I would lean towards "no" but on technical grounds. In terms of PR/marketing it would be a great move and if Microsoft's recent moves are any indication it is not something behind what the company, today in 2014, would consider.<p>IE is not a stand alone browser. IE is built on top of dozens of different Windows components. In order for IE to be open sourced you would have to open source a large chunk of Windows itself, the two aren't that inseparable.<p>You could definitely open source the UI, but the UI in IE is fairly light weight, most of the actual useful stuff is not within it and providing the UI source would likely not really offer much.<p>Another useful question to ask is, let's say they do open source all of the components, then what? Windows enforces Microsoft signing and other checks on internal components for security reasons. So if you compiled a new copy of e.g. http.sys you likely couldn't install it anyway.<p>Plus they'd have to audit the heck out of the code before doing so for IP issues. It would be very easy for every patent troll to point at lines within IE's code and then sue.
Interesting question. I know there is a lot of links between the core Windows OS and IE, so there would be certain parts that would need to be kept open source. Mind you, Chrome has the same issue (Chrome is not open source, Chromium is, which Chrome is based on.) Some parts of Chrome are closed and possibly not even owned by Google (Flash is one i can think of).
They probably have a lot of licensed proprietary code inside it, so it could be hard. What they could do is release critical components (like the JavaScript VM) as Open Source and gradually open more and more of their code base.
I think Betteridge's law of headlines applies here. MS open-sourcing such a massive project which would be highly scrutinized publicly, there's bound to be some very ugly code in there. I don't think there's much to gain given existing open-source browsers being much further ahead than IE.
I think they should open source Trident, which would be more appealing to compete with the mess that Webkit has become. But who knows if Trident isn't already a mess itself. I do like how snappy IE11 renders webpages though, perhaps something to do with how they implemented Direct2D.
It is a good idea but a little late. It this had happened five or ten years ago it could have lead to a standardization of web-browser code. As it stands now, if I wanted the source code to a web-browser I would stick to WebKit or Gecko.
IE doesn't need to be open sourced. It needs to be euthanized.<p>Also, we don't really need the entire application open-sourced. There might be an argument to be made for open sourcing Trident (the rendering engine), but only for the purposes of figuring out what in the hell is happening under the hood that's causing things to work so poorly. If any part of IE were open sourced, I imagine that at least modern versions of it are written on top of .NET which is also open source now, so maybe it would be made to work on multiple platforms? This is a bad thing. As I said before, we need less IE, not more.