Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Is Building a New Browser As Part of Its Windows 10 Push
mpicpp sends word that Microsoft may be working on a new browser. "There's been talk for a while that Microsoft was going to make some big changes to Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 time frame, making IE 'Spartan' look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox. It turns out that what's actually happening is Microsoft is building a new browser, codenamed Spartan, which is not IE 12 — at least according to a couple of sources of mine. Thomas Nigro, a Microsoft Student Partner lead and developer of the modern version of VLC, mentioned on Twitter earlier this month that he heard Microsoft was building a brand-new browser. Nigro said he heard talk of this during a December episode of the LiveTile podcast. Spartan is still going to use Microsoft's Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft's Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), sources say. As Neowin's Brad Sams reported back in September, the coming browser will look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox and will support extensions. Sams also reported on December 29 that Microsoft has two different versions of Trident in the works, which also seemingly supports the claim that the company has two different Trident-based browsers. However, if my sources are right, Spartan is not IE 12. Instead, Spartan is a new, light-weight browser Microsoft is building. Windows 10 (at least the desktop version) will ship with both Spartan and IE 11, my sources say. IE 11 will be there for backward-compatibility's sake. Spartan will be available for both desktop and mobile (phone/tablet) versions of Windows 10, sources say."
Everything is wrong with WebKit, including the companies behind it, I thought monoculture are evil?
More like Trojan.
What is wrong with Trident? It's a great engine these days.
Yet another quirky browser to support. More idiots using -yetanotherbrowserspecificcsstag: 0px;
Please, not another useless Chrome clone. We already have more than enough browsers with crap UIs, thank you.
Webkit is only Apple. Who are the other companies?
But only is they make Trojan for OS X or Linux
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
At least it's not "Your desktop IS your browser."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Just ditch Trident. Why do we need more browser engines? What is wrong with WebKit? Why waste man hours and money on this waste of time project instead of helping with the development of WebKit?
Indeed, and besides, if it's using the Trident engine (and the same JS engine), then WTF - it's basically going to be IE 12.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It will be interesting to see if this is true, sources say. At least it will look like Chrome and Firefox, sources say..... sources say, sources say, sources say...
Chrome, Dolphin, the Android browser, Kindle, and about a dozen others. The vast majority of web browsers are based on WebKit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
If the JS and rendering engines are the same, then there's nothing new that matters to developers. Making it look like Chrome/FF is not necessarily a good thing, as those browsers have stripped the browser UI of many of the most important elements.
Trident is ancient hacked up garbage that MS needs to replace.
You must not have to deal with IE10 on a daily basis. It's missing features from dev tools that make developers' lives easier, especially on Javascript heavy web platforms like Sharepoint. It was finally decided in IE11 that making improvements to the dev tools could be done without having to upgrade the browser which is ludicrous.
Enh. TFA seems long on speculation. I can see Microsoft doing this in an effort to (a) create a browser that is performant on portable hardware, (where their competition clearly beats them) and (b) try to (eventually) dump the millstone of decades of backwards compatibility, which is, in general, a good thing. [1] But just because it's a logical move is not proof in and of itself that Microsoft is actually doing it.
But I wonder how different, and especially how "lightweight" this hypothetical browser can be if it's using the same rendering engine? Wouldn't it just be IE with a different skin?
[1] apropos of nothing: Over Christmas break, at my daughter's request, I installed an old Windows 95 game on her Windows 7 PC, and it worked! I was deeply impressed. And a little appalled.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not Chrome; it is based on a WebKit fork called Blink that drops a lot of the Apple specific stuff in WebKit. So it no longer acts exactly like WebKit does in all scenarios.
That might be because it's a web browser, not a development environment. Just because Opera integrated web dev tools into their browser and Google copied them doesn't mean it's an important feature. Most people don't care or even notice.
The last thing the world needs is an Apple monopoly on web browser engines.
Yup, Blink drops a lot of the Apple stuff but also adds a lot of Google specific stuff. Swings and roundabouts really.
Right now, if I make a website or web application, I need to test it on Chrome, a couple different versions if IE, and FireFox. If I have the time, I can test it on Safari and Opera as well. I also need to test my site/application on my laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone. The latter two in both Android and iOS. After all of this, I can rest assured that my web site/application will work fine - at least until someone comes in with a weird configuration that I didn't test and it all blows up*.
