Slashdot Mirror


In Addition To Project Spartan, Windows 10 Will Include Internet Explorer

An anonymous reader writes After unveiling its new Project Spartan browser for Windows 10, Microsoft is now offering more details. The company confirmed that Windows 10 will also include Internet Explorer for enterprise sites, though it didn't say how exactly this will work. Spartan comes with a new rendering engine, which doesn't rely on the versioned document modes the company has historically used. It also provides compatibility with the millions of existing enterprise websites specifically designed for Internet Explorer by loading the IE11 engine when needed. In this way, the browser uses the new rendering engine for modern websites and the old one for legacy purposes.

99 comments

  1. Internet Explorer by Iamthecheese · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Tying whole corporate environments to a particular web browser is the greatest shit show of our time. I get that you don't want to have to support more than one browser but it's not hard to stick to highly standardized i/o that any browser can use. And if your web app is that fragile it says a lot of bad things about whoever designed it.

    --
    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
    1. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      ActiveX controls make SharePoint a pleasure to use. Yes, we're stuck on IE 6, and thus XP, at work, but it is a lot better than the alternatives. Also, our version of OWA (Outlook Web Access) doesn't work with newer than IE 6, but again, it's a nice product. Compared to Squirrel Mail that our competitor uses, OWA is great. That doesn't mean it is fragile. It's just built for a certain version of a certain browser. You're wrong.

    2. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Requires you to use a 15-year-old OS that no longer gets security updates" is either the very definition of fragile, or something equally bad.

    3. Re:Internet Explorer by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Having been dredged into that market by no choice of my own, I can tell you this.: Picking a solution that works well in every browser is damn hard, even if you try. IE6 was the worst, but it did't look right in Safari either. I'm pretty sure Firefox and Opera was correct, but it doesn't really matter to th end user. You use an obscure client, it's your problem. It's only quite recently it's become their problem.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:Internet Explorer by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 0

      Compared to Squirrel Mail that our competitor uses, OWA is great.

      I call bullshit. SquirrelMail rocks. Especially compared to the craptastic load of mega ass crap that is the OWA of 2002.

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    5. Re:Internet Explorer by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      You mean IE6 haven't died out yet? That was the "standards-compliant" browser for corporate intranet websites during the Win XP era. Good riddance.

    6. Re:Internet Explorer by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      Corporations still use IE 5 quirks mode and ancient security TLS 1.0 which have problems in modern browsers as they are too secure.

      Funny if it were not true as these insecure settings process HIPPA and credit card info. But IT is just a cost center right?

      At work we disable all security for IE with no sandbox and put in ancient versions of Java with +100 security exploits. Our clients demand this as their cost accountants do not see a need to upgrade.

      As a result even without MS specific CSS work arounds they still can't run.

    7. Re:Internet Explorer by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      most of these apps were written when there was no standard, there was 3 or 4 standards, if you wanted to stick purely to standards were destined to be highly restricted in what you do. This isn't the case anymore but the reasons back then for doing this stuff were far less obvious than they are today.

    8. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      SquirrelMail manages to survive in tiny nooks, but it anything but "rocks". It's simply the lowest of low end web interfaces that people will still tolerate in some places.

    9. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "dredged"?

    10. Re:Internet Explorer by ancientt · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I know, that's funny and yes, for a good three seconds, I had a moment of incoherent and dumbfounded shock at the idea someone could be seriously saying that. Then I saw the moderation and realized I'd been had. I paused for a second and realized I had some actual experience that wasn't so far off.

      There was a time I liked VMWare. I used it until I discovered how much better Xen performed for me. I was a fan of XenSource until they were taken over by Citrix. When I took a job with Microsoft as the standard (no kidding, the boss sat me down and gave me the lecture my first week for daring to use VNC instead of MS Remote Desktop) I learned to use Microsoft virtualization instead. This was before Hyper-V and it.. well lets just say it was a hard acclimatization, so when I needed something that actually worked well, I convinced them that VMWare was a big enough enterprise player that we could use it where MS just couldn't do the job. That didn't mean I got a budget of course, it just meant I could use the free version. It wasn't great, but it was good enough. IE worked with it but keeping IE patched meant that IE stopped working, so now I had a system that couldn't work with anything but outdated and insecure software. Long story short, until I retired that system years later, I had portable Firefox 2 to run the interface.

