[johnkchow]

This interoperability-focused approach brought the obvious question of adopting an existing open-source rendering engine such as WebKit. While there were some advantages, upon further investigation it was not the right path forward for two important reasons. First, the Web is built on the principle of multiple independent, yet interoperable implementations of Web standards and we felt it was important to counter movement towards a monoculture on the Web. Second, given the engineering effort required, we found that we could deliver an interoperability focused engine to customers significantly faster if we started from our own engine (especially if unshackled from legacy compatibility concerns), rather than building up a new browser around an open-source engine. We will continue to look at open source and shared source models where it makes sense and look forward to sharing more details in coming posts.

This is a powerful paragraph from the article. I'm all for competition, and if they actually produce the next great browser, that'll just mean better browsers overall (and probably even better tooling for us devs). I'm a bit skeptical whether they can pull it off, but at least I have a good feeling that they're out to prove us all wrong.

[tkubacki]

I hope it doesn't mean: "we will copy but we will not share"

[amelius]

I just wished we could put on top of our HTML something like:

<meta render-engine="webkit" />

or something along those lines.

[munificent]

We just need to implement an HTML renderer (or two or three) in JS and then ship the renderer with your site.

[amelius]

Bingo :) But it makes me wonder how well is asm.js supported by the new IE?

[jonathansampson]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/02/18/bringing-asm-j...