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."

Comments

Hard to believe

[markdavis]

> "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.

Re: Hard to believe

[Billly Gates]

IE 11 implements W3C standards better than any browser. Webkit might have more check offs from html5test but they are not implemented the same way as w3c.

Css 3 animations are a good example. Chrome does not do them right without hacks.

It is not IE 6 anymore and Sun and IBM subverted and changed proposed standards IE 6 used in development on purpose. It was not designed to break Web pages. Mozilla and Netscape were worse in 2001 believe it or not

Re:Hard to believe

[plover]

Microsoft is a very different company than they were under Gates or the Sweat-hog. They long ago figured out that their cash cows were kind of fragile, and they more recently figured out that they alienated a lot of developers. They are now trying to find ways to woo developers to any of their product families, not just to Windows. And they've done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,

Re: Hard to believe

[TheReaperD]

I'm getting the impression that is why they are shipping the Spartan web browser. I've been getting the feeling that they've been having troubles coding IE to support many HTML5 features without breaking a their legacy crap. Add to that the browser is heavily integrated into the win32s code and you're in for a coding nightmare. They were never going to be able to develop for changes as fast as competing browsers with that model and they knew it. As such, this move makes the most sense given their options. As long as they stay dedicated to working with web standards, I'm all for it. I'm just going to be very wary given their history with the web.