I'm willing to give Spartan a chance, honestly. The ModernIE initiative taken by Microsoft the past few years feels like Microsoft gave IE to a team of competent engineers and told to run with it. They dropped support for older versions of IE and upgraded the technology behind it.
Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products.
I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]
I too will give Spartan a chance, and in likelihood will use it predominantly on my tablets and laptop (since I use IE 11 in those contexts today).
On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D.
I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.
That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.
The big problem that I see, and it applies to any browser, is that every page is loading tons of crap from ad or tracking sites including twitter or facebook. When one of these sites stalls the whole page stalls and it is a chronic problem. As an interim fix I block these domains using my host file pointing to localhost 127.0.0.1 but sometimes that stalls the loading because it doesn't get a reply so it waits for the timeout. I am thinking of setting up a web server on my LAN that replies 404 or 204 to all queries and pointing the worst ad/tracking/social domains there so I can load the content not the dross.
Eh, not totally. For instance, the backoffice UI of Umbraco CMS was rewritten using Angular or something, and now it's just...slow. Unreasonably sluggish. I've seen other work from agencies with no 3rd party dependencies that use all this crazy JS and animations that unless you're on a top line MacBook, it's just sluggish.
I've been using the web for a long time, and while loading was slow, I don't remember UIs feeling so sluggish and unresponsive.
I'm 40 and grew up online with an acoustic modem. There is no fucking way craigslist is the way the web should look. Many sites go to far the other direction but even CL is begging to update their look.
I really hope they don't change, I love the simplistic design and never having to worry about major layout changes is great. The downside, their massive legal team has a larger budget.
Even the small layout changes Reddit has done the past few years has started to drive me away.
The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed.
It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.
It certainly wasn't an act of altruism, but the entire modern web can trace it's AJAXy roots back to Microsoft's decision to eschew web standards. Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest to Internet Explorer so that they could develop Outlook Web Access.
IE may have had utterly stank HTML compatibility, but adding XMLHttpRequest and inventing AJAX was probably the single most profound changeset in the history of the web.
Leaving aside the greater Windows thing, let's be honest - all the major browsers in that era basically said FU to the standards and raced ahead deploying their own stuff. There was greater interplay between the non-IE browsers, but that was because of marketshare and grim realities. Every browser was guilty of releasing features and functions that were "Best viewed in Browser X"
But the Mozilla Foundation was founded in between IE6 and IE7 and, if I recall correctly, their stand on a standards-based web was there from the get-go. They fought a war, against Microsoft in particular, and were starting to win by the time Chrome came in and cemented the victory.
I agree with much of what you are saying, personally the slew of bugs are the unforgivable bit as they are the parts that continue to persist. Legacy features tend to die
I don't care who does it or why - I just want higher quality software platforms. I'm glad that Microsoft didn't immediately give into the "open web" because it's a horrible mess of designed-by-committee compromises.
I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.
Sure, you can decide to just spectate, but like it or not we all have to share this tech ecosystem. If there's no consequence for companies or people that behave in ways that harm the whole industry, we're all going to suffer.
What gives you the idea that am I spectating? I'm a developer who votes with my choices and I've been in this industry for over 20 years. I just don't have a problem with Microsoft's tactics because I'm not an idealogue like you.
You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices?
So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!
Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.
I'm not sure why it's reported somewhere on Github and not in Firefox Bugzilla. If reporter cared about the bug he had to report it in the right place.
I think "firefox is slow" partialy comes from people using css3 animations eg. this
http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored
works smooth on my MBP as well as on my Ubuntu desktop
whereas seems sluggish on FF (on both platforms)
Looks pretty smooth to me in the latest Firefox (Debian testing), but if somewhere it's a bottleneck, to improve that Firefox should fully implement OMTC.
> As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times.
No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so.
One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.
I'll give it a chance as soon as I can add simple extensions (like ublock, vim bindings, etc). And when they make the UI not look unfinished. Maybe it's silly, but those ugly square tab things look like a prototype before the design team had their turn. Petty as that is, I really find it annoying. Also not a fan of sharing the address bar with tabs, but that's minor in comparison. (I used IE for a long time, until well after Chrome was shipped, so I'm not inherently biased.)
