Dylan Schiemann

One of my favorite geek dinner topics, browser possession, was highlighted at the end of the Ajax Experience. It’s something I’ve talked about with Brad, Alex, and even Brendan before in the past. The idea goes something like this: “instead of waiting for the weaker browsers on the market to update their codebase, use another browser’s rendering engine as a plug-in for the inferior browser.”

It is a very non-trivial problem, but it would have been great in the days of Netscape to avoid Netscape 4 (the Adobe SVG plug-in would have been an interesting infection vector), or today Internet Explorer (Google Toolbar or Gears would be a great Trojan horse). At the end of the day, I would hope something like this would exist for the sole purpose of giving certain browser vendors the swift kick they need to encourage more rapid improvement of their browser. Getting such an installer to patch IE is far from trivial. My guess is that it is actually more likely for Microsoft themselves to make rendering engines pluggable than it is to get a reliable third-party plug-in that works and works well with their codebase.