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.

Comments

Re:Web developer headache?

[bondsbw]

I wonder how much headache this will create among web developers. Will Spartan implement things in a new unheard of way or will it actually try to achieve maximum compatibility?

According to WinBeta, interoperability with other browsers is the goal of Spartan. Compatibility (for legacy/enterprise sites) is the goal of IE. IE's Trident engine will not be updated except for security fixes, and Spartan's Edge engine will move forward with modern standard, new features, and improved performance.

Re:Web developer headache?

[Billly Gates]

Have you made websites recently?

I do not mean to sound critical about you personally? I wrote a kind of bad trollish review below. With that ouf of the way IE 11 is one of the most standard compliant browsers available. It does not support the most features but it supports those correctly. Webkit/blink is the worst. CSS 3 animations is like IE 6 you need hack after hack of -webkit to get it to work.

Why is it we accept Google doing this yet bash IE 6 as the anti Christ when it did the same in 2001? Spartan is a better browser than IE 11 but Chrome and Mozilla accelerating in the last year faster than the project Spartan could catch. So in a sense it is about Chrome in 2012/2013 but with more standards compliant. It still is beta in a rewrite engine stage so I won't bruise MS too much more on this :-)

After the new engine stabilizes they need to add quite a few features like interactive forms, pointer events, drawing primitives, stencil support in webgl, to catch up to the other browsers. However I do not know if the W3C standardized these yet.

Since IE users NEVER EVER UPGRADE the last thing MS wants is to implement a changed feature later on and be stuck for the next 10 years where developers curse them for writing 2 versions of that standard after W3C changes the final spec. This is what happened with IE 6 besides the bugs. CSS 2.1 was very very new and changed final after IE 6 came out. firefox implemented it the other way causing 2 rifts as it was assumed users and corporations would upgrade to IE 7 FAST and quickly. We all know they never happened and kept the damn IE 6 until 2011.