What if Microsoft builds IE on Mozilla Firefox ?

I was reading an interesting article today called Dear Microsoft : It’s time for Internet Explorer, Powered by Firefox!

Well, it certainly rings the bells and the headline itself is catch enough to drag all your attention from rest of the stuff in your life. I read through whole article and believe me or not, the whole article made sense and it provoked me to write few lines about it and give my 2 cents on the impossible request by Harry McCracken.

The article says that here’s what will happen if Microsoft decides that they’ll build IE over Firefox’s code :

1. It’ll be the biggest tech news of the year.
2. It’ll make Microsoft favorite amongst huge sector of techies who only vouch for Open-source technologies.
3. Microsoft will become darling amongst all the web developers too.
4. Microsoft will have millions of developers working to build their browser better.
5. Less exploits will be made for IE and thus will make Windows more secure. Well, in case any exploit will be made, it won’t be on IE based, it will work on other browsers like Firefox and Flock too.

What else won’t happen if Microsoft takes this step :

1. Opera will be pissed as they won’t be able to sue them.
2. We’ll not have icons showing a fox eating the "Blue e" but we’ll have icon, where "Blue e" will be showing middle finger to the Fox.
3. Google will have tougher competition as they won’t be able to blame Microsoft for not being innovative and who don’t support Open-Source, apart from that it won’t matter to me if I want to use IE or Firefox as they will be based on same browser and like this won’t matter to most of the people and so, Google’s idea of converting the users through Firefox will go in vain.

Well, it perfectly makes sense to me, not only it’ll give Microsoft a PR boost, it’ll certainly make web a uniform with more than 95 % (for sure) of browsers based on Gecko (the rendering engine behind Mozilla Firefox).

As always this post will be incomplete without your input and thoughts, do tell us that what do you think about the idea of having Internet Explorer powered by Firefox ?