What's the word with Firefox performance? My company's app is critically slow in JUST Firefox. It's an Ember app, but we use D3 and Immutable.js. We aren't doing anything weird AFAIK
What has profiling turned up? Because in my experience, Firefox is faster on the apps I work on for Javascript performance, so I'm really curious what sort of performance profile your app has.
My company's app is slowest in Firefox too. Most noticeably its the CSS3 transitions that are slow and chunky compared to all the other main browsers. It doesn't really affect the usability too much, but it still annoys me that I can't get the transitions to be nice and smooth like they are in Chrome or IE.
I don't use much extensions, so that's never been too big of a deal for me. I'm using Opera although currently trying Vivaldi[0]
Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox]
Try Otter Browser too, it also follows the philosophy of the old Opera but it's free software and cares about your privacy. It's also in an incomplete alpha stage though (it has quite a bunch of features but still doesn't have some convenient stuff, remarkably autocompletion in the address field).
I agree. Have you fired up the Windows 10 preview and enabled the new rendering engine in IE? It's a pretty good step forward so far, and I'd imagine the next build will be even better. AFAIK, Spartan itself should be in the next build.
It's fast in benchmarks… but it's either single-threaded or has horrible locking. One slow script somewhere will not just block the tab, but the entire browser. Good luck hunting it down with 40+ open tabs.
(I really miss Opera 12, it's still the only browser to decouple the UI to its own thread so a long-running script doesn't lock up the page. Or the whole browser…)
You may not consciously notice, but you sure as shit do. I've got some lovely scatter plots sampled across billions of user sessions that show that average page load time in a session has a direct inverse correlation with conversion rate.
Oh you can easily figure out render performance differences in milliseconds with your eyes. Try that. For example, a difference of 300 milliseconds is noticeable by me. I don't know what are you 'attesting' there. I'm not a web-developer, but just 'a developer'.
Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)
When you say “I notice millisecond differences”, that means “one millisecond”. If you meant something more on the order of hundreds of milliseconds, you should probably clarify that.
Exactly, that's the point minitech was making. Your statement is accurate. Saying you survive on a single millisecond of sleep each night would be clearly impossible - as is noticing single-millisecond differences in page rendering times.
You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".
That's one of those places where common sense should take over literal English. When someone says 'millisecond differences', there are high chances that they mean 'milliseconds differences', and not exactly ONE millisecond difference.
Oh well, first, I was not the one who said that. Then, there are HIGH chances that the original comment meant 'milliseconds' differences and not one millisecond difference, which all of you didn't even try to consider.
Heh, exactly my thought when I saw the headline. As a webdeveloper since 1995, I can only say "phew, finally" - that browser probably cost me 2-3 years of my life, spent hacking various webprojects to make them work in IE.
March 1998, and it underwent a pretty well-publicized rewrite as well... Firefox is not built on top of what was released back then (Communicator 4.x); it's built on top of its rewrite.
I cannot believe that Seamonkey still lives! In fact they just had a release a week ago. And by looking at the features, I think you are right. Netscape lives on as Seamonkey in its most complete form.
Some of us remember times before Opera, Galeon et al. (and I am one of those people who actually paid for Internet Explorer when it only shipped with the Windows 95 Plus Pack).
I remember the day IE introduced Javascript (v.3 I think it was) & going round chatrooms that let you post HTML and griefing with inline images.
IE was very forgiving with its HTML engine. There was a time when missing a /td or /tr would leave you with a blank page in Netscape but IE rendered the page just fine. This led to hundreds of websites that only rendered in IE because that's what people checked them with.
So in this way it was the "best" browser because you needed it to browse half of the web!
IE 4 was far and away the best browser in its day. Nothing else was as fast and as reliable. Netscape had devolved into a steaming pile of garbage which had horrible resource usage problems aside from being massively unstable. Other competing browsers weren't much better than netscape either. It wasn't until years later that things changed.
But Netscape ran cross-platform, without which the WWW would have devolved into a Windows-only niche product. And that would have meant the only tablets today would be running Windows.
I don't think that follows. Also, it's not as though Netscape didn't have it's moments either. There was a time where it was better, a time where IE was better, a time where firefox was better, a time where chrome was better, and so on. Time marches on.
