This entire project seems to be about improving compatibility with older websites, by adding more algorithms and layers to the rendering process. I don't believe everyone is using Firefox and Chrome because they have better compatibility than IE.
I think they should focus on cutting the fat, and making the lightest weight, fastest and standards compliant browser possible, with some popular third-party add-ons available, such as ad block. Or, leave IE11 as the default now for compatibility, and spin off a new browser called IE Lightning.
If people start to switch over, then more sites will be developed to work in IE Lightning.
In short, create a faster browser with a smaller memory footprint and ad block, get users, watch compatibility fix itself, then make this ship as the default browser in 5 years.
Removal of old IE legacy cruft is slimming Spartan's disk and memory footprint when compared with IE. Advances in the Chakra engine are pushing performance ahead. We're rearchitecting our DOM, which is yielding perf and security wins too. We're planning an extension platform also, with top add-ons like ad block being a clear target.
There's a bit of a catch 22 with "get users" and "watch compatibility fix itself" as broken compatibility is often cited as a top reason for users to switch browsers. It's hard to grow users without investing in compatibility.
So what we're doing is defining our "blend" of investments. Right now we have a heavy amount of interop investments in our blend as we think that's important for users. Over time (months, not years) the major interop gaps will disappear and I expect we'll see a shift in that blend to increase investments in other areas.
(Jacob Rossi, Spartan platform engineering team)
This would allow the Web platform on small-capacity devices such as watches or headsets to grow in capability like an iOS device with its frequent OS upgrades and deprecation of older code, but would make the whole Web back to the earliest websites still accessible to somewhat larger and more capable devices (desktops, laptops) that could afford to include plug-ins for any old crazy code from the past.
I really don't want the Web to be the "we'll keep hanging on to the past" platform, while the native APIs are the "we'll keep bringing you the future" platforms.
Edit: Really? Downmods for a legitimate question?
MS has opened up their flagship development platform (.NET) and even has it building on Linux. MS will also rent you Linux virtual machines.
The post also talks about interoperability and running across many kinds of devices, including "try out RemoteIE which will stream our latest browser from the Azure cloud to Windows, iOS or Android devices."
Then there is the fact that .NET is far less tied to the platform than IE is. .NET is nothing more than a VM, runtime and GC. That's fairly easy to get cross-platform, compared to a GUI application that makes use of platform libraries for hw-accelerated drawing and text rendering.
I think you may be mistaking broken compatibility with backwards compatibility. I don't use IE because it doesn't work with modern web sites.
Cool logic from the company that refuse to follow any standard they haven't defined.
Any chance of C# ?
Based on this sentence, I get the feeling you don't appreciate the value of web standards? If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously ever again (they had 10+ years to make that effort with IE before they lost the browser war) all they need to do is render pages correctly, not in their own special way. That also means not inventing special-to-Microsoft codes.
Microsoft has a long record of screwing the greater community for their own self-interest. For example, sabotaging Java.
I believe this would allow for a smaller browser footprint, and we'd see better coded websites in the long run, instead of carrying them through.
For example, we get a new IE browser, that follows standards to the T. If your site doesn't work in IE, it's not because "it's IE, use a real browser", it's because you didn't code your site properly. In the video they talk about how they would previously look at the top 10k websites and ensure compatibility, and now they're looking at millions and billions. They shouldn't look at anything. If Reddit doesn't work in the new version of IE, because they're not following standards, then so be it. Don't look at methods of relaxing those standards and bending the rules to get Reddit working. Leave it broken, and let the users apply pressure to Reddit because the site isn't working in IE. As I said above, they can't laugh off IE anymore, because it's not some dumb, outdated browser. Instead, it's following standards, so Reddit is broken, not IE. It would be the gold standard... in standards. You check to make sure your site works in IE, because if it does, then you coded it right. If your site displays fine in Firefox and Chrome, you don't really know if it's coded properly, or if they just held your hand to make it display correctly.
There's much, much more. Pick better battles. Google is not your enemy.
That said, I think applying morality to a company is silly; despite what the law may say, I'll never consider a corporation a person. It's a collection of people, and people can do good and bad things.
If you're looking for friends, pick a non-profit.
Just look at how they've been fucking up google voice to drive users to Hangouts to get more control. Look at how sometimes, Hangouts randomly doesn't give you notifications of new messages, so that you're kept on your toes and keep checking your mobile frequently. Look at how google maps absolutely _degrades_ and the 'famed' UI starts to look retarded when you turn off 'Location sharing'. Haha, google is definitely going to have the last laugh. Edward Snowden must be crying somewhere right now.
There's going to be a day, when your 3 months old search for 'google services open source alternatives' gets you flagged as disqualified to being hired in Google/(maybe) other companies. And it's not going to stop. Google is going to keep getting bigger and bigger, keep growing tentacles, and keep getting more and more in control, and omniscient. I wonder how the great hackers of ages past allowed the whole technology industry to come to this, to let the situation become so bad. There should have been dozens of rms', but everyone kept quiet and rolled over. Now, it's near impossible to be free of google's touch when browsing the internet.