Now Microsoft is going to add in "Spartan" as a new web browser for me to test on? If they are going to sunset IE and switch to Spartan, that would be one thing. Yes, IE usage would remain for awhile but it would be a constantly dwindling population until it got small enough to simply ignore due to time constraints. If they plan on running with two different browsers, though, they're just making the lives of web developers everywhere even harder.
* Anyone who says "just code to standards and your web site/application won't have problems" hasn't coded anything too complex. There are always browser quirks and what works in one browser isn't guaranteed to work in another one. Though, usually, I've found that IE is the problem-browser (especially older versions) and Chrome/Firefox/etc work nicely with, at worst, minor issues.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If so it's dead on arrival.
"... giving up control is anthem to them."
For future reference, that should be "anathema".
You mean, like how Google is heavily restricting Chrome extensions these days?
I am less concerned about the browser engine. But how well it follows the W3C Specs!
If Trident does X,Y,Z faster than WebKits X,Y,Z but WebKit is faster at P, Q, R. Then we can choose the best browser for our needs... However they ALL NEED TO RENDER THE WEB PAGE THE SAME WAY!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
IE is the best browser to use to download other browsers.
Sent from my TARDIS
Just ditch Trident. Why do we need more browser engines? What is wrong with WebKit? Why waste man hours and money on this waste of time project instead of helping with the development of WebKit?
I can't believe I'm trying to justify a rumor of what Microsoft (of which I'm not a fan) might be doing, but it's not necessarily bad to have more than one rendering engine out there. For instance, a significant security hole in the engine wouldn't take, like, the whole world down.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No shit. I wish they'd put some work into links2.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Yes, but it can drop all the legacy crap in IE11 as well as shed the negative connotation of its name.
If you say so.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sometimes I wonder if IE's biggest problem these days is marketing and the negative reputation they've built with older version of IE. I had to use IE recently here at work and it's not bad; certainly not the horrible, buggy, bloated POS it was in the 90s (comparatively speaking). I still prefer IE and Mozilla (plugins, etc), but if faced with a modern IE I wouldn't loathe it. So, IE isn't so bad anymore. But because it was so shitty for the longest time, I really don't want to go back to it. Perhaps this is what MS has realized: They're going to have to change the name so people won't associate the new browser with bad memories of the past...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
As a Gecko user, I'd hate for Webkit/Blink to become the only option. The interests of Google and Apple shareholders don't necessarily coincide with mine.
MS may still be the Great Satan but it's their time and energy being spent.
MS knows it has to do something right to save their ass; Remember when Bill thought the internet browser wasn't a big thing and The Netscape catch up? Their answer? make the IE logo spin like the Netscape one, ha ha. Then slowly websites started working better in IE than netscape for some reason... Well putting away the cluttered browser no one uses anymore couldn't hurt right? Maybe it will have it's own Porn search engine that can't be tracked...
I fucking better not have to rewrite all my ASP.NET web apps.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Creating a new browser means reinventing old and new bugs. MS is still getting rid of bugs in Windows Explorer in version 11 and the new browser will take at least 11 or more versions and hundreds of patches to even come close to other, more mature browsers. What are they thinking?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It's a development environment for people who develop web pages. I'm not talking about general users I'm talking about my experience with their shoddy tools.
MS is the new IBM, while android is the new windows.
Source: I own an android phone.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
To sell Bing search and map services.
Apparently its easier to skin new browser with these defaults than change the reputation of IE or make these services default on any other browser.
Finally they have. Why Microsoft couldn't improve their dev tools without a browser update until version 11 is a mystery. I haven't mentioned Chrome so I'm not sure why you have.
Just ditch Trident. Why do we need more browser engines? What is wrong with WebKit? Why waste man hours and money on this waste of time project instead of helping with the development of WebKit?
Whilst being a web developer for a bajillion years I have dealt with the plethora of issues caused by Internet Explorer's standards divergence.
But one still remembers HOW things got so bad in the first place (one engine/browser with almost complete market share, no reason to expend any work except to make incompatible any competitors.
Competition is good.
I always thought IE's big security problem was its tight integration with the Windows OS. Too easy a path for malware into the core of the system. I hope this new browser just sits on top of the OS like a regular application, and every other browser. Updating the browser would be easier too and not require a reboot either. Let MS do this and remove IE completely and just leave behind what elements needed for their file manager!