      I still don't love Hyper-V but it has performed better than VMWare free crap and if it still doesn't do some things (seriously, when will they enable USB access for clients?) at least I don't have to keep ancient browsers around to manage it. I miss Xen and still don't think KVM is as good. For that matter I miss the Phoenix browser. The best thing that could have happened to the Mozilla browser was to throw away all the crap that kept it from doing the one thing it was supposed to do best. I will appreciate it if Spartan is even half the improvement Phoenix was over Mozilla. I won't be surprised to write a comparison on how both started out with noble goals and decent performance before they were killed by the same loss of focus by their parent company in ten more years.

      --
      B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
    11. Re:Internet Explorer by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative

      Kinda. It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.

      Unfortunately the situation in the late 1990s was:

      - The major browsers were incompatible.
      - IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.
      - IE came preinstalled with the standard operating system of that time.

      That was it. That was why corporations went with it. It's why they adopted the monoculture in the first place. If Netscape had been a little quicker with Mozilla, or been more enthusiastic about CSS in Netscape 4.x, and if CSS had been a little more complete, things might have been different.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    12. Re:Internet Explorer by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      As much as I've been bashing Microsoft lately for their major screwups, I've tested IE11 in the Windows 10 tech preview, and it seems even more standards compliant than the webkit/blink web browsers as far as the Acid3 test goes. Chrome for example has three distinct pauses on the acid3 test, whereas IE11 on Windows 10 has only one much shorter pause. For comparison, IE11 on Windows 7/8 fails the test at 92/100.

    13. Re:Internet Explorer by ahabswhale · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      More standards compliant based on what? Chrome is 100% acid 3 compliant and has one tiny pause. Chrome has kicked IE's ass in standards compliance for years and continues to do so.

      --
      Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
    14. Re: Internet Explorer by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Informative

      Chrome uses Webkit specific css and not W3C. It claims it supports more standards but like IE 6 it is not standardized.

      It is like IE 4 in many ways as websites need to use Webkit specific hacks.

    15. Re:Internet Explorer by germansausage · · Score: 3

      Thats right, dredged. First in buttermilk, then in flour, then one more time in the buttermilk, then in panko crumbs. Dredged.

    16. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tying whole corporate environments to a particular web browser is the greatest shit show of our time. I get that you don't want to have to support more than one browser but it's not hard to stick to highly standardized i/o that any browser can use. And if your web app is that fragile it says a lot of bad things about whoever designed it.

      Shifting standardization from one steaming pile to the next until something decent sticks to the fan is no way to go through life, son. Now pour me another cup of that shitty instant Java plug-in crap.

      And no, I don't know what the answer is either, but bitching about a particular browser only results in standard plug-ins like Java, ActiveX, and Flash that end up with their own issues.

    17. Re:Internet Explorer by evorster · · Score: 1

      Obligatory XKCD:
      http://xkcd.com/927/

    18. Re:Internet Explorer by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

      More standards compliant based on what? Chrome is 100% acid 3 compliant and has one tiny pause. Chrome has kicked IE's ass in standards compliance for years and continues to do so.

