Future of Internet Explorer [closed]

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.