The original idea came from ActiveX, but it didn't take off until it was implemented across browsers via JavaScript as XMLHttpRequest over the next 6 years, and didn't become "Ajax" until the Adaptive Path blog post about Google's innovations with Maps and Gmail in 2005. Microsoft then added support for XMLHttpRequest a year and a half later in late 2006 with IE7, which of course had very little adoption, particular among businesses, because of IE6 (see IE6 @ 49.8% and IE7 @ 17.1% IE market share at beginning, March 2007, of this graph: http://www.w3counter.com/trends).
IE4 was the first browser with dynamic HTML (DHTML).
Microsoft evangelized the combination of DHTML, Javascript and ActiveX data controls to build applications similar to what we now call AJAX. Microsoft was ignored for various reasons.
Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest and evangelized DHTML, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest. They were ignored again.
It was not until the introduction of Gmail and Adaptive Path's coining of the term AJAX that people finally got it. By this time, Microsoft had already put IE on the back burner.
Isn't this just a marketing stunt? The article contains no engineering facts, just the branding thing. I mean: I expect the "new IE" to inherit code and practices from the "old IE". Unless I'm proven otherwise.
While this is true, there isn't really a common browser distribution that uses that setup for non-OS X platforms, though. Chrome/Chromium/Opera use Blink now.
For all practical purposes, Safari is an OS X-only browser.
"Safari" aka WebKit + JavaScriptCore is also on iOS with a separate UI from OS X "Safari," similar to how you'd have a separate UI if you use WebKit + JavaScriptCore on Windows.
Whether it's popular on Windows is also irrelevant with regard to the fact that it does, indeed, work on Windows.
Speaking from practical experience, iOS' Safari is quite a different beast from the desktop version. `position:fixed` in a scrollable, element, for example, has completely different behaviors depending on the platform Safari is running on. You have to treat desktop Safari and iOS Safari as different browsers for development and QA purposes.
Windows Phone uses Trident + Chakra for its IE deployment, as well, so if we're going to make that argument, then IE is multiplatform, as well :P
It's available, but it's not used. I get what you're driving at here, but for practical purposes, Safari-OSX is a single-platform browser and Safari-iOS is another single-platform browser. You can't just target "Webkit" and call it a day.
I don't know what Modern IE is other than a testable version of IE. No version of IE is respectable since it can't hold a candle to any other major browser.
While it is mostly marketing (i.e. still using Chakra and Trident engines), the biggest change from a web developer's perspective is that the new Spartan browser will be evergreen[1].
EdgeHTML.dll is just a fork of mshtml.dll, which started somewhere after IE11 and stripped out all the compatibility modes (except quirks and limited-quirks, both of which are starting to get properly standardised) and then started refactoring the code to get rid of all the less nice design decisions caused by having to keep the IE7 code working through a bunch of ifs.
IE has been evergreen since version 10. The biggest change is that this is not Trident. It is a new rendering engine, called EdgeHTML, which started as a fork of Trident. That might sound odd, but Trident and the rest of IE had accumulated years of technical and backwards-compatibility debt: All the different document modes and obscure features from the ActiveX era that couldn't be removed because enterprise intranet sites relied on them.
So what Microsoft have done is create an entirely new browser, using the EdgeHTML fork, while keeping IE around only for enterprise installs. Then they went on a killing spree in the EdgeHTML source, ripping out all the crap that they were previously stuck with, then adding new features into their newly cleaned-up codebase. This will then form the basis for the new, consumer facing browser in Windows 10.
They should have done this EdgeHTML rewrite/legacy cruft split with IE9 rather than layering on more kludges.
They should eliminated native code apps in user mode in Vista and forced developers to ship only managed code with legacy native code apps running in a virtual machine sandbox.
They should have finished WinFS and transcended the files and folders thang. (No, SQL Server does not count as WinFS, it should have been THE file system in Vista.) They should have fixed the file locking thing on open files, geez I hate hate hate that DOS backwards compatibility.
They should have done something/ANYTHING amazing with WinCE beyond pocket office with the insane lead they had. I was running .exe's and playing DOOM at a decent clip on my Samsung phone in, when, 2004?
There's so many wouldda couldda shoulddas I have lined up in my mind wrt Microsoft. Makes me sad.
I truly hope Microsoft wants to win this new browser war. I truly hope there is some fire left in you M$. Show me what money combined with hardcore computer science can really achieve!
With this new CEO, Microsoft is a different company. Cloud & Mobile all the way. .NET/CLR is open-source. First class support for Linux and OS X. Commitment to standards.