      Opera up to 12+ always passed the acid tests, even acid test #1 when they shouldn't of been prepared for it. I don't think any other browser can make this claim. Opera 26 passes #3 100/100 (no pause and one tab edit from default) but it's chrome with a different skin. While not actually Chrome they are stepping in it's foot prints. About Opera 26: made possible by http://www.chromium.org/ it will import bookmarks but not Opera's :)

    19. Re:Internet Explorer by uulbri · · Score: 0

      SharePoint a pleasure to use ??!? On which planet do you live ? This is the biggest bloated piece of crap ever. Unfortunately that was the corporate choice in my company for years. Implying stupid dependencies with Windows, IE, buggy and sluggish ActiveX etc ... It took us years to get out of this. Finally alternative raised, namely Confluence. It doesn't solve the mail issue (still locked on this horrible OWA), but at least we have now something decent for internal sites, docs, sharing, wiki that is no more tied neither to Windows nor to IE... But I guess that if for you IE6 and Win XP is something acceptable, there is probably not very much people could do to convince you... Especially if you have such basic misconception of what the web is, that you agree to justify specific browser dependency with particular web-apps.

    20. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      shouldn't of been

      It's "shouldn't have".

    21. Re:Internet Explorer by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      But it's easy to use and reliable. I'd like to have a webmail service that comes with it though ideally with switch-and-forth with roundcube.

      I once looked for webmail other than the big ones (microsoft, yahoo etc.) but most require a yearly fee or the free ones have been closed to newcomers for a decade, or are for specific users.
      I would like some no-bullshit webmail that works, even if it has squirrelmail, and pay one fee for lifetime use.
      A web 1.0 javascript-less interface to keep a few text notes and files around would be useful, even.

    22. Re:Internet Explorer by Bogtha · · Score: 2

      It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.

      I had these arguments many times back then. It was laziness more than anything else. We were writing cross-platform web applications without problems at that time. We were trying to convince other developers to follow the same route, but their attitude was mainly "IE has 90%+ market share, why bother?" They didn't believe a time would come when proprietary IE code wouldn't work - even if other browsers caught on, they were expecting them to copy the IEisms. They certainly didn't believe that even later versions of Internet Explorer wouldn't support their crappy code.

      - IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.

      Let's not overstate things. Netscape bet on JSSS and when the W3C selected CSS as the standard instead, they scrambled to fix Netscape 4 to convert from CSS to JSSS on the fly. So Netscape 4 was exceptionally bad at CSS. Internet Explorer 4 was merely very bad at CSS. Opera was ahead at that time. I don't think you can call IE4 "relatively complete" unless you only compare it to Netscape 4, which was unusually bad.

      --
      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
    23. Re:Internet Explorer by vux984 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That was it. That was why corporations went with it.

      That's a big part of it, but you do have to factor in activeX. While it was always a bit of a boondoggle on the consumer internet; it did provide some much needed glue that those old browsers didn't have.

      Wanted your cool new enterprise intranet application to be able to print to the receipt printer? Or upload local files with an elegant interface? Or (and a long list of other stuff.) There simply was no cross-platform way to do it. Netscape Plugsins OR ActiveX... and if the enterprise had the luxury of controlling what people were using so it could pick just one... and IE in addition to everything else you said ALSO was easy to manage via AD group policy etc. So it just made sense to use it.

      And once they'd gone down the activeX road, and became dependent on it... well the whole planet has suffered for that mistake. :)

    24. Re:Internet Explorer by Wootery · · Score: 1

      Yes, we're stuck on IE 6, and thus XP, at work, but it is a lot better than the alternatives.

      How? The disadvantages here are enormous.

      Compared to Squirrel Mail that our competitor uses, OWA is great.

      Seriously? You're really arguing This product that I like uses a certain framework, therefore it is a good framework.

      That doesn't mean it is fragile. It's just built for a certain version of a certain browser.

      Errr.... poor browser support is a legitimate complaint when it comes to web apps.

    25. Re:Internet Explorer by peragrin · · Score: 1

      How old is COBOL again? how many places are still using programs built on COBOL?

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    26. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So many whooshes below...

    27. Re: Internet Explorer by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      RDP is better than VNC though. Hyper V still isn't as good as VMWare though. Can't copy and paste text or drag and drop files from the host to the guest WTF? Even Dropbox can do that now.

    28. Re:Internet Explorer by gtall · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You are equating an OS with a computer language? To paraphrase Pauli, that's not even wrong.