EDIT : Hmm, downvoted without a comment. Looks like the 'crawlers' picked this up. I'm scared now.
Regards, -Google Search Spider #52837
Uh... isn't that exactly the opposite of what they're actually doing here? Did you read the article? They're creating a new rendering engine that has all the backwards compatibility crap stripped out, so that they don't accidentally break compatibility while making changes to the layout engine they're using for legacy sites. (I.E. They're removing layers from the rendering process, not adding them.)
> Or, leave IE11 as the default now for compatibility, and spin off a new browser called IE Lightning.
Uh... they kind of did. It's called Spartan.
If it had a nice LastPass extension, Ghostery, Buffer, and a few others, I'd probably be using IE as my default browser right now.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/09/17/add-ons-stayin...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7VNjGuSK_k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaNpWJY9SEs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrDHrwLUtvk
I agree that speed isn't everything, but switching to IE is often a relief these days when Chrome has managed to spin up my Surface 3 Pro's fan yet again just browsing average sites.
> then you have never coded for the web and have never gone through the trials and tribulations of IE
I've been developing for the web since before any version of IE existed. You?
But you say you agree with my point.
If your Surface 3 can't handle the computing needs of a browser, that's not a resounding recommendation for owning a Surface.
As far as developing for the web, I've own a web dev company for 10 years and, among our list of clients, we manage two web sites you have visited before, one of which you probably visit every week or so. I was also, once, invited to work at Mozilla but declined. Does that answer your question?
Seriously though, everyone I knew who jumped from Firefox to Chrome ~5 years ago did it 100% for performance. We were switching to Chrome for speed even despite it lacking a lot of key features (e.g. dev tools, extensions, third-party cooking blocking, Flash blocking). Speed might not be the only important mark of a good browser, but it is a crucial ingredient.
Suffice to say, if IE11 was that great, they wouldn't be dumping it and rewriting. That's considerable effort.
-- Internet Explorer
-- Firefox
-- Safari
\
-- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+
-- Opera 12 (abandoned)
-- Konqueror
\
-- Safari
\
-- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+
-- NCSA Mosaic
\
-- Spyglass Mosaic
\
-- MSIE
\
-- Spartan
Spartan/IE engineers -- any info?
-- Internet Explorer 6-8
-- Internet Explorer 9-10
-- Internet Explorer 11
-- Internet Explorer new?
-- Firefox
-- Konqueror (abandoned?)
\
-- Safari
\
--Chromium, Opera 15+
\
-- Chrome
\
--IOS safari
-- Opera 12 (abandoned)
the later is actually even better.
also, Firefox has venkman before all that.
sign. kids and Google marketing
blink webkit gecko
The closed source solutions are the ones we need to hope and pray die away trident. They're evil because there is no hope for any innovation as we saw in the last decade with IE6. MS can do anything they like to re-market their browser but as long as it's closed source engine it has no place in the web IMO. I hope it reaches 1% market share and is forced to go the way of Opera.
Microsoft makes, hm, how can I be positive here ... patchy software. There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up. But, very often you'll see these weird, beautiful bits just sticking out all over the place in Microsoft code. The weirdo geniuses at MSFT are allowed to do their thang and leave their mark. And the seminal releases of their software are always the best. Like, there are parts of IE6 that make me go, "how the HELL did Microsoft pull this tech off in 2000?" IE6 was this crumbly tower of awesome. If IE6 were a game, I won that game.
Anyhow, if development on Spartan goes RIGHT, then this browser will be the 2015 version of IE6. It will be the completest vision of kickassitude. There will be weird, crazy bits, and it'll take Microsoft and the rest of us a decade to untangle the proprietary parts. I can feel my blood pressure rising already!! The rage and the triumph and the glory!
For me, one thing I've been wanting to do is a compute heavy challenge-response for API requests.. meaning web workers, and that's only IE10+ ... will probably do a proof of concept with node (server) with scrype (client/server) against a pool of computed hashes... which could be very interesting in terms of reducing a DDOS against an API.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...
Unfortunately, they have no mobile market share, and this is where most people will be browsing the web.
http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/24/ios-android-duopoly-marketshar...
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...
It's also interesting to note that the "Android browser" (so not Chrome) still has a significant market share 15.65%.
"Unfortunately, they have no mobile market share, and this is where most people will be browsing the web."
That time is now, can we not be excited for it? Have you heard the parable of the prodigal son?
I really don't see this as some big move. They've been doing this stuff for years. I think the consumer oriented Spartan browser is a clever move, but MS was getting there anyway. Seems like they're being clever and using Spartan and web-standards as a way to sell Win10. We're not getting these toys on 7 or 8. Want the new fancy browser? Get Win10.
I hope that all those who currently talk about how wonderful IE11 is take note that Microsoft is, essentially, saying they're abandoning it for all these reasons.
1. Safari iOS
2. Firefox
3. Chrome / Chrome Android
4. IE11 / IE11 Metro
Although I don't bother testing IE10- to be honest, I just blindly trust the document modes of IE11, I'd rather spend time testing different mobile devices than testing different IE versions.
