MSHTML debuted with the release of Internet Explorer 4 in 1997. For versions 7 and 8 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft made significant changes to MSHTML's layout capabilities to improve compliance with Web standards and add support for new technologies.[6][7][8]
MSHTML will continue to receive security updates[9] for the IE mode of Microsoft Edge until at least 2029. However, support for new Web standards will not be added.
MSHTML was designed as a software component to allow software developers to easily add web browsing functionality to their own applications. It presents a COM interface for accessing and editing web pages in any COM-supported environment, like C++ and .NET. For instance, a web browser control can be added to a C++ program and MSHTML can then be used to access the page currently displayed in the web browser and retrieve element values. Events from the web browser control can also be captured. MSHTML functionality becomes available by linking the file mshtml.dll to the software project.
Added support for SVG, XHTML, HTML5, and CSS 3. Added a new hardware-accelerated JScript engine named Chakra. Scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test. Included with IE 9 Mobile in Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango".
IE Tab, a browser add-on used to render pages with MSHTML user interface (originally available for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, now only for the latter)
Impulse (content delivery), uses MSHTML to render "Explore" page, as well as several of the "Community" pages
Netscape Browser (Netscape 8), which used MSHTML to render web pages in IE mode
Pyjs, a python Widget set Toolkit. Embedding IWebBrowser2 as an Active-X component and accessing the COM interface, Pyjs uses MSHTML for the Desktop version, through the python Win32 "comtypes" library.
Valve's Steam client, previous versions of which used MSHTML to render the "Store", "Update News" and "Community" sections as well as the Steam in-game browser and MOTD screens in Valve games. The Steam client was updated to use WebKit instead of MSHTML for these features. Then was updated further to use the Chromium Embedded Framework[24]
Current versions of MSHTML, as of Internet Explorer 9, have introduced support for CSS 3, HTML5, and SVG, as well as other modern web standards. Web standards compliance was gradually improved with the evolution of MSHTML. Although each version of IE has improved standards support, including the introduction of a "standards-compliant mode" in version 6, the core standards that are used to build web pages (HTML and CSS) were sometimes implemented in an incomplete fashion. For example, there was no support for the <abbr> element which is part of the HTML 4.01 standard prior to IE 8. There were also some CSS attributes missing from MSHTML, like min-height, etc. as of Internet Explorer 6. As of Internet Explorer 8 CSS 2.1 is fully supported as well as some CSS 3.0 attributes.[15] This lack of standards compliance has been known to cause rendering bugs and lack of support for modern web technologies, which often increases development time for web pages.[25] Still, HTML rendering differences between standards-compliant browsers are not yet completely resolved.
Apart from MSHTML, Microsoft also has and uses several other layout engines. One of them, known as Tasman, was used in Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. Development of Internet Explorer for Mac was halted in roughly 2003, but development of Tasman continued to a limited extent, and was later included in Office 2004 for Mac. Office for Mac 2011 uses the open source WebKit engine. Microsoft's now defunct web design product, Expression Web, as well as Visual Studio 2008 and later, do not use Internet Explorer's MSHTML engine, but rather a different engine.[26]
In 2014, MSHTML was forked to create the engine EdgeHTML for Microsoft EdgeonWindows 10. The new engine is "designed for interoperability with the modern web" and deprecates or removes a number of legacy components and behaviors, including document modes, ensuring that pure, standards-compliant HTML will render properly in browsers without the need for special considerations by web developers.[27][28] This resulted in a completely new browser called Microsoft Edge (later referred to as "Microsoft Edge Legacy",[29] with a flat blue "e" icon) which replaced Internet Explorer as Windows' stock browser and became the base of Microsoft's web related services, until its replacement with a Blink / Chromium[30][31]-based browser, also called Microsoft Edge[32][33] (with a brand new wave-like icon) in late 2020.
^Mauceri, Rob (2007-04-11). "Office Live and SharePoint". Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog. Microsoft Docs. Retrieved 2022-01-01. SharePoint Designer doesn't use Trident. SharePoint Designer, Expression Web, and the next version of Visual Studio's Visual Web Designer (code name Orcas) all use the same standards-based web design component. This component was developed jointly by the three product teams for high fidelity rendering of web standards like CSS, XHTML, as well as ASP.net.