    29. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Buy which I think you mean: standards were ignored, we chose to use extensions.

    30. Re: Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're comparing the wrong products. Hyper-V competes with VMWare ESX, not VMWare Workstation. Hyper-V is a tier-1 hypervisor and intended to run on a headless host. Features specific to a desktop-within-a-desktop don't apply.

    31. Re:Internet Explorer by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      But IT is just a cost center right?

      And that sums it up perfectly.

      It's easy for people to bitch about IE6 and old software, but try to get money to update, and see how far that gets us.

      Don't worry though, when the shit hits the fan, those same people that won't fund it will find a way to blame you.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    32. Re:Internet Explorer by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      Oh yay, let's all compare a 13 year old bit of software to an unknown version of SquirrelMail (but I'm sure it won't be a comparably old version...)

    33. Re:Internet Explorer by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 2

      Oh yay, let's all compare a 13 year old bit of software to an unknown version of SquirrelMail (but I'm sure it won't be a comparably old version...)

      SquirrelMail has changed in the last 13 years?

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    34. Re:Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Update your Chrome/Chromium. I just ran it and had 0 pauses whatsoever. Same with latest Firefox.

    35. Re:Internet Explorer by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      It's very much up to date and I still get that result. This is even running chrome on a bare metal system, with Windows 10 running inside of a VM.

      By the way, when I say pause, I more or less mean distinctly slowing down and then speeding up, as opposed to being a fluid motion.

    36. Re: Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One day you may come across RoundCube RainLoop mail...

  2. So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Really, why are people making a big deal out of this?

    1. Re: So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
      For those of us who were around for it...

    2. Re: So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly that was back when then govt wasn't spying on us via our computers, now they'll let MS do whatever as long as they get their sweet sweet backdoors

  3. Microsoft says lots of things by turkeydance · · Score: 0

    go tell the Spartans.

    1. Re:Microsoft says lots of things by rmdingler · · Score: 0
      Blasphemy? Madness?

      This is MS-Dos, old school, bitches.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

  4. So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

    Maybe if MS actually supported *gasp* older OS's with IE11 we might take it seriously.

    No one gives a crap about IE11.

    Chrome is the performance king, Firefox was the add-on king.

    1. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Firefox still is the add-on king.

      Chrome addons still don't allow certain modifications of the user interface. Tree Style Tabs is fabulous, especially now we're all using widescreen resolutions:

      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

      Chrome still can't match this. They try, but it's clearly trying to work around the limitations Google has put into their product:

      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-style-tabs/biiammgklaefagjclmnlialkmaemifgo

    2. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Maybe if MS actually supported *gasp* older OS's with IE11 we might take it seriously.

      Huh? IE 11 is available for Windows 7 and 8. You're seriously going to cry about IE 11 not being available Vista and XP?

      Chrome is the performance king, Firefox was the add-on king.

      I hadn't used Chrome is years, but I took it for a spin last month. It's very slow starting up, even from cache, and didn't really provide any noticeable speed benefits nor were the benchmarks that impressive.

    3. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if by performance king you mean "uses one hundred to two hundred times the RAM a browser from just eight years ago used just to display ONE static page", then you're absolutely right.

    4. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm about to try Safari 5.1.7 for Windows because apparently it has less than 1/6 the memory footprint of either Chrome or Opera which will certainly result in an immediate performance boost right across the board, and (this bit I love the idea of) it only spawns a single process, as opposed to Chrome's 5 or Opera's 6 (for just ONE static tab!)

    5. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      oh, shit mesen', I'm on slashdot now via Safari, RAM charge is just 66MB! Chrome sitting there at 763MB displaying the same page!

    6. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      No one gives a crap about IE11.

      My company has a pilot project to upgrade computers from IE9 to IE11. Although the intranet websites run great on IE9, external websites are horribly broken. Corporate IT doesn't allow other browsers on the network.

    7. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, Safari is the performance king. http://www.cnet.com/news/safar...

