A break from the past: the birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine
As we announced last month, Project Spartan will be the new browser across all Windows 10 devices, from phones to tablets, PCs and beyond. You’ll hear about the new browser’s features in the coming months but in this post, we want to tell you more about what motivated us to build a new rendering engine focused on interoperability with other modern browsers ― all in the name of making the Web “just work” for our customers. This new rendering engine was designed with Project Spartan in mind, but will also be available in Internet Explorer on Windows 10 for enterprises and other customers who require legacy extensibility support.
Modernizing IE while not breaking the Web
Internet Explorer has been the Microsoft Web browser for 20 years and has evolved to work with ever-changing Web sites over that time. Since 2009, we’ve been systematically bringing major investments to the browser to modernize each of the browser subsystems: from fast new JavaScript and layout engines, GPU-accelerated rendering and 3D graphics, and multi-threaded touch input to improved F12 developer tools and backwards compatibility with Enterprise Mode.
Big changes in 5 years: Fish IE (GPU rendering), Chakra fastest on SunSpider (JavaScript performance), Touch Effects (multi-touch input), new F12 developer tools, Assassin’s Creed Pirates (WebGL)
As we’ve been rolling out these significant changes with major versions of IE, we also did our best to abide by the mantra of “don’t break the Web.” This is an ambitious goal given that the Web consists of over 44 billion Web sites, so we prioritized compatibility testing on the Web’s top 9000 Web sites globally which accounts for roughly 88% of Web traffic. This represented the sweet spot of where the “head of the Web” becomes the “long tail” – allowing us to focus our testing resources on the most impactful sites. Prior to release, we would ensure a compatibility pass rate greater than previous releases of IE and our competitors on those top 9000 sites.
The long tail matters
And yet, even as we released new and improved versions of IE, we heard complaints about some sites being broken in IE – from family members, co-workers in other parts of Microsoft, or online discussions. As we examined these sites, they were often not on our top 9000 list. They were issues like not being able to complete a reservation online for the barbershop down the street, or not being able to log in to see the schedule for the local kids soccer league.
In Windows 10 planning, we set out to tackle this apparent discrepancy – how could our real-world compatibility be declining when our compatibility testing data shows that we are improving?
Rethinking our assumptions
As we dug in, we uncovered a series of issues that led us to realize that we needed to significantly rethink our approach to compatibility with the Web at large:
- Legacy vs. modern. While we were pushing ahead with new HTML5 features, we were also expected to preserve compatibility with old versions of IE, particularly for enterprise Web apps. Limited compatibility was provided through document compatibility modes within Trident, however compatibility could not be guaranteed and it provided consistent obstacles towards fixing long-standing IE-specific behaviors. Furthermore, fixing long standing interoperability bugs with other modern browsers could actually break sites who have coded to the IE-specific behavior.
- CV list. Our compatibility pass rates were dependent on the presence of the compatibility view list. This allowed us to “fix” broken sites by forcing them into old document modes which emulated legacy IE behaviors. However, this approach requires testing and maintenance, and doesn’t scale well beyond the top sites.
- X-UA-Compatible. Some sites forced an older document mode using the “x-ua-compatible” header. However, rather than using it as a temporary stopgap, they would rely upon that to keep that version of the site working in future versions of IE while they developed an evergreen code path of their site for other modern browsers.
- Standards focus. Our focus on building new HTML5 features was to comply with Web standards, which in turn should lead to interoperability among browsers. However, interpretations of the standards document could easily vary, leading to real-world interoperability gaps and ultimately more bug fixing for Web developers and more broken sites for customers.
A break from the past
Faced with these issues, we were inspired to have “courage in the face of reality”. We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for. We needed a plan which ensured that our customers have a good experience regardless of whether they browse the head or tail of the Web. We needed a plan which gave enterprise customers a highly backward compatible browser regardless of how quickly we pushed forward with modern HTML5 features.
In order to really address these challenges, we realized that we couldn’t just incrementally improve on our previous approach, we needed a break from the past – all without losing the major investments that we had been making since 2009.
A pragmatic approach
The break meant bringing up a new Web rendering engine, free from 20 years of Internet Explorer legacy, which has real-world interoperability with other modern browsers as its primary focus – and thus our rallying cry for Windows 10 became “the Web just works.” This pragmatic viewpoint, which was initially proven out by our work in Windows Phone 8.1 Update, meant that Web standards would continue to be important but should function in the background to drive real-world interoperability between browsers.
