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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.
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.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
For those of us who were around for it...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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"
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).
I believe this is Mozilla Servo - it just takes awhile to start from scratch.
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.
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 :-)