Look Microsoft hates the very idea of Extensions - giving up control is anthem to them.
IOW, they'll do it when the fat lady sings?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It might be a pseudo-english term invented by german speakers.
That is actually a pretty concise definition of "English."
Except you cant really do anything on your phone except view google's ads, making them more money.
How fast is the VBScript engine?!
It's my understanding that MS is going to try to diverge from their waterfall development model and aim for a model more akin to the Chrome development model of rapid small releases, but they've probably gotten enough blow back from their corporate clients that there will be two browsers, one a more classic IE with a slower less disruptive development model, and the new browser with the rapid paced model. This is probably a good thing, as a slower target with longer release cycles is good for those of us that have to support third party systems that rely on the client browser to be the UI (basically every enterprise system that's not so crufty as to use a client/server or green screen) and will allow us to have a centrally managed and security updated browser with features that web devs will love.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We already have the original Internet Explorer and the metro "Internet Explorer", which isn't quite the same thing, and now a whole new browser (new but still using the same rendering engine and javascript engine as before).
poor performance on hardware nearing 10 years old
who would have thought
in unrelated news, my hp48gx can not run crysis.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
There's hardly any need to refine IE11 any further. So what they can do is continue releasing IE11 for those who need the full browser, and offer Spartan too for those who don't. Sorta like Chrome and the other Android browsers
Yep, please get over yourself already. The anti-MS stuff is cliche and tiresome. General competition drives plenty of innovation, no matter what the politics or corporate structure. MS has changed course a bit and offers some pretty good tech for fairly cheap these days, and and increasing amount of open-source stuff as well. They still pretty much own the desktop, plenty of enterprise, and the home PC OS markets, so ignoring or rubbishing their every move doesn't seem smart.
It's not nearly as cool amongst my peers these days to flat out trash MS for no good reason. Evaluate and use the tech/stack that suits your problems or usage. Chill out.
It's good for Microsoft, especially when they make you bend over...
But Active-X plugins are perfectly fine and safe?
WebKit came from KDE.
However they ALL NEED TO RENDER THE WEB PAGE THE SAME WAY!
Why? I like the idea of having browsers that can show off what they're better at, by rendering pages in different ways. It creates a market with a variety of browsers.
As I see it - the core engine(s) used aren't the key problem, the key problem is rather that many browsers today have been bloated to no end with additional crap.
Like the "Accelerators" that Microsoft provides.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
(insert MS Works joke here)
Times change. I recommend changing with them. Don't forget the past, but Microsoft is far less evil than it used to be. Or maybe every other company got far more evil. I'm not sure which.
The track record of Windows proves you absolutely correct.
IOW, Spartan becomes IE, and IE becomes IE ESR, effectively. I just question whether copying the others by adding a rapid release version with bleeding edge, non-interoperable features will really cause web development hipsters to embrace a browser made by MS.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
at least not if they keep up with the path they started with IE10 and continued on with 11. They've been pushing standards compliance because they can make way more money selling software-as-a-service (Office 365) then keeping browser competition down. Netscape's dead, buried and the built a playground on the burial site. Firefox and Chrome exist to serve ads. It's a different market now that requires different strategies, and Microsoft isn't shy about pivoting.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I can read and respond to your vapid post on my Android phone, with effort, since Slashdot Mobile sucks so hard.
But I can. It's not just for Google ads.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
God, we really DO need a new OS in the marketplace...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's called Agile, and it's pus unless your entire dev team is ADHD.
Then your dev team is pus.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Except IE is slow at like 15-25 tabs and get worse the whole time.
Chrome more instantly become shit and and the 64 bit version is way worse than the 32 bit one.
Worse than Microsoft? Off the top of my head: Oracle, Symantec, CA, SAP.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Actually Slashdot Mobile works great on iOS! ;-)
Or a return to the bad old days of "Best viewed with $browser" plastered over web pages.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Something new with lots of holes to PEN test!
Wow.... Maybe you should develop a sense of humor...
You have just proven a point. I just can not say anything so silly that the internet will not provide me a fool that will take it seriously.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For the same reason they developed WebKit in the first place when Trident had 'won' the browser wars. It prevents a mono-culture and makes everyone play by the standards. Do you want WebKit to be the next IE6?
It's worth killing IE dead if that stops people turing their MS Windows PCs and the file shares they are connected to into a malware swamp with just a single click.