At the risk of sounding like a complete lunatic, here's my prediction for the next 10 years:
* Microsoft abandon traditional Windows development.
* They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple. Unix and Unix-like OS's become the only game in town. "Traditional" apps are emulated. New Apps are written in a CLR-compatible language only for the modern runtime.
* IIS, IE, Sivelight - all are left to stagnate.
* Office becomes HTTP/JS, hosted only.
Can you elaborate on what MS would gain by tossing their rather fine kernel and using Linux/BSD? Particularly since that'd lose the massive amount of hardware support from current drivers.
One strong reason is to lure back developer love. One reason why most startups use Macs or linux machines is because open source libraries runs on linux and most of the time on OSX without much modifications. Windows is always an afterthought and is lucky if Windows support is available in a few months. MS knows this and knows that if the trend is not reversed soon, Windows market share will decline.
And that depends on the kernel interface? I don't think so. If you mean MS should start shipping "Unix Services for Windows" again, in earnest, yes, sure. But that hardly requires a separate kernel (and killing all current hardware support, etc.)
Most online SaaS/Internet startups? Yes. Maybe some on Azure too.
Every other type of business startup is going to use Windows because software. Call centers, restaurants, supermarkets, retail stores, real estate, financial, pharmaceutical, etc.
Have you compared the cost of your compute/VMs to Google Compute Engine? When I did, Azure was literally double the cost. And it has useful SSD options which Azure doesn't yet have.
Also, no, we haven't. They don't provide native .NET, like Microsoft (obviously), access to all of their services. Azure's pretty much the only option for infrastructure-less .NET at the moment.
As long as Microsoft has big customers all-in on Windows, and there are many, so too will Microsoft remain Windows. You can compete with free for as long as free is not what the big players want in their IT operation.
I think they would keep the NT kernel. The engineering that went into that was pretty top notch. The rest of the Windows legacy yeah, that gets dumped.
Ms would stop being ms in that scenario, I can't see it happening. I could see them drop the "windows" brand though.
This new browser, is it married to Windows? Ibm went through this, they were maybe the most dominant corporation the world has ever seen, then the government scared them and the micro revolution happened. IBM switched from trying to own every deal (well they still wanted that) to being satisfied to get a slice of the action, it became all about open. Ms seems to be switching from "windows everywhere" to "helping you be the best you" or some other theme. I'll be impressed when they support a browser and office on linux.
I've thought about this a lot too and I mostly agree, but I think they'd keep the Windows branding and NT kernel and just start making the POSIX/Unix layer installed by default and supported as first-class.
I'd love a Windows machine to work the same way I use my OSX machine: using Terminal.app and HomeBrew to develop and use unixey apps, but with a nice GUI and hardware support that's better than the Linux distros out there. I can confidently develop say, rails applications, test them locally, and just push them to production on Linux servers and I've never once thought "hey, I wonder if this will break due to differences in OSX to Linux." It just never has made a difference. I want windows to be like this too.
I can get there with Windows now with Cygwin or SFU, but I want it all to ship with Windows, and binaries I create are unlikely to work anywhere except other people who have installed the whole stack. Plus there's no good terminal emulator for windows I'm aware of.
I became a Mac user when I started to become a developer with a preference for the command line. The default Windows terminal sucks for development. I think bmy biggest beef is jltrying to do something as simple as cutting/pasting text.
> They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple.
No. NT is a far more advanced kernel than any of the free unixes. If anything, they'll make it the other way around; a decent "linux" subsystem which can seamlessly run ELF binaries. Like FreeBSD's linux binary support. Or like coLinux, but without the overhead of virtualizing another kernel.
We have to support Ie7,8,9,10,11 and 11 for metro in and out of compatibility mode across three fucking platforms due to control styling differences. Now we have Spartan and whatever shtcrock will ship as legacy.
We'll lose IE7 when vista is dead. We'll be left with enterprise IE11 well into 2028!
Why? In financial services all our clients are cheap, dumb and incompetent. Unpatched win7 from "managed service providers" is the reality. If yore lucky they're not some hideous terminal services shit crock.
This is why we go "oh joy".
Its also why everyone who works at the places goes home to Apple and Android kit.
Is that really any different than if enterprise clients were demanding support for Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Firefox 4, etc? I've actually been in that situation, a place I worked in 2011 had a web app that only worked properly in Firefox 2.something.
