Am I Crazy Or Is Microsoft Missing A Huge Opportunity?
No matter the outcome of the ideas below, it is quite likely that I am crazy. And I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this so it is comforting to know there are other crazies out there who I’ll be able to hang out with, provided we can find each other in this (dare I say again) crazy world.
I won’t belabor the point but I do promise to use way too many words while getting my brief point across. Fair? I know, it’s not. Sorry.:(
The big idea… no, wait. The *colossal* (as in, titanic, monumental, mountainous, elephantine and rather large) idea is, why the four-letter-word doesn’t Microsoft simply use Mozilla’s rendering engine for its new version(s) of Internet Explorer? They can still control the browser market but they don’t have to work on the hard parts which cause both compatibility issues and security nightmares for the rest of us.
Microsoft could write a browser “container” to control search and other features but leave the real inner workings up to the Mozilla team. Costs them less money and costs the rest of us less money, aggravation, data loss, hair loss, infection and blah, blah, blah [bloody] blah.
I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this but for some reason today it moved from a desire to an actual thought. Apple has already decided to *not* go this direction with Safari. Thanks a lot appleholes! KHMTL seemed to be the better direction for Apple for some brilliant reason. Maybe the lack of WYSIWYG functionality was too appealing… who knows. I do know that I have to deal with the fallout of Apple’s decision, much like I have to deal with Microsoft’s decisions to be “different” (read: shitty to the point where I want to switch from water to bleach for my just-before-bed drink).
If I can think Utopian for a minute; What if Microsoft and Apple got together and used the same core engine as Mozilla. Drop a few million bucks into development and cheat themselves out of the pleasure of choking the project to death with their bullshit requirements and we’d have efficient development with the ability to write code once, knowing that what we see is what the end user would see. Whoa! That would be so cool. I mean, totally neato, fresh and plain groovy.
Remember folks, the big wannabe controllers could still control you just fine by building a container for the rendering engine with all sorts of branded and custom stuff. It’ll all be just as useless as before but we programmers would be able to get more code out there to touch more people. I’d have to spend less time hiding all of the Internet Explorer icons on a new Windows box and I’d rarely have to say, “Gee, that sounds like a nasty problem. What browser are you using?”. Lots of goodness to be had.
So, “Dear Microsoft…”.
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