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Microsoft's Goals For Their New Web Rendering Engine
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has put up a post about explaining what they wanted to accomplish when they started working on Project Spartan, the new web browser that will ship with Windows 10. They say some things you wouldn't expect to hear from Microsoft: "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for. We needed a plan which ensured that our customers have a good experience regardless of whether they browse the head or tail of the Web. We needed a plan which gave enterprise customers a highly backward compatible browser regardless of how quickly we pushed forward with modern HTML5 features." They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."
I got a goal for you: Make it not an insecure steaming piece of shit!
Sounds like a good plan... a lot of people use sites like Tinder and Grindr to find both head and tail.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
You mean like Internet Explorer used to be?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
> "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for."
Can you even IMAGINE Microsoft saying that 15 years ago? 10 years ago? So is it because they are a better company now before... or is it just because they have no choice but to cooperate (since people left IE in droves for Firefox, Opera, and Chrome)?
>" They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."
Oh right.... because Microsoft would never want to support a monoculture... Hmm... I need to go find some Twilight Zone episodes to watch, now.
And you should too.
... contribute to a monoculture by avoiding WebKit. Just so long as this isn't just going to be another form of developer lock-in. (Which I suspect it will be.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Microsoft have a long history of ignoring everybody else's standards and implementing their own - trying to define computing. I think it's a good thing really, they have proven that they can play on the bleeding edge and they're not held back in terms of innovation But it gets really annoying when they refuse to even use the same line endings as everybody else ;)
Seriously though fair play MS, you *can* write good software, just leave it open and pure and don't try and tie it in with everything else. If I see a One-drive button you're dead! (disclaimer : not a real death threat)
You all forget lots of smart people at microsoft and a lot of the hate is better directed at middle / upper managers stifling potential. maybe after 18,000 shed the smart ones are actually allowed to build something useful
Really? Why not? Microsoft has been moving in this direction for quite some time now, not matter what the haters on /. like to insist.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. We are back to the embrace mode. Sure, I'd trust Microsoft completely. But why not contribute code to existing open source projects? What's the benefit in writing commodity software? There's got to be something in it for them down the road. To steer the direction of the web in their direction somehow. If Microsoft announced they'd be now contributing to Firefox or any other popular open source project then I'll trust them again. Look at what Google is doing with Chrome. They are beginning to leverage their other services to steer people to Chrome by only developing to Chrome instead of open standards. It's a feedback loop to steer people to their browser, then offer services through the browser that are Google specific. It's all for your data people. They realized long ago that data is a moneymaker and the best way to get it is directly to the source.
They always say this now, and their browser is always shit. Its more than safe to expect it to suck.
Using the name Spartan really shows off their worldview - the embattled good guys who are the best at what they do.
In this analogy, Apple is the Covenant (religious zealots) and Linux is the Flood.
What substantive actions can you point to that don't run purely on their platform? (Promises and PR statements don't count.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
When you compare the elegance and simplicity of javascript with asp.net you realize Microsoft cannot ever create for normal people, only those with aspergers.
They have never and will never be about developers, I don't believe them.
I have grown up, gone to school and developed all according to their dogma. When I began to create for myself though the rules changed and I needed real tools that work and can finalize a project within a reasonable time frame.
If you are attempting to placate another person use microsoft, the brand name soothes them. If you want to get something accomplished avoid it like the tar pit it is and pick up a real tool set. I would highly recommend nodejs.
Just like with their phones, tablets and bing, they should have learned there isn't much demand for a 3rd or 4th place product. People who like Chrome will stick with it, people who like Firefox will stick with it. They may get a few people who switch from IE to this, but many of them will just keep using the newest version of IE. In the end, I won't use it or put it on any of our workplace computers. Any browser by microsoft will be tied to closely to the operating system, keeping the doorway unlocked for viruses.
I'm using Word, Excel and Power Point on my android device with seamless switching between working on files on my desktop and on my tablet.
Your move.
Standards compliance.
Seriously, all the solutions to those plans have been staring them in the face for 20 years. Ironically, MS's own desire for a monoculture on the web prevented them from seeing that.
This is in no way a complicated issue! There is no "wrenching of hands as to which way to go". There is a standards committee: w3c, also known as the world wide web consortium. And their sole purpose in life is to build standards for internet browsers, and to test the w3c compliance of those browsers. There are even tests for html5. All that is needed is to abandon the "lock-in", "incompatible" model that microsoft has plagued the computing industry with for the past 35 years (including their own software not compatible with older versions of their software), and there will be no problems.
Just stick to the standards. Do not subvert them, as you are wont to.
I want to warn big companies like Microsoft. "Do not listen to your customers." Stay focused on making lots of money and pleasing just the stock market share price.
In 1995 when Bill Gates said the Internet was real(Internet Tidal Wave memo" on May 26, 1995) I expected Microsoft web servers and apps, did I get it? No
I asked those bastards for a version of MS Office that I did not have to install from CD on every machine. They could have made it work with an IIS web server kit that you buy and install. Did they do that or listen to me? Hell no, in 2011, 16 years later I get the office 365 but it now runs somewhere else, not on my LAN for my users. Internally we have 99.9999% uptime and even if both Internet feeds die or have BGP issues we still hum away in our business making money.
