Microsoft, by seemingly ignoring the huge benefits of JIT-compiling VMs on
the browser and instead pushing Silverlight (which is pretty awesome though),
is showing it STILL hasn't gotten the Web. (The fact that I can't seem to
post on these newsgroups using Firefox (!!!) is yet another glaring example)

What is so ironic is that it has a golden chance to leapfrog Chrome without
even reinventing anything new, just stitching together pieces which it
already has.

http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/12/microsoft-should-replace-ie-with-a-coreclr-based-browser/

One question I would have is if such a browser should / would support CLR or
CoreCLR (the refactored, smaller CLR Silverlight supports), or (heaven
forbid?) something in between.

CoreCLR is tiny, it along with all the other Silverlight assemblies fits in
only 4MB and still manages to provide most of the functionality of the .NET
Framework API that
counts.

People would be happily tolerate up to perhaps a 20MB (and up to 50MB quite
grudgingly) download for an out-of-the-box Silverlight-supporting,
[Core]CLR-based browser so it might mean that you could pack more of the .NET
Framework in there.

IE Blog. An early look at IE9.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx

Suggestions and issue reports to connect.microsoft.com

Regards.

CLR? CRL?

"Andy" <Andy (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

*Exactly* what I don't get. The CLR is JIT, already well optimized,
supports multiple languages and can talk to browser DOM. Why not just use it
as the browser JS engine instead... ?

IE is playing catchup and me-too, ironic, when Microsoft easily has the
capability to leapfrog. .NET was an amazing vision, but MS apparently has
very little understanding of how to apply it to the web.

A lot of the technology is licensed.

Backward compatibility is a big concern. IE has the COM WebBrowser Control
at it core. v9 may be a split from the COM architecture.
Nearly 100 man years went into developing v8. Its not cheap.


Regards.

"Andy" <Andy (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote