Yesterday, many people were disappointed when Bill Gates mentioned that the version following IE7 would be called... IE8. Asa, Al, and many others (321 comments under that blog post) wanted Microsoft to tell us more about what's coming. Is the new version of the engine more standards-compliant? Will Microsoft finally address CSS and DOM compatibility? When will it be released? The IE blog has been silent over these important topics, upsetting the Web community.
Actually, many of us have missed the point, as Molly (who's contracting with Microsoft) had an interesting discussion with Bill Gates himself (who does not seem to know a lot anything about IE). Here is an excerpt of the transcript (emphasis mine[1]):
Molly: (...) I do realize that there is a new engine, there is some other information, and this information is not being made public — we are being asked not to talk about it.
So there will be a new engine for IE8. Is it an improvement of the (very) old Trident codebase? Is IE8 going to use the MS-Word rendering engine codebase like the one used in Outlook 2007 which, to say the least, got little support from the community. Some people say so... Wait and see! If you have ideas, information, educated guesses, clues, hopes or just feel you need to vent, just leave a comment here (an email adresses is requested, but not verified nor published, and comments are moderated).
Notes
[1] Thanks a bunch to Daniel Glazman for his sharp eye on this one...
12 réactions
1 De Peter Gasston - 07/12/2007, 23:04
Chris Wilson announced two months ago that IE8 would have a new layout engine:
http://www.broken-links.com/2007/10...
2 De John Allsopp - 07/12/2007, 23:13
The Outlook rendering engine supports a subset of HTML4 and CSS 1 - the chances of the new engine for IE8 being this are therefore not even measurable on the quantum scale
However, "Expression Web uses its own standards-based rendering engine, different from the browser-based FrontPage, which uses Internet Explorer's Trident engine. 1 Microsoft claims that Expression Web's rendering engine currently provides the most accurate standards-compliant rendering on the market, 2 especially CSS rendering"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micros...
So, it would seem that this engine is what we might expect to see in IE8. And I would guess for backward compatibility, Trident will also be there, and they'll have some kind of heuristic for guessing which engine to use on a page by page basis, as well as some kind of explicit switch, like doctype switching (though maybe not with doctype switching as is, because developers who use it already make assumptions about the IE rendering engine).
All of this is simply speculation based on publicly available information, nothing more.
john
3 De bibinou - 07/12/2007, 23:17
>Is IE8 going to use the MS-Word rendering engine codebase which got little support from the community
Vous vous mettez au F.U.D maintenant?
4 De David Hammond - 07/12/2007, 23:44
The new engine is rather old news, at least for me. It isn't a complete overhaul, but they're rewriting a lot of their CSS engine in order to overcome a lot of the big limitations in their current engine (which, as I see it, has been a bunch of hacks piled on top of hacks). I think it was Chris Wilson who originally revealed this. The new engine will be toggled by an opt-in switch in the webpage so all current webpages will use the IE 7 engine (thus not breaking). Details are really scarce so far, but hopefully the IE team sheds more light soon.
I haven't heard anything about it being based on Office's code, and for a number of reasons I seriously doubt it will be. The reasons that led to the change in Outlook don't apply here, and such a change in IE would cause extra obstacles for the developers.
5 De eMeRiKa - 08/12/2007, 01:17
Je comprend pas qu'ils ne se "bougent" pas plus le "cul".. Windows Vista et IE complètement à la masse, cela favorise la concurrence, ils courent à leur perte s'ils ne changent pas de politique.
6 De Darken - 08/12/2007, 01:52
Hummm, alors, ce Internet Explorer 8 sera encore en retard comme d'habitude, j'espère me tromper ! Que vaut réellement le moteur de rendu d'MS Word ? Hummm...
7 De MrBlue - 08/12/2007, 15:51
Ce moteur est-il moins polluant ? Combien de CO2 dans l'atmosphère au km ? Des retards à l'allumage sont-ils prévus ? Cette information est-elle vraiment intéressante sachant que IE est déjà mort ?
Je sors !
8 De funtom - 08/12/2007, 19:01
My bet is that MS is going to capitalize on the Silverlight.
9 De Pat - 09/12/2007, 01:47
Aaah... plus j'entends parler (dans le domaine de la technologie) de Microsoft, et plus c'est pathétique.
(Par contre dans le domaine de l'économique, ils font peur, et ils sont encore là... surtout pour "offrir" la première "dose"...)
10 De Tristan - 09/12/2007, 14:23
Peter Gasston & others: thanks a bunch, this is very useful information.
11 De Colargol - 11/12/2007, 00:20
À propos de Microsoft, quand je regarde le bilan de cette année, il me semble que Microsoft a sacrement reculé. En fait, je crois qu'ils ont manqué plusieurs tournants. Et j'ai l'impression que ça a commencé avec la musique sur Internet, avec Apple et son couple iTunes/iPod : pas la possibilité pour Microsoft d'avoir le monopole sur les DRM. Et puis, Microsoft se tire lui-même des balles dans les pieds. C'est une pas trop mauvaise année pour les anti-Microsoft.
12 De $M> - 15/12/2007, 20:37
Quelques informations sur Internet Explorer 8
Tristan Nitot a obtenu des informations sur Internet Explorer 8, le successeur d’Internet Explorer 7. Il semblerait que la prochaine mouture intègre un nouveau moteur de rendu. Une question se pose alors : est-ce une évolution du moteur actuel ......