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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.
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.
Someone (I think on reddit) pointed out that using the code name Spartan fits the "Halo" theme they've started with the "Cortana" search assistant.
What are you talking about?
MS has not done that in awhile. Unless of course your version of it at work is a decade behind what is out now as usually the case it is with ultra conservative IT departments who laid off the intranet team in 2008 recession
http://saveie6.com/
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.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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/
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.
http://saveie6.com/
The problem is that you need to upgrade your OS (and therefore need to pay) to get a good upgrade of your browser. No other browser vendor enforce this. THIS is why people are stuck with old versions of IE.
AND IT SUCKS.
(Was I yelling right there?)
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
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....
You seem to forget Vista in there buddy. Also, this is the first time this is happening, so let's not get carried away.. I'll wait to see how all this rolls out.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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.