

Will Microsoft Open Source Internet Explorer? - vikas0380

Will Microsoft open source Internet Explorer ?
======
UnoriginalGuy
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.

------
tiernano
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
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29#Differences_from_Google_Chrome)

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

~~~
justinschuh
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/](https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/)

------
saosebastiao
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.

------
TheCoreh
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.

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

------
Mandatum
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.

------
ethana
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.

------
jostmey
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
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.

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

~~~
junto
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.

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

------
room4debate
Wouldn't be a bad idea.

------
billconan
they need to at least make it cross-platform.

------
henrixd
Is there some indication that this could happen?

Microsoft has track record by not making smart choices.

~~~
joshmn
Their choices were smart by shareholder standards.

~~~
jostmey
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?

~~~
drivingmenuts
What most web developers are more familiar with are the myriad ways to get
around the inner workings of Trident, so that their websites can work from a
more-or-less even playing field.

------
cweagans
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.