    8. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Yes since IE 10.

      Yes people who do not know what a browser even is give a damn not to mention web developers.

      Windows 7 is pretty old and a half a decade now and it is still supported. XP? Well it is ancient. You do not expect to see MacOS 9 be usable in 2015.

    9. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      IE 9 is not a bad browser compared to its past horrible abominations. I started using it in 2011 after Firefox 4.0 abomination came out for several months. It was a little behind in HTML 5 support but was a much better browser than Firefox at the time and was very quick. I ended up with Chrome mostly. However, IE 9 was the first browser I used from MS in a very long time. I hated IE so much I would download firefox via the command prompt last decade as I didn't want to pollute my cpu with such trash :-)

      Sounds to me your company has IE 9 in IE 7 compatibility mode and is rendering things in IE 7 mode via 2006.

      This quirks and other hacks is what Spartan is all about. Stop supporting ancient shit which of course impacts current modern experiences and gives excuses not to upgrade

    10. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Lehk228 · · Score: 1

      chrome also seems to be more fragile as far as badly behaving websites messing up it's video acceleration or audio processing.

      --
      Snowden and Manning are heroes.
    11. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by MightyYar · · Score: 1

      Completely agree. For a brief time, Chrome had vertical tabs built-in as a beta feature. They killed it, and so too they killed my use of Chrome.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    12. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      counting everything except dynamic page loading speed, javascript parsing, and plugin support - yes, Safari is king. Footprint: king. RAM charge: king. HTML5/Flash playback of HD (720p and 1080p video) as far as I've seen having gone through a few Youtube videos: most definitely king.

    13. Re:So MS do you _finally_ support WebGL now? by yuhong · · Score: 1

      IE11 finally support WebGL and they even improved the implementation with cumulative updates.

  5. All very confusing by linebackn · · Score: 1

    OK, a couple of questions TFA doesn't really detail enough:

    When they talk about a different rendering engine, they make it sound like a completely seperate program. Historically MS has just tacked on compatiblity layers as a sort of "personality" to their existing rendering engine, and TFA indicates they are not doing this here. But how then? Which are they really doing? What is it based on?

    They make it sound like they aren't even going to keep the Internet Explorer brand. Is that actually what is happening? I would find that very hard to believe. On the one hand TFA is probably just spewing BS speculation, on the other hand this is the modern Microsoft that REMOVED THE FUCKING START MENU!

    Not that it impacts me any, of course. But I can imagine these changes creating customer, developer, and support confusion at many levels. Well, perhaps not as much as they did with Windows 8.

    1. Re:All very confusing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Will it include Qbasic?

    2. Re:All very confusing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which? To quote yourself,

      TFA indicates they are not doing this here

    3. Re:All very confusing by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      MS forked Trident with different .dlls.

      Problem is the rendering engine goes through a crap ton of if/else statements for specific workarounds and compatibility even without the legacy modes. It is crusty. Remove it for better performance and websites which detect IE and feed ancient code break and corporations freaks out.

      So Spartan is like Firefox. It removes crap from Netscape/Mozilla. So if a site is in trusted zone like an intranet page it loads the older trident .dlls for compatibility. Other than that the newer versions focuses on standards on a much cleaner and fresher slate.

      IE is a terrible brand. It was an awesome brand in the 1990s but MS really screwed up last decade with IE 6 and letting it rot for many many many years. Now the standards are so radically different it needs modes and workarounds to keep intranet apps and modern websites happy. Meanwhile Chrome doesn't have this problem but I have notice it slow down and take more ram recently.

      Ms wants this to be like its firefox/chrome. A new slate to build upon which is fast and lean. Also rumor has it MS will use Chrome's pepper APIs for extensions and will have add-ons. Another thing IE has been missing for a decade now.

    4. Re:All very confusing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So Spartan is like Firefox. It removes crap from Netscape/Mozilla.

      No, Firefox removes the useful functionality from Mozilla and turns it into an overhyped dumbed-down IE clone.

