In spite of all the hate IE gets, I have to concede that their developers are rather decent people. I'm sure the cake [1] they sent to Mozilla was a gesture of honest goodwill.
Cool. :) I was on the WAC team, working on the Word Viewer web app. I know a couple people who are going to be there this summer - can put you in touch with them if you like.
(I make a web site. It works great in every browser I try... until I open it in Internet Explorer, where it's all messed up. This is not an isolated incident.)
I still think buying Opera, and adopting/adapting would be a good thing for Microsoft. It would give them a major playing hand in the mobile browser market too.
From Opera's perspective, they might gain a lot of users overnight, which may or may not be a good thing. But i do think Opera as a browser is the neatest, most feature-rich and yet unbloated piece of software i've seen. And they deserve a bigger desktop market share than they currently have.
I really don't see the reason for them to acuire Opera. They should calm their egos and just use Webkit like Google and Apple do instead of wasting innumerable resources on new layout and rendering engine for IE8/IE9.
I strongly doubt that will ever happen due to fears of additional antitrust complaints. What I think eventually will happen, however, is that they put their support behind Webkit. Wishful thinking perhaps, but I don't think it's outside of the realm of possibilities.
I'm sure they will eventually. However I fear that just like with a lot of other Microsoft implementations the IE Webkit will be bloated, processor intensive, and generally a painful thing to use.
All you have to do is compare page render times, JavaScript parsing and execution times, and other major metrics between IE and Firefox or IE and Safari and you will see that IE tends to be considerably less efficient that its competition. I'm just saying that I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens with a Microsoft Webkit implementation.
Microsoft products are getting better in recent years, but I still wouldn't get my hopes up too high.
Compare render times between Netscape Communicator and IE and you will see that Netscape tends to be considerably less efficient than its competition. Doesn't mean a decent browser couldn't be salvaged from it, though.
Yeah, i'm not saying the MS change the product dev/team thats behind Opera. I would just look at it as a brand re-building exercise. It doesn't have to be revenue generating, but MS needs to get some developer goodwill behind them.
Buy stake in Opera, maybe adopt it as a default browser, but i would definitely leave the dev process alone. But judging from how large companies act, dreaming this is just silly on my part.
Do IE developers at MSFT just suck really bad or they don't care? I am interested to know how can they fail so bad when much smaller team of developers like Opera does it so well.
I didn't meet any of them - different part of the company. I was in Office. But from what I hear, IE9 will dispel the notion that they suck...but I didn't see anything firsthand.
I'm surprised the IE team hasn't made more progress considering the easygoing attitude they express with these antics including that cake they sent to Mozilla for FF3. I guess being fun doesn't necessarily mean your software will be too.
[1] http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=24004