It makes sense.

Apple did not chose it because they are commie hippies.

They are a cut throat for profit company and they chose it because it is a free and good code base.

And that makes development cheaper and faster - good for any for profit company,

There is also no giving up of control to speak of. You can fork any time you like, and you can do what ever you like. You lose no control.

So why wouldn't Microsoft do it?

Pride, not invented here syndrome, internal politics, what ever, I just don't think we'll see it happen any time soon. But I hope to be proven wrong.

God, I wish it was a possibility. But this headline seems specious. Ballmer's saying that for the time being Microsoft is staying the same. Them "considering" the route means nothing for current development.

If Internet Explorer become a WebKit browser I'd cry with joy.

Yes please.

Though this was apparently an off the cuff remark. I'll believe it when I see it. I also take anything reported by AppleInsider with a grain of salt.

Simply: no, microsoft is not considering adopting WebKit for IE.

This appleinsider article, and others like it, took an out-of-context statement by Ballmer and stretched it into a farce.

I happen to live in Seattle and have friends who work on the IE team. IE8 sports a completely new rendering engine built in-house. It ain't webkit. My friends claim that when it is finished the new engine will render things, y'know, in a standards-compliant manner. Personally, I'm not holding my breath :-)

I don't really care much about their desktop browser, but dear God I hope they do something about the mobile one. It's truly awful.

I actually like WinMo 6 for the most part, but find myself using third-party browsers, which is not nearly as seamless an experience as it is on the desktop.

I'm sad to say it but this doesn't make sense. Strategically, the easier it is to develop web applications, the less people are dependent on Windows. It is to Microsoft's advantage to make web development as hard as possible. Therefore they will try to break compatibility whenever possible.

What are the advantages for Microsoft if they were to make the change to WebKit? I know developers would love it, but is it really worth giving up complete control on their end? When it comes down to it they have their own best interest in mind, not developers'.

I don't see it happening. Webkit is LGPL, and Microsoft have always been anti-GPL. It'd be a major shift in their position to suddenly embrace it out of nowhere.

The Internet Explorer's Trident engine is slowly but surely catching up with its competitors, so it's less of an issue than it was a couple of years ago. Let's not forget IE8 passes Acid2. The real problem for developers it that users aren't upgrading from IE6 fast enough, and that's not going to change whether Microsoft embrace Webkit or not.

That would be awesome if this happened. It makes a lot of sense too; proprietary HTML/JS parsing engines aren't necessarily a competitive advantage these days...

I read it as "Microsoft may look at Open Source" not "Microsoft may look at WebKit"