  6. Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Ditch IE, don't give people a reason to continue to cling to older web technologies. It's time to clean up the mess that is dated and insecure software. Stop supporting it so these places have to update and clean up their own acts. They've had plenty of versions of IE to do this and if they aren't ready now, they never will be. Let them go and fall on their own faces.

    1. Re:Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I find comments like this amusing, on one hand you have someone a few posts above complaining that MS don't support Windows XP anymore and in the same article we have those saying they should abandon all backwards support. No matter which way they go people won't be happy.

    2. Re:Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well it's either that or we get to read more about hacks and other fun things because people are using dated technologies that got exploited. Keep in mind I'm not advocating updating for the sake of updating but there does come a point where people and businesses need to let go of some things because frankly they're doing more harm to themselves in the long run then any good with gambling on staying with dated technology.

      Bare in mind I'm not saying update without thinking, planning, or just because the latest and greatest is out there. I'm saying that because businesses have had years and five versions of IE to get off the old stuff and on to something newer and more stable. There comes a point where you have to let go and move on.

    3. Re:Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      +100

    4. Re:Dear Microsoft by jrumney · · Score: 1

      When I've come across corporate internet pages that need "compatibility modes" to work properly in modern versions of IE, they mostly work fine in Firefox, as the developers already catered to standards compliant browsers, and put in exceptions for IE being broken. Dropping IE's compatibility modes would force the cleanup of all these legacy exceptions for IE, which can only be a good thing. Any remaining corporate webapps that were developed solely for old versions of IE without catering to standard browsers of the day, and have not been important enough to update over the past 8 years or so that more standard versions of IE have been available (I'm counting IE7 here, which may be a bit generous, but mostly it's applications made for IE5 and IE6 that are the problem) need to die already.

    5. Re:Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I understand what your saying, but really you need to look at it from the perspective of a business. Business X has ancient POS or inventory system Y that cost them Z dollars, It works perfectly, suddenly they are out of date and you are telling them spend Z more, there answer FUCK OFF, it works and does everything we need it to do, and given they probably aren't cruising the net on these machines it is probably a fair enough statement. To put it in a car analogy, Not everyone can afford to buy new car every year even though the new model is safer especially if you only use it for a specific purpose and it does that purpose. Do you buy a new model car every year?

    6. Re: Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree with you generally, but part of running a business (or government, school, club, household) is budgeting for future expenditures. That's not to say they should replace $EXPENSIVE_THING every year, but they shouldn't assume it'll work forever.

      To use your car analogy: Most people would think it's ridiculous to buy a new car every year, but likewise, they'd find it crazy to expect that an old car will perform like a new one.

    7. Re:Dear Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This isn't every year, this has been several years and five versions of IE. Also a car doesn't handle transactions for customers, customer information, inventory information, purchasing information, and other things that can cause a real legal headache for said company refusing to update after so long. Still if they wish to continue taking risks and risking their customers information with such dated technologies then I have no sympathy for them if they are that sloppy and get Sony'd. They deserve to go out of business from the damage their stingyness brings them.

  7. "though it didn't say how exactly this will work." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I could hazard a guess, but I'd be 0x0003302'ing..

  8. proprietary circlejerk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    nt

  9. What about the destruction of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What you describe was only a "shit show" for end users. For Microsoft, it was likely very beneficial when it came to helping entrench Windows.

    The "greatest shit show" when it comes to web browsers is, without a doubt, the destruction of Firefox by Mozilla. Not only did end users lose, but Mozilla has been losing, too.

    A few years ago, Firefox held about 35% of the browser market. It was a well-respected browser that end users enjoyed using. It made their lives better.

    Then Firefox 4 and later versions happened. Mozilla made a lot of bad decisions, from screwing up the release process for many months, to awful UI changes that most Firefox users did not want, to not fixing the memory leaks and slow performance that have hampered Firefox for so long, to totally missing the boat on mobile.

