good and mitigates complacency.

Other way round: they've already got a rendering engine, and a team maintaining it who are keen to keep their jobs. They may be concerned about the LGPL-ness of webkit.

The Bay Area is not the world. Plenty of corporates - MS core market - run IE.

Also, by bringing in a rendering engine, IE will never be better than the competition.

The browser, in particular the render engine, will be more than only a simple browser. MS focus on Webdevelopment and they will transform all their products to web and later the OS too (Windows Phone demonstrates this).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com