Dave Morrill

 From:  Michael Gibson
4391.4 In reply to 4391.3 
Hi Burr, well at first glance it won't look too exciting because the UI looks pretty much the same as before, only a few cosmetic differences here and there.

But it does open up new possibilities in a few different ways.

One big difference is that if you develop some UI for MoI you'll now be able to know exactly how that UI will be processed, since it's now handled by the WebKit engine that is included with MoI's installation. Previously the UI would have been handled by whatever version of mshtml.dll was installed on a user's machine, that could have been IE6, IE7, IE8, or IE9, making it kind of difficult to rely on any specific features from the later engines if you wanted something that worked for all users.

So that makes it possible to use newer things like CSS3 in the UI now in a reliable way.

Another benefit is that MoI will no longer be susceptible to mangled IE installs - previously if your machine's installation of IE or jscript.dll was mangled somehow (like if some registry entries that handle some IE configuration stuff was corrupted) it could interfere with MoI being able to run properly. I think you ran into this before yourself - something like a text editor that you installed overwrote a registry entry for which script engine was marked to handle .js files or something like that? Anyway, that won't be an issue anymore with the new engine.

Then another sort of underlying thing is that new versions of IE can sometimes have subtle changes in behavior, sometimes those are enough to mess things up for MoI and that will no longer be an issue with MoI v3 as well.

- Michael