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

Posted by timothy on from the ultra-backwards-compatible dept.

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.

5 of 99 comments (clear)

  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.

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    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 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.

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      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    4. 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. :)