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

[TWX]

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.

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.

Re:More of this

[HiThere]

To be fair, at the time MS adopted the CRLF line ending style there were *four* standards, none of them dominant:
CR, LF, CRLF, and LFCR (called NLCR..new line carriage return). They picked one existing standard, and Unix was already using another. The supporters of the other standards have died off, so there are only two standards left.

So don't blame MS for all the bad decisions. Only some of them. I still wouldn't want to use their software, though. Perhaps if they live up to their current "We love FOSS" line for a decade or so I'll change my mind, but currently it just feels like their latest lie.

Re:More of this

[Kjella]

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.