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Microsoft Rolls Out Project Spartan With New Windows 10 Build

Posted by Soulskill on from the this!-is!-spar!-tan! dept.

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.

5 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Approx. every other version of Windows is shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Approx. every other version of Windows is shit. by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

      Windows 10? No thanks, I'll wait for Windows 9, the good version they skipped.

      I'm waiting for Windows 11. Most OSes only go up to 10, but Windows will go up to 11.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    2. Re:Approx. every other version of Windows is shit. by NotDrWho · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well if you *really* want it, Windows 9 is available in that alternate universe where Justin Timberlake never left NSYNC. But no fucking way am I going there to get it.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  2. Re:Web developer headache? by bondsbw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  3. Re:Not another new rendering "engine" by Shados · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.