Recently during a developer conference in Sydney Australia, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was “interesting” and added “we may look at that.”
I hope this is true, but one must always take anything Ballmer says with a grain of salt. He often speaks without thinking and without any background knowledge of what Microsoft is actually doing with regards to the subject in question.
Of course, if this is really true, it will not be the first time Microsoft admit defeat with regards to their bloated browser, Internet Explorer. When Microsoft released 7.0 version and announced 8.0 version of it Internet Explorer, they admitted that their approach in the past had been wrong and they promise to do a better job to comply with Standards; established by W3C. With IE 8.0 that compliancy is starting to take shape, but it is still far from the compliant status of its competitors: Apple Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera’s Opera, etc. Therefore, the adoption of WebKit as its engine for future version of IE will accelerate its compliance to Standards and gaining the capabilities of the current fastest Javascript engine in the Internet world.
Most of all it will cause all those lazy web developers who only code their web site to work on IE’s quirky mode to finally wake up and start to follow the W3C standards.
I call upon all web developers to not wait for Microsoft and start coding to the W3C standards and then make exceptions for IE, and not the other way around. This is because even if Microsoft does not adopt WedKit its IE 8.0 will be more compliant to W3C and will be must less lenient to web sites that are not compliant, causing these web sites to just FAIL.
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As I still found my Smartone-Vodafone charges too high, I decided to look for alternatives, including those from competitors, like: PCCW, Three and People.
