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.
For me it has nothing to do with being open source or aligned with the "free" philosophy. I don't like IE because it makes my job harder without any real reason.
Why can't it update automatically and save millions of dollars? Developers cost money and companies have to pay tons of unnecessary hours making a web page work on broken IE renderings.
I would not hate IE, and maybe even use it, if it could update itself without needing it's crap Windows Update thingy.
Agreed. Neglecting issues of open vs. closed source (for whom that matters), the question boils down to "would you refuse to use an arbitrary program because it's named IE". Of course not.
Good catch, but not terribly surprising. Developers don't use IE except when they have to test for non-standard behavior. IE hopefully will soon go the way of the dodo - I no longer see any reason for it to exist.
IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because:
a) it's not open-source
b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft
So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.
But if that's the case, isn't that likely because they have internal applications that are IE only? It seems more like a marketing thing--Overcome people's inhibitions by letting them feel like they "only" installed a plugin and are still running IE.
Indeed they could, I just said that. This lock might force MS to make IE's engine as good as WebKit. I don't see any problem as long as the standards are kept open and the engine doesn't belong to a single entity.
It's sad that so much work had to be done by Google to get these standards available to IE users. Had IE been open source, a few patches would have been released to the upstream maintainers, and a fix could have been released years ago.
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