Blame companies for demanding an app specific to one version. Blame the developers for writing apps that only work on one version. Blame Microsoft for making breaking changes between versions. But only one of those things is Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing people hard to update their browser since IE7 was released.
Actually its ensuring that all the show stopping bugs that IE has don't take our app out or make it unusable. Unfortunately clients don't upgrade their browsers if cost is involved.
My mother still has a 486 with wordperfect on it. Fortunately it's not connected to the Internet. I'm rather surprised the disk has lasted as long as it has :)
> Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
Except that is hardly the case.Competition is good,that's what forced IE to evolve as it was losing marketshares. But let's not kid ourself thinking all the players are in it for web standards.
I think IE supremacy was different and much worse than a Webkit supremacy would be because Webkit isn't controlled by a single company and is open source. Different Webkit implementations still compete for marketshare.
I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
I understand the problems of monocultures when they are controlled by a single profit-motivated company, but is a monoculture based on open source software so bad? Besides, both webkit and *nix systems aren't exactly monocultures because they have so many different implementations.
Webkit is controlled by Apple, basically. If you want to make big changes (i.e. Chrome) you're going to have to fork it and merge Apple's changes periodically.
This will make things harder to maintain, and if you have enough investment, you'll eventually want to fork it (Blink).
People don't really use different Webkits - there's Chrome and Safari (incompatible forks) and Opera (declining market share) and that's about it, really.
Making all OS' Nix would again be a bad thing, because there'd be no level playing field.
The current Unix players are similar in some ways, but have different APIs and behaviours (so OpenBSD has better randomness, Linux has some cool perf monitoring stuff, OS X has its GUI lib) and what you'd essentially find is that there'd be loads of incompatibilities that'd make developing cross-platform a nightmare. Since not all devs run all common operating systems, it'd be hard to motivate fixes.
So, you'd develop for one of them, not all - and then you're not in a much better place than the situation with Windows - where you can share a lot of your code cross-platform anyway, or write in a JIT'd language etc.
> I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
How?
Windows and Unix have evolved entirely different ecosystems. Most developers have a tendency to exist entirely in 1 or the other with only a little interaction between them.
I personally am able to use either environment comfortably, but that's actually a big part of the value I bring to certain environments. But that isn't the norm.
For a developer's perspective being able to write once and have it work everywhere is pretty darn big "pro". What are the practical "cons" that outweigh this?
> Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
I agree, as long as they are by companies, organizations, and teams other than Microsoft. And that's what we indeed have already: Gecko, WebKit, Blink (and Blink is new, which is great). I very much look forward to additional open engines (and POSIX-compliant operating systems, for that matter) by companies, organizations, and even unofficial teams of dedicated individuals that are not Microsoft, of which there are many.
Microsoft is in much less of a position to screw with standards than they were back when IE was a problem. I'd be more worried about Apple and Google running the browser show if I were you.
I was more concerned when Microsoft did. I have no issue with Apple or Google. In fact, if it weren't for Google and Mozilla, we'd all be using IE6 right now.
I don't have any concerns with Google, but Apple's "No browsers allowed except for new UIs tacked on the iOS WebKit framework" is not my favorite thing ever.
Honestly, I am prepared to welcome a clean-start browser from Microsoft that rips out all the layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of legacy support and emulation layers it had accumulated. That, not the browser itself, has been the increasing problem with IE in this decade.
I wonder if this is a way to get around backwards compatibility issues. If it's a new brand with a new name, maybe there won't be expectations that it will work like previous versions of IE.
“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing.”
Ummm that's confusing. If you're going to kill it, kill it dead.
Is there some proof of this outside of this USA Today article?
I came here with the exact same concern as the GP comment.
“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan..."
It just reeks of marketing double-speak that gets engineers excited, only to find out that they're stuck maintaining code for N + 1 browsers now.
Incidentally, Microsoft rebranding exercises infuriate me. Arguably, Spartan is a "new" product, but by that measure any product rewrite should get a completely new, unrelated name rather than a version number. I remember COM + DispInterfaces ==> ActiveX, Outlook Express ==> MSN Messenger, MSN ==> Bing. It's just irritating and confusing to both developers and consumers.
