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Windows 10 IE With Spartan Engine Performance Vs. Chrome and Firefox
MojoKid writes: In Microsoft's latest Windows 10 preview build released last week, Cortana made an entrance, but the much-anticipated Spartan browser did not. However, little did we realize that some of Spartan made the cut, in the form of an experimental rendering engine hidden under IE's hood. Microsoft has separated its Trident rendering engine into two separate versions: one is for Spartan, called EdgeHTML, while the other remains under its legacy naming with Internet Explorer. The reason Microsoft doesn't simply forego the older version is due to compatibility concerns. If you're running the Windows 10 9926 build, chances are good that you're automatically taking advantage of the new EdgeHTML engine in IE. To check, you can type 'about:flags' into the address bar. "Automatic" means that the non-Spartan Trident engine will be called-upon only if needed. In all other cases, you'll be taking advantage of the future Spartan web rendering engine. Performance-wise, the results with IE are like night and day in certain spots. Some of the improvements are significant. IE's Sunspider result already outperforms the competition, but it has been further improved. And with Kraken, the latency with the Spartan-powered Trident engine dropped 40%. Similar results are seen with a boost in the Octane web browser test as well.
Windows is unfortunately relevant. The question is whether the built in browser is relevant. I'm going to install firefox and/or chrome and use those exclusively anyway because i've been burnt too many times with MS's attempts to "add value" with IE to ever trust their browsers again.
Just because pull-down menus are a great idea for Turbotax, doesn't make them the best idea for a webbrowser. The "good" one wastes screen space on stupid pull-down menus that will never get used. For a program used on occasion, yes it is a very good idea to follow standards strictly. But plenty of people do basically nothing on their computers but use the web-browser and Office. I think it's best to optimize these programs interfaces to actual use, irrespective of general standards.
I just spent 2 seconds to turn on the pull-down menus to my browser...and a File menu? WTF? How often do you need that?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
More speed is great, I'm sure users will be happy.
The dual rendering engine, less so. I know backwards compatibility is pretty important to Microsoft, but now they have twice as much web-facing code to maintain - all the legacy IE MSHTML stuff as well as the new EdgeHTML code - and thus twice the zero-days to cope with. Perhaps this is the lesser of two evils, but it's certainly not ideal.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yes, but that's just a dodge. There are 1.5B people running Windows. Tablets are great (I like mine) but it now seems clear that they aren't going to replace PCs on a grand scale any time soon. So PCs are still relevant, including yours. Since that's a fact it follows that the most popular PC OS would also be relevant.
People scoff at Win8 and call it a failure but that's only compared to Win7 and WinXP. It's been more successful than either OSX or Linux as far as PC OSs go.
And Win10 looks pretty nice already with about a year of dev time to go. Anyone who says it doesn't mater is just whistling past the graveyard.
Nah, MS is off the hook for that. The OEMs can fight back now by refusing to go along (WinRT) or threaten to ship more chrombooks. That's enough competition to keep the feds happy, plus tablets really are computers so it's not the same situation at all. And the EU seems to have its sights on Google lately anyway.
Point is, Win10 is going to be solid. It may take a while to overtake Win7 since that was such a good OS but it will take off better than Win8 for sure and that didn't really do that bad compared to non-MS OSs.
Because it was a dumb question, Asking if the dominant market leader with over 90% of desktop market share (much much higher in enterprises) as well as very high server market share and you expect to get marked as something other than troll or flamebait? get real.