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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.
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.