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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!
Yes, but Mozilla/Netscape was not an integral part of my OS kernel giving malware a vector right into the system-level processes of the computer.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Microsoft used to say these sorts of things all the time. They even fooled a lot of people at first.
Actually, they don't support standards better than other browsers. They just support a couple of features better than others do. A quick look at testing suites and caniuse.com reveals just how far behind they are compared to others. I'm glad they've improved, but misinformation isn't going to help make them look any better.
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.
I think this is because in the olden days having CRLF meant being able to dump a raw text file to a printing device. Unix had a tty driver that could handle adding the missing CR. CP/M and DOS didn't have any such thing. That doesn't mean I haven't spent 20+ years being annoyed by CRLF though.
That's not it, CRLF was a feature. How do you make strike-through text on a type-wheel printer? It automatically advances to the next position and it only has a fixed number of characters, you don't double it with strikethrough-a in addition to regular a. So you send a CR - carriage return - to return to first position, space your way over to the text to be striked out and make a ------- over it before you CRLF to the next line. And you have no idea how old knowing that makes me feel.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just as Microsoft has done, you too can separate IE and Windows.
I'll believe that Microsoft has separated IE and Windows when I can have more than one version/instance of IE installed and running at the same time like I can with external products such as Firefox.