Actually, our approach is effectively yielding the results you're looking for.

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)

I strongly hope that there will be a drive among the major browser makers to do what it takes to make the future Web as powerful a platform as possible, even at the expense of delegating support for some old websites to legacy-support plug-ins. I personally would not have a problem with a dual-path approach to the Web: one set of browsers that specify a "current standards" Web platform with maximum capabilities, strict rules, and no legacy baggage, and an optional set of browser plug-ins, to which older, non-conforming sites are delegated.

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.

Will there be an open source Linux build?

Edit: Really? Downmods for a legitimate question?

I think you got downvoted for asking a foolish question. If there were linux builds in the plans, they would have announced it. If open sourcing the whole thing was planned... well, you get the idea.

I don't see what is foolish about the question (and was taught [and believe] that there are no foolish questions).

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."

First of all, the team who open-sourced .NET is a different one from that that is building IE. DevDiv has been very open-source-friendly for a few years by now.

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.

What's foolish is to think that such a thing wouldn't have been announced outside of the comments section of some website.

Sorry, I don't have time to go through Microsoft's entire PR archive to verify. Why would anyone ask Microsoft (or an employee) a question then?

The first rule of Linux builds is...

So when your browser doesn't work on modern web sites that make up 90% of what people visit, people will site "broken compatibility" and then move to Chrome or Firefox. You'll then reiterate your focus on the few outdated sites that no one visits stating that "broken compatibility" is the cause.

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.

So you're saying that Microsoft doesn't break web standards, users do?

Cool logic from the company that refuse to follow any standard they haven't defined.

What languages will be supported for extensions?

Any chance of C# ?

hope you are going to support Shadow DOM/Web components soon - otherwise we will face new generation of "works only on Firefox and Chrome" apps

"If people start to switch over, then more sites will be developed to work in IE Lightning."

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 should clarify, I think they should be strictly following web standards, and by doing so, they help to force those sites not following standards to update their code, or die. I don't want my browser using extra resources, and having extra features and menus to improve compatibility with someone's sloppy, hacked together website from the 90s. I'd rather that site appear broken because it's not following standards, and by doing so, it's encouraged to update, or be replaced by someone else.

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.

Your last sentence describes Google.

Absolutely correct. We should be trusting neither.

I thoroughly disagree. Net Neutrality, today, is case in point. Until Chrome came along, Firefox was going it alone against IE. Until Google Fiber came along, we all had less than 10Mb downloads for $80/month.

There's much, much more. Pick better battles. Google is not your enemy.

A company can achieve good things, and still be an enemy. There are other examples of unsavoury things Google has done as well.

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.

That's suggestive that Google is our friend, which it is not. It's a for-profit entity, thus just as much as our convenient friend as any other and in general an enemy whose sole purpose is to separate you from your money. Don't get it twisted any other way.

If you're looking for friends, pick a non-profit.

lol people like you are going to be happy when in a decade, everyone is going to be wearing google glasses, browsing through google chrome, having a google fiber internet connection, and 'renting' self-driving google cars. Cameras everywhere, control of the source internet, control of the browser, and I bet through some magic prominent universities decide that Go is the perfect language to teach beginners, over Python/C++/others- and start issuing free chromebooks to students.

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.

While I enjoyed your apocalyptic fiction, it's an indulgent fantasy. I really don't think you think this is true, and if you do, I'm very sad for you.

Regards, -Google Search Spider #52837

I wasn't aware of this. Source? Coincidentally, I'm not seeing results when I Google: google sabotage java.

Try googling "android"

>This entire project seems to be about improving compatibility with older websites, by adding more algorithms and layers to the rendering process.

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.

Have you used IE in the past few years? IE is (by far) already the fastest browser on my two Windows 10 machines right now. That was also the case when they were running Windows 8 and 8.1 in the past. The latest versions of IE make Chrome feel like Netscape Communicator 4, and they're noticeably faster than Firefox too.

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.

Sadly, judging from FF and Chrome both, extensions lead to unavoidable slowdowns. Which makes them a "can't live with them, can't live without them" proposition. Every time I create a new profile, I am shocked by how fast it is. Then the avalanche of ads and tracking pixels forces me to install ABE or uBlock, and the downward spiral begins.

Definitely, that's probably one of the biggest dangers of opening IE up to more extensions. On Windows at least, the divide between Chrome/FF and IE is more fundamental though. Last month, I spent a week really seriously trying to evaluate switching to Firefox or IE, using equivalent extensions (essentially just LastPass, IIRC). Chrome was still awfully clunky compared to Win10's IE TP, especially around touch scroll/zoom/swipe inputs.

I think MS already has a solution for this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/09/17/add-ons-stayin...

Speed is not the mark of a good browser. If you are using speed as your mark, then you have never coded for the web and have never gone through the trials and tribulations of IE. If speed was the target, then Lynx would be the best of browsers.

http://html5test.com/

http://css3test.com/

Err, Chrome's absolute #1 selling point for at least the first year or so was speed, e.g.:

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?

Speed is NEVER the mark of a good browser. It can be a point on a list but, if it fails to properly implement standards or work in all devices, that's a failed browser. It's not the whole picture.

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?

So, you're telling me that Chrome running poorly on an i7 processor (while Photoshop, Visual Studio, WebStorm, Firefox, and IE all manage to run fine) is the Surface's fault? It's awfully hard to take any of your points seriously with these lines of reasoning.

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.

html5test might not be the best comparison either. They test things that are not part of the official html5 spec. The scoring seems sometimes arbitrary.

Tell me when you've found better. In the meantime, you didn't say anything about the other test.

Suffice to say, if IE11 was that great, they wouldn't be dumping it and rewriting. That's considerable effort.

On my machine, Chrome Beta channel scores 51% in 52ms and IE TP scores 44% in 41ms. If no browser is even making a passing grade on that test yet, it seems more aspirational than anything.

i think that is what they are going against...