    What's the end result of all of this? Firefox's users were driven away, and Firefox is now down to about 10% of the market, across both desktop and mobile platforms. Chrome for Android alone likely has more users now than all versions of Firefox across all of the platforms it supports.

    These days, Firefox is detested. Firefox is even laughed at. Firefox is a dying browser.

    The strangest thing about the fall of Firefox isn't that it was some competitor that crushed it. Firefox was ruined because of what Mozilla, and Mozilla alone, did to it. By not listening to Firefox users, and pushing one dumb change after another, while simultaneously not fixing the problems that users did have, Mozilla doomed Firefox to its current pathetic state.

    1. Re:What about the destruction of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      I hate to break it to you but despite a few failures its still a better browser than Chrome, IE, and Opera. The part that was bad was Firefox copied Chrome and Microsoft in various ways in regards to the UI. However you can't solve that by switching to other browsers that are just as bad or worse. Firefox still has several privacy and security advantages over the other browsers and whatever crashing / memory leaks were eventually solved. Plus there were measures put in place to make crashing less irritating. You might argue IE has some security features Firefox is/was missing, but once you factor in the lack of source code and an open development model its a mute point. Particularly when these features have or will be added at some point- or are really OS specific anyway and its up to the OS developers to implement those features.

    2. Re:What about the destruction of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are FF's performance problems and memory leaks really fixed? I saw this screenshot linked to here recently, during some earlier discussion of FF. I'm a FF user, and I generally like it, but I've seen stuff like that happen on my Linux system, even with recent versions of FF.

    3. Re:What about the destruction of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Mute" point? Seriously? What does it take to be that stupid?

    4. Re:What about the destruction of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Same issue here with FF and Chrome on Windows and linux. But with IE11 on Windows 7 no memory leak issue but performance takes a hit when flash player is enabled.

  10. Spartan is to IE, as Firefox was to Netscape/Mozil by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Mozilla was terrible with Netscape quirks (worse than IE 6 if you can believe that) back in 2001. It gradually became better but was slow and not as quick or standards compliant as IE 6.

    Then firefox came as a purge of old shit. It was fast, stable, extensible, and a new beginning to build upon and finally was the best browser around for many many years last decade.

    IE 11 is not bad. Just like the last Mozilla Seamonkey builds in 2003 were improved. But it has legacy garbage and many if/else for specific workarounds from another era. IE 6 quirks code is still in even if not activated directly.

    A rewrite with the legacy garbage gone for quick performance and faster implementation of HTML 5 and ajax is what MS needs to gain credibility. Yes, slashdotters IE 11 is not designed to subvert standards compared to the past. IE 11 like Mozilla is a great step in the right direction but to compete with Chrome it has to try much harder and be lean.

  11. Consent Decrees and Bundling by Virtucon · · Score: 1

    This harkens back to when the Consent Decree was put into place, then it wasn't, then it was watered down and now it's expired (as of 2011). The EU on the other hand at least forced MSFT to give users a choice when it came to browser selection. It still seems as though we still have to have IE and this new Spartan presumably. I guess I'll need to download the preview and see if I can get rid of both.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
    1. Re:Consent Decrees and Bundling by jader3rd · · Score: 1

      I guess I'll need to download the preview and see if I can get rid of both.

      You know, you won't have to get rid of both if you don't download the preview.

    2. Re:Consent Decrees and Bundling by Virtucon · · Score: 1

      I make a living on Linux and Windows. So, a strategy for removing both will need to be ironed out because I have customers who won't use IE at all and they will be migrating to Windows 10 sooner than later.

      --
      Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  12. Re:Spartan is to IE, as Firefox was to Netscape/Mo by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    Interestingly I think firefox is almost at the same state as IE (just a few less years of cruft) with a desperate need of a good purging to get rid of the bloat and cruft, maybe if Spartan is successful Mozilla will realize the sorry state of firefox and we will see a similar improvement from when we went netscape->firefox. IE 11 is a decent browser, but has its performance hamstrung by its backwards compatibility though I do find it acceptable to use on a machine (still swap browsers if it is my own machine but I no longer feel the need to change friends or family away from it).