If I sent an accurate description of the malware situation now back in time to 2000 it would be discarded as a blatant attack rant on MS disguised as incredibly unlikely SF.
If the browser Crashes they MUST include "THIS IS MADNESS!" as the error message.
when it starts up one 200% Volume soundbite playing "THIS IS SPARTA!!!"
if not done by MS....im sure we can get it via plugins.
I'd say Linux is the most used OS, specifically the Android distribution. Ignoring that, variety is good as long as people stick to standards. Microsoft is no longer the clear number one, so they have to play along as well. Even they don't insist on Windows these days. Look at the supported platforms for Office.
Interesting, I was thinking that if it's using trident, then it's basically IE. I think you're right about the fresh marketing start. I don't know if they'll be able to drop old guff, MS struggles with this...
Choice, yes. But Microsoft products are typically built with the proverbial "suck that" attitude, essentially draining all choice & fun out of it. So their so-called choice is really just an annoyance to everyone, or who has ever willfully and with pleasure worked on IE "capable" web pages. The experience uaually goes something like this: Ok this looks great on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, including their mobile counterparts, Osx, Win and Linux versions. Let's check on IE... boom! *** so my choice is to just not touch any of that crap that has MS in its name or about box. Thanks, but no thanks.
Or a return to the bad old days of "Best viewed with $browser" plastered over web pages.
When did those bad old days go away?
Immersive IE, the metro/ modern / Windows 8 store style Windows app version is slated to go away in Windows 10, so there'll only be two browsers. Given MS and their complete inability to name things I expect the difference will be IE / IE for business or IE / IE Express but I probably need more coffee to get more confusing.
It's a big world out there...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yeah, except FF ESR is a joke compared to IE support, MS gives years and years of security support to IE versions whereas FF barely gives a year. We've had projects take nearly a year from demo to golive, having to go through a complete QA and UAT cycle just as you go live is not what most businesses want to do.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Good God, they peaked at Cheshire Cat, for crying out loud.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Not if it's open source monoculture.
KHTML came from KDE. WebKit is an annoying name because it's used to mean both the Objective-C HTML framework (BSD licensed, purely Apple code) and the overall project that contains the WebKit framework and a load of other stuff. When most people say WebKit, they actually mean WebCore, which evolved from KHTML but has little KHTML code left. There's also JavaScriptCore, which is mostly Apple and includes a bytecode interpreter, a simple JIT, a CPS-based optimising JIT, and an LLVM-based even-more-optimising JIT. Chrome only ever used WebCore, along with their own JavaScript implementation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
EA is pretty evil, but they're also pretty easy to avoid. Few people have jobs that require using or interacting with EA products.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
However they ALL NEED TO RENDER THE WEB PAGE THE SAME WAY!
Why? I like the idea of having browsers that can show off what they're better at, by rendering pages in different ways. It creates a market with a variety of browsers.
The great unwashed masses fucking EXPECT them to render in exactly the same way.
That's why.
'But it looks different at home .... blah blah blah"
If that quote above, didn't give you fits of anger, you haven't done enough web development and need to shut up on the subject you don't know anything about.
http://dowebsitesneedtolookexa...
Google is the primary developer of Blink, Opera switched to it after Google forked Webkit to create Blink back in April 2013.
60% of the language is based on Latin roots.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You realize that KDE uses WebKit now, right? Apple forked KHTML into WebKit, and a few years ago, KDE decided to go with the forked KHTML, aka, WebKit.
https://techbase.kde.org/Proje...
https://konqueror.org/features...
What legacy crap? There really isn't much to IE. It's a program that makes HTTP requests and uses the HTML/CSS/JS engines built into Windows to display the results, along with a few other things. Any serious legacy crap is likely to be in the OS, not the application.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm not at all sure that Android is the most used variant of Linux, since there's a LOT of devices with Linux embedded in them. Other than that, I completely agree with you. If you look at actual computers, designed to run arbitrary programs, I believe Windows is not only not the clear number one but not even half.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
All fine and good for HTML 1 mind set.
Now a couple of decades later. HTML had become a standard for portable GUI display, for Web Based Applications.
Should HTML be this... Probably not, but it is, so we need to deal with that fact. Being that this how things are done now, it should be reasonable to expect every browser to give properly rendered output, So when you code the page, you don't need to try to get dozens of web browsers to work for it.