AIUI, the version of Trident (i.e., mshtml.dll) shipping in Win10 is that of IE11. There shouldn't be any behavioural changes, and Trident should only be used in IE12 for intranet websites by default.
They should just tie it into Bing! and call it the Bing! Browser!
Rather than it be offered by the operating-system division, they should have the product engineered and marketed by the search engine division. The integration to Bing! should be uncompromising and a genuine step change in usability. This does not have to appeal to the 'power users', however, if it has a few usability tricks that make it more useful for most people in most circumstances then they could do fine with it.
With an integrated approach of browser plus services such as search this browser could be great. As a mere browser it has no USP so I will stick with Chrome (on a Chromebook).
> "Not that Internet Explorer branding will vanish entirely. It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet."
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.
The same way users were going to flock to Netscape instead of IE?
Spartan will be pre-installed and "good enough" for a lot of people. IT departments will de facto have to support it because it comes on the Windows image. Joe User read a lot things about Chrome spying on him or blocking his favorite ad blocker and might want to try it out.
>If IE was an issue for users
IE as legacy browser tied to active x junk and old school enterprise sites was the problem. Spartan dumps all of that. Oh some $crappy_site_coded_for_ie6 doesnt work in Spartan? Too bad. IE is there for legacy stuff, Spartan is for modern stuff.
If MS doesn't screw it up, Spartan may be a big deal and could cut into Chrome's marketshare. I wouldn't write it off.
I think part of Spartan's success will live and die on how well it supports addons/extensions. I imagine it won't be backwards compatible with IE's old COM extension nonsense, so it will be interesting to see what they do there...
The rumour at the moment is that they're going to use an extremely Chrome like extension system, either native support for Chrome extensions or an extremely minimal conversion process required.
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.
If Microsoft wants to "win the browser war", in my opinion the best thing they could do would be to create their own WebKit (or even Chromium) distribution and have it installed in Windows by default.
That may work, but it would be bad for the market overall. The more browser engines we have the better, least of all we wind up in another IE6-like situation where one browser/engine rules the world and dictates web-features.
PS - Yes, I know Google broke away from Apple's WebKit branch. But a lot of browsers are still very WebKit-like.
And that's also a pretty big reason why Microsoft may not want to be on WebKit. Google forked WebKit because it and Apple couldn't agree on what direction to take things. Why would Microsoft be able to work with either of Apple or Google than they could work together on WebKit? So it's very likely that it wouldn't be a WebKit-based browser, but a browser based on Microsoft's WebKit fork or Microsoft's Blink fork.
Does it really matter? Do they need a browser at all? Browsers are all pretty much interoperable now. What strategic advantage is there in developing and maintaining their own browser? Nobody pays for browsers. They might pay for content or apps delivered in the browsers. That's what Microsoft should worry about. They've lost their browser monopoly, move on.
You maintain your own browser so that you can influence the development of the web. For example, Apple used Safari's influence to push touch events, Microsoft tried to use its influence to standardise pointer events, Google's been pushing NaCL, Dart etc.
In order to consistently have weight with changing CSS, HTML rendering etc you basically need your own browser - and most of the changes we've seen in the last few years have come out of Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple.
There is also the issue of your army of tech staff doing demos and presentations using your competitors tools, or shipping your operating system with somebody elses browser installed.
With the browser so ubiquitous, it has become a huge part of your platform experience. Consider IE's big power consumption advantage. If people spend all their time in the browser, offering a browser that makes Windows work as well as possible, is good for Windows.
> What strategic advantage is there in developing and maintaining their own browser?
You hold the keys to the default search engine for that particular browser, to name an example. Even with the Mozilla-Yahoo deal it's still in MS interest to own a browser so they can push Bing and their other cloud services there.
the answer from "silverstorm" is correct. To elaborate a bit, if you add a feature or API to the underlying OS, but there's no corresponding browser feature that makes use of it, to someone who spends most of their time in a browser the OS feature may as well not exist. Microsoft's main reason for investing in IE has generally been to try to add to the perceived value of Windows by making new Windows features accessible through the browser and thereby more relevant to web-centric PC usage. Examples are taskbar integration in Win7, live tile support in Win8, the emphasis on hardware acceleration in IE9+ (which was designed to try to make the underlying Windows graphics system more relevant to web browsing), smooth touch panning/zooming in IE10+ (by being early adopters of the Windows DComp/DManip APIs), better font rendering on high-DPI displays via DWrite etc.
