Forgive me, but how else are you planning to render on the Windows platform? Your choices are direct Win32, MFC, or in this case the more friendly WTL. Guess which one firefox uses?
Cut corners? What? Cutting corners is when there is a well documented way to achieve your goal, in this case there was no other way but to use a hack. Kudos to the team for figuring it out.
FYI Codeweavers released ports of Chrome to Mac and Linux today.
In reply to: "Google Chrome...is Windows inside, which may be a strategic error"
September 15, 2008