This interoperability-focused approach brought the obvious question of adopting an existing open-source rendering engine such as WebKit. While there were some advantages, upon further investigation it was not the right path forward for two important reasons. First, the Web is built on the principle of multiple independent, yet interoperable implementations of Web standards and we felt it was important to counter movement towards a monoculture on the Web. Second, given the engineering effort required, we found that we could deliver an interoperability focused engine to customers significantly faster if we started from our own engine (especially if unshackled from legacy compatibility concerns), rather than building up a new browser around an open-source engine. We will continue to look at open source and shared source models where it makes sense and look forward to sharing more details in coming posts.
A new Web rendering engine is born
As detailed in Jacob Rossi’s article for Smashing Magazine, the new engine began as a fork of MSHTML.dll but has since diverged very quickly. By making this split, we were able to keep the major subsystem investments made over the last several years, while allowing us to remove document modes and other legacy IE behaviors from the new engine. On the other hand, our legacy engine (MSHTML.dll) can remain largely unchanged (outside of security and other high priority fixes) to help guarantee legacy compatibility for our enterprise customers. We also built up capabilities to switch between the legacy and new rendering engines seamlessly.
A clean break also necessitates a new user-agent string to ensure that no IE-specific code was being sent. This built upon a long browser history of using whatever tokens are necessary to get the desired content from servers. Although this meant a lower compatibility rate initially, it was also useful to reveal interoperability issues that needed to be fixed!
Finally, since legacy IE code is no longer being sent, we are able to drastically reduce our reliance on the CV list. This means that our top site compatibility rate will match our long tail compatibility much more closely.
Fixing patterns instead of sites
However, a new engine was not enough – we also needed to significantly revamp how we find, track and fix issues on the long tail of the Web. To do so, we do daily analysis on trillions of URLs crawled in conjunction with Bing to detect patterns that exist in the head of the Web and the tail of the Web. By fixing these patterns, sites just end up working. This data is augmented by thousands of daily feedback reports from users via the “smiley face” icon.
In addition, we revised our internal engineering processes to prioritize real-world interoperability issues uncovered by our data analysis. With these processes in place, we set about fixing over 3000 interoperability bugs and adding over 40 new Web standards (to date) to make sure we deliver on our goals.
We don’t see this interoperability effort having an end date – we’ll be continuously checking the data and rolling out improvements to the new rendering engine. For users that upgrade to Windows 10, the engine will be evergreen, meaning that it will be kept current with Windows 10 as a service.
A community effort
Our mission to create a Web that “just works” won’t be successful without your help. That’s why the Project Spartan journey has included a number of ways for you to get involved. Here’s a quick rundown of ways you can help:
- Join the Windows Insider Program to get the latest Windows 10 previews and test your Web sites on our new rendering engine by enabling experimental Web features in the about:flags page. If you don’t have a device to install it on, try out RemoteIE which will stream our latest browser from the Azure cloud to Windows, iOS or Android devices.
- If you see any site issues, “Send a Frown” using the smiley icon so we can track it. If you have a more detailed description of the issue, you can open a bug on Connect.
- Check out our Web platform roadmap at status.modern.ie. If anything is missing, submit a feature request or vote for an existing request at our UserVoice site.
- Send us a message on Twitter @IEDevChat, or join a monthly #AskIE tweetchat (next one on 2/26 @ 12PM PST). For help on more detailed issues, ask a question on our StackOverflow page.
We believe the break from IE’s past we’ve made to create a new rendering engine will help make the browsing experience for our customers better, and make building Web sites that just work across browsers easier for Web developers. We’ll be sharing more details on specific aspects of the approach outlined above in the coming weeks and look forward to your continued participation in this journey with us.
