Why is StageWebView using the app-breaking Internet Explorer rendering engine from AIR 3.6 onwards?

I'm having a hard time getting an old app working in Windows with the newer versions of Adobe AIR (3.6+) because for some reason Adobe has ditched the WebKit engine which was used in StageWebView in AIR 3.5 and older versions, and now it uses the Internet Explorer (Trident) engine instead. Yuck!

The worst thing is that the version of the engine used depends on what version of IE the user has installed in the system, so we have yet again the age-old problem (for web developers) of dealing with old shabby versions of IE, which we didn't have before in AIR, because StageWebView used to leverage a built-in WebKit engine in up to AIR 3.5.

Why did you have to change the engine from the really reliable WebKit engine to the buggy Internet Explorer one?

This only results in problems of all kinds:

- This breaks existing AIR applications which worked fine up to now.

- Developers have to spend extra time for users with old computers and out of date browsers, such as IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9, which produces all kind of extra headaches (old versions of IE don't support a lot of JavaScript methods such as addEventListener, atob, btoa, the JSON object, etc, so you have to add extra code to do those things, not to mention having lots of CSS layout problems and other bugs). There are lots of users who never upgrade their IE, because of ignorance or maybe just because they're using another third party browser and don't care to upgrade a browser they don't use, even if they're prompted by Windows Update to upgrade their IE. So this is an important issue.

- Also, even with IE10 the engine fails currently to properly display CSS and run JavaScript under some circunstances (inside StageWebView)

- Future IE updates (IE11?) can break existing applications even if they work now (this happened in the past with Microsoft HTA applications, which relied on old versions of IE installed in the system and broke with newer versions)

- Now the user can right-click the StageWebView and make a contextual menu appear in the screen, with confusing and undesirable options (such as "view source code"). With AIR 3.5 and older, no contextual menu appeared at all, which is much better for a desktop application (in a browser people expect a contextual menu to appear when right clicking, but not in a desktop application where the user doesn't have to even know if what is on display is a web page or not).

And now, the advantages of using Internet Explorer as the browsing engine:

- ...

Well, I can't think of ANY! Could anyone please tell me, what was the rationale behind ditching the WebKit engine?

Can any Adobe AIR developer at least explain the reasons, please?

Thank you.