Note that if other browsers themselves adopt new Windows APIs in competitive response, that actually still benefits Microsoft because ultimately they don't care about the browser for its own sake, they care about increasing Windows API and feature usage across all browsers. But in practice competing browsers tend to be late adopters of new Windows stuff (e.g., even now nothing but IE supports DComp/DManip and Chrome is just very recently getting around to improving its Windows high-DPI and text rendering support), hence Microsoft funds IE.
Absurdly, users have to install Windows 10 to use this new browser. Why not write it in .net and have it work on all versions of Windows typically found in the wild?
I wish it worked on other versions of Windows as well (just like Firefox and Chrome do) but a .NET version would likely be vastly inferior to a C/C++ browser in performance.
.NET is great but this isn't really what it's meant for.
Their goal is to have as many people running the current OS as possible. Every exception like that they make is an exception that keeps people using the old versions and keeps them scrambling to maintain them.
Some people are going to stick on the old OS no matter what. Their computer still works, why buy another?
We can stamp our feet or work with that reality. We have 70% of China on Windows XP with no hope of a modern browser from MS (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484761/microsoft-windo...). At least Chrome will work on those old systems. At least web devs can use modern features on those systems.
If the browser is the primary carrot to get someone to upgrade your OS, the OS value prop sucks.
First, you don't have to buy a new computer to get a newer version of Windows (especially since 10 seems to run just as well as 7/8 on the same hardware, if not better). Second, since MS is apparently offering free upgrades to 10 for consumers on 7/8 it doesn't seem like cost is really a factor. The China case is interesting, but I'd like to see some more recent figures on usage, since that article is about 2 years old. I did some quick searching, but everything I could find seemed to be from around that timeframe.
I don't know that the browser is a primary carrot, but it's part of the deal. If you can get enough of their new software to run on, say, Windows 7 to duplicate major functionality of 10, what's the point in upgrading at all? It doesn't make sense to have (people who will stick with the old OS no matter what) + (people who might upgrade, but don't because they can keep the old one and still get the cool new features of the new one) using older versions of Windows, thus increasing maintenance on old software.
> 1/2: I'd posit the people using XP in 2015 are probably not the ones capable of upgrading their existing OS. New OS means new computer for them.
Are those people capable of installing a new browser after making the informed decision that it's better than IE 8?
> 3: Users of every other OS are enticed by features other than the browser. Only Windows ties the OS to the browser.
Every other OS? Let's look at the major players in desktop computing: Windows and OSX. Windows has IE/Spartan, you can as of now only get them on Windows. OSX has Safari, there was an abortive attempt to develop it for Windows but it didn't take off and is now abandoned. I don't think this is too surprising. Here I am on OSX Mavericks making this post from Safari 7.1.3 because Safari 8 is only available for Yosemite. Given that the browser is the main piece of software that many consumers interact with, I think it's fair to say that the browser is still a significant value proposition, even if it's not the only one.
Exactly. At least it may not be worth $200. Apple's $25 or free updates are much more reasonable and get people to actually stay current. The older hardware slows down gradually and people warm up to the idea of faster/newer hardware gradually, rather than thinking that the new OS broke their working computer.
Please, Microsoft, switch to an evergreen OS model like Apple has.
But it's for people running 7 and up, for one year. The 70% of Chinese users on XP aren't going to see the benefit of this.
(Why didn't Microsoft make it for XP too? They want to squeeze that last sale out of people. They don't realize the greater threat is people leaving their platform entirely.)
Even Google doesn't support new versions of Chrome on XP anymore. There is just a point where the OS is outdated.
Not many people run XP in China anymore. Maybe some netcafes with pirated versions that they don't want to upgrade. Its really been a while since I've seen anyone run XP in Beijing.
I always thought the Internet Explorer branding was the one thing they got right. If you're not a technical person and you've got a new computer and you're trying to get onto the internet for the first time do you use:
I'd think something in the line of "Microsoft Web" or "Windows Web" would be better.
The name "Internet Explorer" was right, but the feeling that web developers have with it, ain't. So that's why they have to change it..
If they use Microsoft Web for a cross platform application, the naming would identify Microsoft and "Web". With Windows Web it's solely targetting the Windows platform (and not crossplatform as their goals are changing)
The problem is that 'not a technical person' is a dying breed.