Because the virus vector of IE is still installed, only the frontend is gone.
we are running a full Application in MS Azure built on FOSS software. Fully supported by the Azure team (not app of course, but all the infrastructure bits).
Plus we now have Office on Android and iOS
I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to heart in some ways.
In history, the Spartans were the despotic enemies of democracy who constantly tried to defeat Athens. They could have stopped the Persians at the sea crossing, but delayed because they had a religious festival and finally sent a tiny troop to Thermopylae (too little too late). Those troops did acquit themselves well, but Greece would have been overrun if the Athenians hadn't brought up their army and crushed the Persians.
So yeah, an appropriate name for Microsoft (and for people who know movies but not history).
"the head or tail of the Web"? What the file system check is that?
Really the XBox guy are running the company now.. It's the only "cool" people Microsoft has left.
...wasn't it? I've sort of lost track, but I think Microsoft has made precisely this claim for every browser. Yes, here we go:
" That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?
Chris: Absolutely, in IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards. Even at the expense of more backwards compatibility..."
Then much the same thing was said of IE8,
and then we read that
"I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block. Iâ(TM)m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a 'bad browser.'"
It's the same every time. They acknowledge that the previous browser wasn't standards-compliant after all, and promise the one they are now working on is.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
All Slashdot had to do was remove the borg icon and suddenly they're shaping up!
Plus, wasn't it only the Athenians who were into pederasty? Spartans had different attitudes toward gender roles. Women were more respected. Athenians believed male-male love was better partly because women weren't allowed to participate in the social culture; they were never supposed to leave the house.
We need a plan to make a compatible browser.... we need a plan to make it good for the customers....
Oh boy, so a man who can't MAKE A PRODUCT, has a meeting and he doesn't even have a plan, he's the guy that says "WE NEED A PLAN", he's the "need a plan man".
He's the one that calls the meeting to assign the planning duties to the people who do the planning who assign the roles to the people who manage the product who assign roles to the people who write the code!
And you wonder why Microsoft can't deliver jack-shit these days and eventually (in 2015) gets round to delivering what Apple did back in 2007.
FFS: "We needed a plan which gave enterprise customers a highly backward compatible browser regardless of how quickly we pushed forward with modern HTML5 features."
Quirks mode in Firefox dates back TWELVE YEARS! You don't need a plan to play catch up, STOP PREVARICATING AND DO IT!
Microsoft Word for Mac came out almost 30 years ago (1998). They've had Office software for Apple machines ever since. There's a new version under development now. I don't know about the Android version, but Office for Mac isn't just a crappy port either. It is a version written specificially for Mac that honors the Mac ways of doing things and has features that aren't in the Windows version.
I would rather keep not using anything Microsoft, ever.
American, perchance?
I don't know the mechanism, but IE as of 2015 is still just a single click away from infecting entire office networks with malware such as cryptolocker. Two recent events I've had reported to me were from clicking on an email link about parcel tracking (which opened IE, which then helpfully ran the malware in some way) and another to see an invoice (once again the two usual suspects of Outlook and IE).
I don't know if Firefox is immune to such a malware attack but I've only heard of it coming in via IE.
We have seen some suprises leaning towards the positive side from MS lately, no doubt. I'll admit that. However, MS has screwed up so much, so often, for so long that I'm weary of taking their word for it when it comes to enabling a more hassle free web.
If MS offers a relyably usable web frontend I at least will stop recommending *against* MS with my customers. In my opinion it would be smart for them to focus on openess and professional services with native software as a fallback for the heavy lifting. Their Azure thing seems to play in that direction. I'm wondering if MS can pull it all together with their new management. We'll see.
Until then, they can talk all they want. It will take some time before I see MS as a relyable player in my field again.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Microsoft rebranding themselves as the Spartans after being the Morganites for so many years seems weird. Linux would probably be the Gaians, BSD the University, and Apple the Believers.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Do none of you realize the Halo reference? Cortana is their phone assistant.
30 years ago (1998)
Are these dog years?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
That's all very nice, but MS is a software company. I'll admit I was thinking of cross-platform development environments, like their announced open source .NET, about which I know little, and I don't really count stuff they sell as end products. I will acknowledge that this is bias on my part.
OTOH, ... you actually use those things on a tablet? As other than file viewers? (You didn't say you did, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.)
That said, if I'd been thinking of consumer end-products I'd never have made that statement. MSOffice for Apple has been out for ages...and MSWord 5.2a for the Mac was the best word processor I've ever used. Far superior to any later versions, and it fixed a lot of bugs from the previous versions. These days it wouldn't be so good as, of course, it didn't handle unicode, but that's still the only improvement that I know about.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Only if your view of MS is stuck in the aera of Halloween-Documents. They are doing pretty great work regarding openness and interoperability esp. since Satya took over.
That sign in at a Google search screen bothers me, at which point is one going to be required to use it.
Last time I checked (which was today), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?
So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?
In both cases it was listed as the most recent IE for Win7 - still just one click to infect all the users network drives.
Oops.