Ok, there’s been a hullabaloo of commentary about Steve Ballmer musing about Webkit, as recycled in Techcrunch last week: Microsoft Probably Not Really Considering WebKit For IE

But really, it’s not such an absurd idea. When you look at the two leaders for web browsing, IE and Firefox, it’s becomes pretty clear that a viable path for the web browser is a container… All Firefox is is a nice frame around Gecko… A frame that is extensible through their hundreds and hundreds of add-ons.

…So why couldn’t Microsoft Internet Explorer do the same? No reason, they just don’t right now. But in the future, IE could easily just be a container that wraps around MSHTML, WebKit or Gecko. If anyone could do it, it might as well be Microsoft since by sheer numbers they’ve got enough developers to come up with a  enough wrapper that actually co-operates with all three engines.

Really it’s not such a stretch. If you’re a Firefox user, do a quick survey of your add-ons. How many of them alter the chrome around the web page and how many of them alter the web page itself—and Greasemonkey scripts only count as ONE add-on. That’s right, a lot of them only interact with the edges around your web page so they have nothing to do with the rendering engine itself.

So we’re nearing a point where we can imagine configuring your web-browsing experience as: a) which rendering engine do you want; and b) which web browser frame do you want.

Of course, even if all the web browsers were 100% standards compliant in the exact same way then this still matters, each frame around your web browsing experience would be significant as it is the container for your extensions and add-ons as well and the quality of your frame would be a deciding factor between IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

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