Some interesting things being discussed in light of a recent chat comment by a Microsoft employee about the discontinuation of IE as a standalone application post-Longhorn.

This makes sense though. If you read this blog, you know I think that browser development has plateaued. So where to go next? Deeply integrate the browser into the OS GUI -- so deep it uses the same renderer as traditional WinForms (which will probably be pumped through Direct X and hardware accelerated like Mac OS X -- need those flying and fluttering windows, yaknow). That is what I think Microsoft will do.

Take a look at what the Mozilla-as-a-platform offers and imagine an OS like that. Mozilla can render itself -- enter chrome://navigator/content/ in the Mozilla address bar to see. So not only can Mozilla render web pages it also renders applications using a markup language named XUL (pronounced ZOOL).

So Microsoft will make their own flavour of XUL -- but they will probably one-up Mozilla by allowing DHTML in their XUL and XUL in their DHTML, enabling a hybrid of WinForms and WebForms. Picture web pages that have custom menus and status bars and stand-alone applications with DHTML in them for free (no Internet Explorer in a COM object necessary). It will all be XML and the renderer will sort it out.

The .NET WinForm editing in VS.NET is already just a bunch of nested elements with properties. How long would it take to convert that to a XUL-like language? XML might be harder to read than a property editor but it's easier to see the nesting to layout things properly -- which is why I like XUL so much.

.NET has support for JScript.NET as well, which is a lot like the JavaScript the Mozilla project uses to call lower level C++ modules from the GUI through XPCOM. With .NET you wouldn't need the COM mess ... your lower-level application code in C# could be called directly with JScript.NET. Nice.

So I see the lines between "application" and web page blurring. Microsoft is spending two years developing Longhorn so it will take even longer for the open source community to catch up, a nice side benefit (see .NET and Mono). Should be interesting to see what they come up with. I guess we'll find out at the PDC ... it's fun to predict though. :)