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by rbranson 5935 days ago
Hardly from scratch at all. The base work was done by the KDE team as KHTML many years ago and then Apple put the finishing 50% in with WebKit. By the time Google came along, WebKit (aka Safari) was already a force in the market. Google's biggest contribution thus far to the current browser wars was the V8 engine, which significantly raised the bar for JavaScript performance.
1 comments
InclinedPlane 5935 days ago
You may have noticed the quotes I put around "from scratch" in an effort to forestall responses just such as yours. Yes, I realize that they built on a substantial amount of existing work, but every project does. The point is that they did nothing that nobody else could do, there's nothing stopping MS from using WebKit in IE9. The fact that a relatively small number of total developer-hours compared to the efforts having been expended for development of IE7 and IE8 can translate into a top-tier web browser is significant.
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rbranson 5935 days ago
The Internet is such a terrible medium for communications subtleties. I agree though... but imagine how that would look from a PR perspective. Microsoft is, essentially, the anti-thesis of open source.
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