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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.
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/
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!
Microsoft has very specific requirements for its browsers - namely corporate use. Other browser manufacturers don't have this pressure. Rendering HTML is actually very difficult, and that's ignoring media, JavaScript, extensions, user profiles, bookmarks, system integration, and so on. Saying it's just HTML isn't really helping the discussion...
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.