Ballmer: Microsoft Wants an IE App Store

by Jordan Yerman | November 9, 2008 at 07:03 am

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Turns out that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's cryptic musings on Webkit were not about open-sourcing Internet Explorer's rendering engine... Ballmer just wants an app store.

Pass. I'm not quite sure how Microsoft can have it both ways: encouraging third-party innovation within the IE browser and also maintaining a proprietary lock on the browser technology itself. As it stands, developing for IE is like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, so developers move on to a more straightforward deal, like, uh, Firefox.

Despite acknowledging that WebKit's open-source nature is "interesting," Microsoft's chief executive elaborated on why he says the software giant is sticking--at least for now--with its Trident rendering engine for Internet Explorer.

"I think there will continue to be a lot of proprietary innovation by us, and other people, inside the browser itself," he said. "A company like ours needs to have (its own) rendering service. It is important that we have a browser that embraces (Internet) standards but also allows us to have innovative extensions, even before the standards bodies go there."

This is another instance of Redmond's mee-too style of development, but it doesn't take into account just how bad the IE platform is: successive generations of Internet Explorer have not improved all that much, and a Webkit-style open-sourcing could put fixes in thte hands of people who are actually interested in fixing the hobbled platform.

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