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Microsoft Rolls Out Project Spartan With New Windows 10 Build
An anonymous reader writes: Today Microsoft released a new Technical Preview build for Windows 10. Its most notable addition is Microsoft's new browser: Project Spartan. In a brief post explaining the basics of the browser, the company says it includes their personal assistant software, Cortana, as well as "inking" support, which lets you write or type on the webpage you're viewing. But the biggest change, of course is the new rendering engine. The "suggestion box" page for Project Spartan is already filling up with idea from users, including one for Trident/EdgeHTML to be released as open source.
Unless you're stuck on a version of Windows which is over a decade old (XP and previous), this is simply not true. Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for user of Windows 7 and up.
As a Linux user I'm sometimes jealous of a browser that doesn't change every month.
Recently, Google announced that they would support IIRC the latest two versions of Chrome and Firefox for their services. The only browser they support for longer than a year is ... (drumroll) ... IE.
I was really getting my hopes up for the LTS version of Firefox, but they do everything they can to sabotage it (just try to find the LTS version on their website - it's impossible, you have to specifically search for it, they intentionally hid it and do not provide links to it).
Recently Chrome on my Android tablet changed (it now reloads the site when you scroll to far up). Gosh - I'm really starting to hate Google. And I already hate Firefox for their chicken-brained release schedule. And on Linux there is not really an alternative.
Somebody has to fork Firefox and offer a stable platform. The funny thing is that they would not really have to do a lot - just fork it and maintain it.
Until about 2 years ago I was still using Firefox 2 (yes, two) and I didn't have any problems until Google decided to "drop support" (= intentionally break) Google Translate.
Browsers were "good enough" 7 years ago. Firefox was great except for memory consumption and instability. Today, Firefox is adequate (no longer great, they messed up the UI too much for that) except for memory consumption and instability. So all the real issues of Firefox were ignored while we got "features" we don't need.
Rendering HTML in the 90s was easy. Rendering html today, is really, really fucking hard (there was stuff added between the 90s and HTML5 you know...)
There's 2 big issues.
First, there's just a lot. The CSS3 spec alone would take forever to implement from scratch. Well, no one finished yet.
Second, the spec is full of holes. FULL of holes. So people just lean on each other to figure out what to do. If you implement the spec exactly as is, you could still make something totaly useless, because you're not handling the undocumented edge cases the same way Firefox or Chrome do.
At this point, pretty much no one can realistically write a browser rendering engine from scratch. Even Spartan isn't from scratch. They're just getting rid of the parts of Trident that are holding them back, but very much keeping big chunks of it.
If all of a sudden, all rendering engines and their memories were to spontaneously go poof, but all existing web pages still remained as well as the html5 and related specs, it would be a very, very long time before we could browse the existing web again.