I doubt you did Web Development a few years ago when IE 6 was still king. You had what All the other browsers can handle then you had what IE can do. There was enough users using other browsers for your pages needed to render well on these and still enough IE 6 users that you just can't ignore either.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> ...once we know about them?
FIFY
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Absolutely but you left out "The first try will be pure crap, the second pretty good, and after that it will pretty much be hated by all Web developers young and old."
Murphy was an optimist
Clearly you don't deal with clients in any meaningful way. And by clients I mean people who pay the billls...
ADVERTISING is what the majority of public websites are... People sit in rooms for hours and hours and discuss the shades of this color, or that color (Can't we make the red redder? And the black, it's just too dark). And then the client pays an exorbitant amount of money for the "comp" which is a fancy name for a JPG file, and when they get the website it damn well better look EXACTLY like the comp, even if the CEO has IE8, or it will be the Spanish Inquisition. The creative people drive. We techies sit in the back of the room and try to prevent the website from being too slow, or dampening expectations about what is actually possible inside a browser.
Don't get me wrong, I love this business and all the personalities in it. But once you get into the "public web" you're creating advertising, not programming, and you either adapt to that mindset or you are left in the dust. The buzzword is "pixel perfect". And if you blow it, the creative director will open the website in every single browser, and measure each element, comparing it against the layers in the PSD. And if it doesn't match perfectly, if the style guide calls for a 20 degree radius button corner, and it's 21%, it will be the Spanish Inquisition, and you'll be looking for a job in traditional I.T. again.
You want to create things that millions of people see, that's what you do.
Murphy was an optimist
Have you seen the memory these things gobble?
Murphy was an optimist
I continue with it.
Yeah. So.
IE 10 - Shit.
Firefox - This was the browser fooling around with tabs and blinking and shit. Machine never uses up more than 4 GB of RAM and 4 GB of swap but the browser act like shit and graphics become black and such. Turns out the build is 32 bit (As far as I understood there was no considering fully working 64 bit version as is.)
Chrome 32 bit - Best by far
Chrome 64 bit - Far from the one above for me.
As for "10 year old machine" - So what?
(Opera I guess is just wasted effort for the moment.. Kinda like IE 10.. and maybe evil minds would even dare say F...)
The browsers? Yes? That's kinda the idea.. but in relation to each others.
Firefox loses out because it only runs one process (forgot to say that) and is 32-bit so stuck at 4 GB.
Why Chrome 64-bit act much worse than 32-bit I don't know for sure but the difference is huge.
Chrome 64-bit act worse at less RAM usage than Chrome 32-bit.
IE I haven't bothered much with. Just get slower and slower for the little you add and in the end you give up and open Chrome anyway.
So modern browsers are a disaster on 8 years old hardware with ram filled and 8GB filled of the swap space? I don't believe you...
... except IE do it way-way beyond that while Chrome 32-bit works ok up to like full ram and 16+ GB of swap
(and Chrome 64-bit do so before 32-bit one do.)
Absolutely correct. IE is a lot like M$ Outlook. One asks the question "How in the hell can you need a binary image that big, and consume that much memory, just to give me a simple grid of my emails and a fucking calendar?"
:-)
Because we create Web Sites for public consumption I often find myself doing final client acceptance testing with Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and IE all running at the same time, Windows is practically crushed on a 3 year old premium desktop by this.... Which is just wrong
Murphy was an optimist
Well.. I've tried to use kmail in KDE...
That was on an even worse machine but whatever. .. and then there's mutt. Or gmail.
I hear ya. The thing is, Exchange Server is pretty slick, it does things that IMAP doesn't. It's the suck-ass bloatware that is the client that's the issue...
For example I have a desktop, a laptop I take to meetings, and an iPad. IMAP can synch the inbox... Exchange synchs the sent items folder. Which is really useful... if you're 100 miles from your desktop and needing to find an email you sent this morning while in the office.
Although I think Outlook's main selling point is that Lotus notes sucks even more LOL. Gmail's OK except that I use open windows email as my task list sometimes...
Murphy was an optimist
I have Visual Studio. It isn't any better for debugging JS and doesn't offer any facilities for experimenting with CSS. Stop making excuses for Microsoft and telling me what I'm "supposed" to do. If I'm "supposed" to use VS then why do MS provide dev tools at all?