Will Microsoft Open Source Internet Explorer?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8646347

by vikas0380 • 12 years ago

22 22 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Will Microsoft open source Internet Explorer ?

room4debate• 12 years ago

Wouldn't be a bad idea.

henrixd• 12 years ago

Is there some indication that this could happen?

Microsoft has track record by not making smart choices.

ryanmcdonough• 12 years ago

Other than the recent open sourcing of .NET?

joshmn• 12 years ago

Their choices were smart by shareholder standards.

jostmey2• 12 years ago

Not necessarily. Because the underlying rendering engine of both Safari and Chrome are open source, there exists a pool of software developers outside the company that are familiar with code. This means that there are people that these companies can hire who would be productive from day one. You cannot say this about Microsoft. How many people are familiar with the inner workings of trident outside of Microsoft?

tiernano• 12 years ago

Interesting question. I know there is a lot of links between the core Windows OS and IE, so there would be certain parts that would need to be kept open source. Mind you, Chrome has the same issue (Chrome is not open source, Chromium is, which Chrome is based on.) Some parts of Chrome are closed and possibly not even owned by Google (Flash is one i can think of).

mahouse• 12 years ago

This is the -rather interesting, if you ask me- list of differences between Chrome and Chromium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29#Dif...

I see it lacks a mention to the embedded PDF reader which, if I remember correctly, is licensed from Foxit.

justinschuh• 12 years ago

While you are correct that the PDF rendering code originally came from Foxit, Google purchased it and open-sourced it a while ago. So, it's included in Chromium and the project is hosted here: https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/

jostmey2• 12 years ago

It is a good idea but a little late. It this had happened five or ten years ago it could have lead to a standardization of web-browser code. As it stands now, if I wanted the source code to a web-browser I would stick to WebKit or Gecko.

vegabook• 12 years ago

Microsoft is an entity with some of the deepest understanding of computer science on earth. Unlike the more recent, more trendy companies, this company's very roots are in programming languages, and to the extent that any complex technology (the browser in this case) would be open sourced by it, we should encourage it whole-heartedly. Yes Microsoft is late to the open source party, but let's encourage it to open up more of the most experienced coding technology available to the planet. In general, I cannot be anything less than impressed with the new Microsoft, from open sourcing.NET, to Babylon.js, to free Office on Mobile, to a better command line experience in Windows 10. Yet with all these recent moves I also cannot fail to remember that the definitive C compilers and MASM drove the entire x86 industry, and that experience is invaluable.

This company is a new company, and I personally am paying a lot of attention to it having been a hater for a long time. The latest IE is a decent effort if you leave out Bing (which remains awful) and open sourcing it should be encouraged and applauded if it were to occur. As much as I love Firefox, IE is in my experience a far more stable and credible long term competitor to Chrome. For an example of some of the unsung quality behind IE, it is the ONLY browser that sends SVGs to a printer as vectors and not a screen-raster rendering. This is a small detail but points, to me, to the underlying quality that IE represents. For other Microsoft doubters: typescript, or the almost single-handed effort that Microsoft has put in to defeating large botnets.

UnoriginalGuy• 12 years ago

I would lean towards "no" but on technical grounds. In terms of PR/marketing it would be a great move and if Microsoft's recent moves are any indication it is not something behind what the company, today in 2014, would consider.

IE is not a stand alone browser. IE is built on top of dozens of different Windows components. In order for IE to be open sourced you would have to open source a large chunk of Windows itself, the two aren't that inseparable.

You could definitely open source the UI, but the UI in IE is fairly light weight, most of the actual useful stuff is not within it and providing the UI source would likely not really offer much.

Another useful question to ask is, let's say they do open source all of the components, then what? Windows enforces Microsoft signing and other checks on internal components for security reasons. So if you compiled a new copy of e.g. http.sys you likely couldn't install it anyway.

Plus they'd have to audit the heck out of the code before doing so for IP issues. It would be very easy for every patent troll to point at lines within IE's code and then sue.

billconan• 12 years ago

they need to at least make it cross-platform.

wonjun• 12 years ago

I think this is bound to happen in the next five years. There is no longer a competitive advantage in keeping IE closed sourced.

yuhong• 12 years ago

I really wish MS would do at least an IE only shared source program.

cweagans• 12 years ago

IE doesn't need to be open sourced. It needs to be euthanized.

Also, we don't really need the entire application open-sourced. There might be an argument to be made for open sourcing Trident (the rendering engine), but only for the purposes of figuring out what in the hell is happening under the hood that's causing things to work so poorly. If any part of IE were open sourced, I imagine that at least modern versions of it are written on top of .NET which is also open source now, so maybe it would be made to work on multiple platforms? This is a bad thing. As I said before, we need less IE, not more.

TheCoreh• 12 years ago

They probably have a lot of licensed proprietary code inside it, so it could be hard. What they could do is release critical components (like the JavaScript VM) as Open Source and gradually open more and more of their code base.

saosebastiao• 12 years ago

IE users aren't asking for it in the same way that .NET users were. People use IE mostly because they don't see any reason to change.

ethana• 12 years ago

I think they should open source Trident, which would be more appealing to compete with the mess that Webkit has become. But who knows if Trident isn't already a mess itself. I do like how snappy IE11 renders webpages though, perhaps something to do with how they implemented Direct2D.

Mandatum• 12 years ago

I think Betteridge's law of headlines applies here. MS open-sourcing such a massive project which would be highly scrutinized publicly, there's bound to be some very ugly code in there. I don't think there's much to gain given existing open-source browsers being much further ahead than IE.

Jackcor• 12 years ago

I wish not. Its dying and do not disturb it. Firefox is great.

junto• 12 years ago

I think that is a backward thinking argument. We need browser competition. It doesn't matter who it comes from. The more browser choice we have the better.