  13. Re:Spartan is to IE, as Firefox was to Netscape/Mo by TheCycoONE · · Score: 1

    I believe this is Mozilla Servo - it just takes awhile to start from scratch.

  14. I get it by slashmydots · · Score: 0

    I get it already! MS products are now Halo and Windows is now Xbox Live. Everyone responsible for Windows 8 got fired and I think it's damn obvious the Xbox people replaced them. This is completely stupid.

  15. Excellent! by jargonburn · · Score: 2

    by loading the IE11 engine when needed

    Does this mean I may be able to exploit the new browser using vulnerabilities found in IE11 by calling the old engine via whatever method they'll use? After all, I'm guessing it doesn't use a white-list, at least by default. Maybe that will be an option, though.

    And no, I didn't RTFA this time.

    1. Re:Excellent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly, it is a convenient compatibilty service to exploit writers.

  16. Re:Internet Explorer - legacy exploit support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Great, so web exploit writers can simply invoke the old version when they need to run arbitrary code on a PC. It is so nice of MS to provide continuing support to this valuable industry.

  17. "Project Spartan"? LOL Halo in the OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you own a property, push it...

  18. Re:Spartan is to IE, as Firefox was to Netscape/Mo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I would say FireFox 3.6 and 10 would be a nice thing to patch up. You know, bugs and security issues. They can keep going with this rapid release thing they are doing, but to take a couple of the old ones and just patch them as I mentioned... would be nice.

  19. What do you mean, "for enterprise sites"? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 0

    The company confirmed that Windows 10 will also include Internet Explorer for enterprise sites

    Are they including it to support outdated sites that require older versions of IE? Because that's not limited to "enterprise" sites, nor are all "enterprise" sites out of date.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:What do you mean, "for enterprise sites"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes many corperate intranet sites inside lartge companies are horribly broken.

      For example SAP payslip viewer is marginal on modern IE and really broken on anything else...

      On the other hand SAP just sucks!

  20. Apparently Microsoft hoates use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They hgate us and want us ti diel THat is the wta of 9tguer kind. BillAgutes shit on my fathe'rer s garve. That is the wat of hi kind. Thw hae us je q2nat u sus to die , asis ithe aw 0f hi racist kind. They want wu sto die. His wife enteredered mh ddrooomm and screamred at m bcauchre kind hates me That is the way of thir kind. They are so full of hate that they are Republcicans . That is 3h6m 6y46 9. Tet ate us

  21. I still won't use any browser from Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You can try and seduce all the Halo nerds with 'Spartan' or 'Cortana' or whatnot, I will still avoid all members of Microsoft's ecosystem except Windows and Office (for work usage).

  22. Sounds like Enterprise Mode in IE11 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MS did something similar with IE11 by including a pretty serviceable IE8 emulator last year:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjacks/archive/2014/08/11/ie11-enterprise-mode-and-compatibility-view-are-additive-not-exclusive.aspx

  23. Re:Spartan is to IE, as Firefox was to Netscape/Mo by reikae · · Score: 1

    I can only conclude that you and I must be using totally different browsers despite both being called Firefox, because the one I'm using isn't in a "sorry state". Then again, I'm a weirdo who doesn't think a fullscreen start menu is a crime against humanity either :-)

  24. Almost as bad as two IE's in Win 8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So this on the surface sounds as bad as Microsoft doing a Modern IE and a Classic IE with Windows 8. Talk about confusing the masses. Spartan is really just a light version of IE. I doubt its any more then a browser that won't support much in the way of plug ins. Probably a carbon copy of what they tried to make IE in apps on the modern desktop. Probably a lot like Chrome with a built in Flash plugin and better HTML5 support.

  25. IE pooped Spartan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Same crock of sh!t browsers m$ has been vomiting everytime. Please M$ uninstall and set firefox as default.