Take a long-term view of things - anyone born after 1985 will be the dominant demographic in 20 years. These people are more technically literate than the current dominant demo.
So yeah. My mom doesn't know IE from Chrome, but my 12 year old nephew does, as do all his friends. In 20 years, my mom will be 85, my nephew and his generation will be the dominant demo
I would be curious to see how well browser brand names have associated/resonated with the average computer users over time. I know my mom uses chrome because I made it her default web browser and hid explorer. However she doesn't refer to it as chrome, just "the web".
About 4 years ago (note: not 14 years ago) my boss at the time told me "AOL" when I asked him that question. Immediately I thought he was joking, then I thought he must be mistaken and was telling me what his homepage was by accident. But then, to my horror, he showed it to me, and I realized he was completely correct. He was using some ugly purple "modern" version of an AOL browser that I didn't even know existed.
The thought back then was that there would be a "Mozilla" brand working on the core browser tech as open source code that was strictly for developers, while AOL would take Mozilla tech and use it to periodically release consumer-facing browsers under the brand "Netscape." This turned out not to work in practice, since the main contributions AOL would make in turning Mozilla into Netscape revolved taking a perfectly useful browser and making it less useful. (An example: Mozilla included a pop-up blocker, but AOL disabled it in their "Netscape" builds. Yes.)
AOL/Netscape ought to be a business school case study in how to completely demolish the value of a brand after paying out the nose for it.
I fear that the browser itself will live forever. At least in my parent's basement where the PCs are like Mr. Burns' indestructibility: https://vimeo.com/96581518
Spartan is still Trident, right? So then it's still Microsoft using Microsoft stuff, but eliminating a ton of cruft that builds up over the years due to backwards compatibility.
Historically, Apple (at least under Jobs) were the ones to declare an old standard dead while dragging us kicking and screaming into the future. Microsoft always proudly stood by and told you that your crappy program from 1992 would still be able to run on each version of Windos that came out, no matter how big and bloated the beast became.
Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come? Could the next version of Windows (Not 10, obviously) finally declare the end of backwards compatibility and force obsolete software into a virtualization ghetto?
Is their new project architecturally different, or just a rebranding? I've thought for years that they should rename the thing, to get rid of the stigma, but it'd be kind of a shame to completely abandon the browser just as it was catching up.
My take on this while not a horrible decision, it is a weak one for MS. My rationale;
1. 70% of the world doesn't care about their browser and will use what’s is put in front of them. There was that classic video where people didn't even know the difference between the internet and a browser a few years back. For this 70% unless someone swaps then to another browser, which thankfully people love doing, they'll use IEX for the rest of their life. These people have been trained to click the blue 'e'. Why take that away from the masses and open the door for them to look for alternatives?
2. For the remaining people that do care about a browser, we're going to know if it’s a great browser or not. We understand IE6 is not IE11. In the same was FF was awesome a few years back, we know it’s fallen back, and would recognise it improving if it (hopefully) does.
3. Microsoft announcing they will create a new & awesome browser, and actually doing so, are not connected. It wouldn't surprise me if MS invest all this marketing money on spinning a product that is just as frustrating as IE, just for a new set of reasons. And now we have brand confusion + an annoying browser with a bad name. People prefer familiar bad, than unfamiliar bad.
4. Microsoft is a bloody big and wealthy company. They can afford developing 2 browsers for a while. Why not launch and release this Spartan browser 'for power users'. They can use it as an experimental ground to push boundaries whilst not risking the stability and working of their core product. As this team proves their metal, they can push components of Spartan into IE, or not if the browser fails to deliver. Spartan can be used to buy new street cred for MS. Mum uses IE but young me uses Spartan. And if spartan succeeds by default it will bring credibility to IE, risking much less if it fails to gain favour. As a marketing guy rather than building the conversation; Spartan vs Chrome I’d much prefer to have IE vs Spartan vs Chrome.
And if you bothered to read this far, you probably like browsers. So you might enjoy a video a buddy and I made while on holiday for some really serious (/s) browser speed testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaT7thTxyq8
It will not use Webkit. They internally forked Trident and tore out all the legacy code. From what I've heard the two code bases don't much resemble each other anymore.
From a couple months ago:
"Technically, the browser will use Microsoft’s Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), according to Foley." [1]
Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products.
I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]