It’s been rumored that IE8 will be Microsoft’s final release of IE (When I asked this question, someone pointed me to an article on Slashdot — Yes, I know, it’s Slashdot, but it cited an article on InfoWorld — in any case, there seems to be some legitimate concern regarding Microsoft’s continued support for IE, at least in its present form).
What are their future plans for an HTML-rendering engine?
Microsoft is apparently not making great strides towards making the current Trident engine compliant with CSS3, so I was simply wondering if they are instead looking the replace it with a next-generation engine (I’ve heard the code-name ‘Triton’) or abandoning it in favor of a competing platform (such as WebKit, as Reed Copsey points out in his answer).
Why the aggressive downvoting? This is a legitimate issue for anyone who is planning on using IE as an embedded control.
The two most common speculations I’ve seen are that the rendering engine would be replaced by something based on Gazelle or Webkit. Personally, I think Gazelle is a much more likely possibility.
That being said, I don’t think IE 8 will be teh last release of IE – I think it’s more likely that it may be the last released of IE using the current codebase’s rendering engine and core parsing routines. I would suspect that MS would rewrite their internals, but I would highly, highly doubt that Internet Explorer is going to go away as long as Microsoft is still writing software.