Slashdot Mirror
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.
Approximately every other version of windows is shit. XP (good), Vista (shit), Win7 (good), Win8 (shit).
Windows 10? No thanks, I'll wait for Windows 9, the good version they skipped.
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?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This is madness.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Ballmer
__________
Total ballmers
Only 3 years behind webkit now
Only score 370 from HTML5test.com which places it about where Chrome 20 was in 2012.
Just like IE years behind. Shame.
Also the address bar isn't obvious and will confuse the heck out of Grandma and office drones. No arrow in the address bar to show frequent sites. Again phone will be ringing off the hook for it back.
No thanks will ban this on the corporate desktop and put IE 11 for awhile when we switch to Windows 10 in the next 5 years until MS adds these features back.
I am trying hard not to be trollish as IE has drastically improved by the POS it was last decade! However, the faster MS is on changing and being not bad the further webkit and even Mozilla plow ahead even faster.
IE haters it is only beta so it might change and according to smashingmagazine.com the trident team mentioned 3,000 bugs were removed when they re created the whole engine into something new. So kudos Microsoft.
But all this change freaks the hell out of business users and are parents still clinging to XP for life as the best OS and the last when that worked with things in the right spots etc
http://saveie6.com/
Question for anyone who has tried it, does Project Spartan currently support Vorbis, Opus, VP8, VP9 and the WebM container format? VP8 and Opus are mandatory to implement in the WebRTC spec so hopefully Microsoft will at least conform to the spec for WebRTC, and bonus points awarded if they carry that codec support over to the video tag.
According to www.html5test.com no. Just AAC and MP3. ... however in Microsoft's defense it is not a W3C standard as they all agreed to implement mp3 and mpeg4
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, it seems like they finally figured out that Rome is burning and no matter how large their army, nothing can save them now :-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Why aptly named? The Spartans had nothing to do with the Trojan horse mythology, that was the Trojans and the Greeks.
I still find Windows Update to be one of the most flaky components of Windows. There's a too high chance of updates failing to install, and the Windows Update dialog in Control Panel can be stuck displaying 0% while the backend is making progress just fine. Also they removed the "New updates are available" system tray icon, which I find disappointing. Also you have to keep automatic updates turned on so that the Windows Defender malware definitions are kept up to date.
Just how many have their been over the years? Just how hard is it to render HTML?
Or is it similar to the move away from skeuomorphism with GUIs - its just arrogant new teams trying to prove that they can do better than previous teams whose ideas are "past it"? I've seen this pointless reinventing the wheel so many times in my career it makes me despair. The amount of wasted manpower....
Why aptly named? The Spartans had nothing to do with the Trojan horse mythology, that was the Trojans and the Greeks.
Spartans are (not was, because they still exist) Greeks, and the mythological -as in Homer's literature for example- cause of the Trojan War was the queen of Sparta, Helen, that was "abducted" by Trojans, so Greeks (Spartans and other) went to save her - the "Trojan Horse" was built by Greeks (so Spartans also - it was about their queen!).
That's all moot because this is named after Halo Spartans.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
You might be thinking of Spartacus. Spartans never set Rome on fire.
-- Make America hate again!
Called Project Spartan because it comes with 300 security holes built in?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
> Windows Update dialog in Control Panel can be stuck
Windows update has been in the new settings app since a few preview builds ago.
The browser is unusable to me because the fonts look like they came from a Linux machine in 2006. Firefox, OTOH looks gorgeous in the font department. It's a non-starter to me when I hate reading anything on it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Does it work properly?
I didn't forgot NT.
I wrote consumer versions first.
I didn't wrote Windows 2k or 2k3 there either. So no NT product until there was no further win9x product after ME.
I later wrote them separately as one consumer version and one server version where I put in NT 4. I never bothered checking what the versions was further back.
Users may or may not want stable software. Developers want to be able to use new CSS features. As for the Firefox developers, I'm not sure what their UI goals are, but presumably they have them. That's two strikes against stability.
I suspect you have no idea how difficult it is to support older browsers, as a web developer. The development workflow usually goes like this: first, you code to the spec, and test in a browser that reproduces the specification well. Then you start trying to find out why it doesn't render correctly in Internet Explorer. For each incompatibility, you have to add a workaround. Then continue this process for as many old browser versions as your client has money for.
It is not free to continue supporting old browsers. It's usually shockingly expensive, frustrating, and very limiting for the developer. If you don't like something about your browser, please become involved in its development — file a bug report if nothing else. Please do not use old, incompatible, insecure browsers.
However, if you ever want to induce a mental meltdown in a web developer, tell them their new job is making sure all the sites are IE6 compatible. Even just saying "IE6" a few times can cause convulsions in susceptible developers. I'm not brave enough to try the same trick with earlier IE versions though: Cthulhu alone knows what kind of eldritch horror might be summoned.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Give them nothing! But take from them... everything!