PS. I might be biased in the sense that I have been doing web development since like 15 years ago, and I'm already accustomed to the broken box model of IE. With Firefox I literally have to ask myself every time "what the f%@k did I do wrong???", but with IE literally is "oh you silly IE, I just have to set X and Y extra attributes and it's done".
I don't remember every edge-case I have faced since ever, but for example, the following selector used to fail with Webkit browsers, and the response from Apple were "WONTFIX for performance reasons":
.checkbox:checked + .sibling + .second_sibling { display:block; }
Also, in my experience, the sites that look broken in IE11 (ex. Facebook) is because the website author (or the compatibility lists from MS) set an old/faulty document mode via X-UA-Compatible.
I'm not trying to claim that IE is a better browser than Firefox/Chrome, because this is subjective (and personally I prefer Opera), but I'm trying to say that you must not develop a website in Firefox/Chrome assuming they never have faults.
IE is not as broken as people claim, and there are edge cases where IE is right and the other browsers wrong.
I guess a lot of it hinges on your interpretation of the words "competitive" and "parity".
I'm hoping that it means the expression "IE issue" gradually becomes the exception rather than the norm.
This makes it very clumsy/impossible to write real web apps that need to save to the local file system. The scenario is generating a document client-side using JavaScript. Now you want to let the user save it. In Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and no doubt others, this isn't a problem. Just set the download attribute on the link to the file name you want to use.
Now, let's talk about Chrome's pointer events support...
What's actually involved here is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
I haven't really had to say "IE Issue" unless I was dealing with 8 and lower.
Well that's great, but if I'm on Linux and OSX this is just a pain in the ass for devs to support YAWB
Isn't this the line with each and every release of IE? Why is this different? Each prior version of IE was proclaimed some revolution of some sort.
EDIT: Downvotes? Really? I see the front page is starting to get curiously Microsoft heavy again.
We've heard the "this time it's different" argument with IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10, and now IE11. Each time some shill would declare "finally! This changes everything! Microsoft has the resources and know-how to beat everyone" And the world moved on.
You and I know the truth. There are seminal, world-beating versions of software that Microsoft has released in the past.
And then, after dominance is attained, they touch up the pig's hair and makeup a bit in the subsequent releases. IE7-11 has been hair and makeup and some botox.
I don't know how Microsoft works internally, I only know history. And, reading their statements, Spartan might be a world-beater at least in quality, features, or developer interest. When Microsoft feels threatened, that's when the sparks fly.
I do not EVER underestimate Microsoft. How quickly did they turn that billion dollar Mojang acquisition around, 2 days?
I should be able to type `-beta-mask-image: url()` and any browser that implements that version of the spec can pick it up. There's no good reason to have to type the same exact thing 3 times to target each browser engine.
Instead of -webkit-mask-image and -moz-mask-image, have -beta-mask-image and -gamma-mask-image. When IE comes along and wants to play with WebKit's implementation, they implement -beta-mask-image and all the sites that use it get IE support for free.
-moz and -webkit and -ms and -o.
Unless we're actively working in synchrony, your "beta" won't be my "beta".
The issue isn't vendor versus version prefixes. The issue is sites using early versions of an API, relying on them, and then never removing/upgrading that code.
-webkit-border-radius for example doesn't necessarily match a particular version of a spec. Unprefixed, standard border-radius has been in all the browsers for several years [1]. Yet over 60% of page views (according to Chrome data [2]) still requires this property. So other browsers are forced to support the webkit version of this property for compatibility, which may not have a particular version of a spec for those browsers to reference when implementing support.
If you're interested, I gave a talk with other browsers at Mozilla HQ last week about some new ideas for how we can further improve the strategy for experimental APIs going forward. Check it out and give me feedback if you'd like (@jacobrossi on twitter).
https://air.mozilla.org/web-compatibility-summit-talks/ (Starts around 31 minutes into the video)
[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-gradients [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/css/timeline/popularity...
Just as our life "was easier" when we could just assumer every user ran MSIE.
It was easier for a short while, then the rot set in. I'm not interested in having Google control the web in the same way, that's a road we've taken, we know where it leads and it's a terrible place.
Wait, no, this is Microsoft we're talking about, and they'll use their monopoly to force everyone to have the "new IE", and they'll break the web, again.
Honestly, I don't know why you think they'd do anything different. They've managed one release of IE that was actually innovative and good for its time - IE4.
I have little faith that they won't just produce some xslt spewing horror show that only works with drm monitors and complains if the backend isn't .net.
Finally. This is the Microsoft I've been waiting for! No more rolling over and no defeatist talk of adopting WebKit or whatever. Microsoft is going to use its muscle and position to make a truly competitive browser.
We need more competition, and we need the default browser in Windows to be just as good as Chrome and Firefox.
Microsoft, I hope you pull every -ms- vendor flaggin', ring-0 kernel hookin', micro-optimizatin', site-specific D3D driver tweakin' trick in the book as you reach for parity. This is going to be so fun to watch.