— Charles Morris, Program Manager Lead, Project Spartan
Comments
Anonymous
February 26, 2015
This is awesome! Can we hope/expect that Microsoft will never again put non-standard stuff in the browser to maintain for years to come? E.g. No ActiveX, no XML Data Islands, no VML, no behaviours, no modal dialogs, no VBScript, no createPopup type crud ever again? We need to be sure that Microsoft has learned it's lesson and will strive to follow standards, not try to invent their own and attempt to strong arm the other browsers to follow suit.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
@Gus, I do not see it as unfair. I do not believe Chrome and FF have "their own version of HTML5 and CSS3," but we are not talking about them, we are talking about what Spartan will become. @Steve has a point: do not repeat the same mistakes, or it will fail again.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
> IE6 was an amazing browser at the time hence why it lasted so long. That's laughable - it lasted because it was just around on old computers.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Gus, IE 6 was not an amazing browser. It was, like each IE, a browser bundled with Windows. It lasted that long because it took Microsoft that long to come up with something else, and companies invested much building applications on its proprietary architecture. It was, and is, a horrible browser.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Smorgasbord and @Fastidious - Yeah... no. That's not the reason. Internet Explorer 6 had only one competitor back in its days, and that was Netscape, and they just messed up. Netscape 6 was a piece of software the worls should never have seen. Internet Explorer 6 was a great browser for its time, and introduced an aweful lot of ideas we now call HTML5 and CSS3. Either way, keep up the good work! A question through: is Edge (or Spartan) coming to Windows 8.1, 7, Server 2008 R2, 2012 and 012 R2 7 for the people that don't/can't upgrade to Windows 10?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I think this is great work and a great plan. BUT, I think if Microsoft is serious about supporting the evergreen browser, then Spartan needs to run on Windows 7, also. While the Windows 10 upgrade will be free to consumers, many won't upgrade. Businesses will be slower to upgrade, so that means it will be years before older versions of IE are no longer used. Having Spartan on Windows 7 would really help spur the change to evergreen browsers for everyone.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Fastidious @Smorgasbord Wrong, wrong, wrong. Were you guys actually around and doing web development in 2001, when IE6 was released? The only major, competing browser was Netscape 4. Try downloading Netscape 4 and comparing the two. Mozilla 1.0 wasn't released until 2002, and Firefox 1.0 wasn't released until 2004. IE6 was by far the best freely-available browser that had ever been made at that time. Possibly Opera was better, but it still required payment back then, and Opera 7, with the Presto layout engine, wasn't released until 2003. In any case, IE6 was a huge leap forward in terms of stability and standards compliance. Of course, by modern standards it is a buggy piece of ***, but that was absolutely not the perception of the majority of developers and users in 2001. Saying otherwise is attempting to rewrite history. Furthermore, discussion of standards compliance misses the point that what passed as "standards" in the IE6 era were woefully incomplete. It was impossible to read the HTML and CSS specs and produce a interoperable implementation of either, because many topics around things like parsing and error handling were not covered, not covered in sufficient detail, or did not match the reality of what existing browsers did (and what web sites relied on them doing). It has taken many years of effort by the WHATWG, W3C and other groups to produce specifications and test suites detailed and accurate enough that it is possible to make browsers that meaningfully standards compliant and interoperable.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I notice many LGBT websites don't seem to like older versions of IE and IE in the Windows 10 Preview. Sites like Out.com, Advocate.com, Queerty.com and many others don't load or crash or are just very slow on IE.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@editor the "10am EST" value of your dev chat on Twitter is off by 2 hours... thus those that started at 10am (me) were posting tweets to "dev/null" :-(Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Fastidious, The growing list of sites that are Chrome-specific has definitely shown me that they have their own version of HTML5 and CSS3. Heck, when Google Inbox first launched it only worked in Chrome. You were rejected if you tried to log in with Firefox. In regards to IE6, it was a very good browser for its time. But it did have bugs that needed to be patched that just went unpatched for years because IE had no true competition and the development team was basically shut down and members moved to other projects. I believe they just addressed security issues for a number of years.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
A concept Microsoft will initialize is project Spartan, into windows 10 devices, such as phones, tablets, PC's (and beyond). I have used Microsoft internet explorer and network navigator for twenty years now, its a pleasant feeling Microsoft has been transitioning their browser subsystems like JavaScript to splitting-GPU into faster processing speeds, as well as my personal favorite 2 & 3 Dimensional graphics ending competition while providing definitive sources for expansion and innovative technology. By transitioning IE with an ambitious (or determined) goal of "do not Break the web" in mind, we have to remember the web consist of roughly fourty-four billion different websites. So it was a smart move to focus testing on nine-thousand of the most impactful sites around the globe. This will put us ahead of our competitors. When initializing upgraded software like IE will bring some technicalities, maybe people with smaller privately owned sites and engines might not be able to access customer support or contact with another user online. But we as people have to (for generations to come) make significant advances to stay ahead and provide meaningful progress. It's tough when dealing with statistics in an annual report for instance, or translating economic into technology. You've got to figure or predict a point where supply meets demand, scientifically, not an easy target. Rethinking pros & cons or comparing and contrasting differences that might arise between legacy & modern might have glitches, something I'm unaware if Microsoft has room for. In the report it states significant rethinking came forth about the enterprise web applications, so it becomes a question of just how compatible this browser should become, by troubleshooting and repairing older perhaps reliable accounts might have an adverse "breaking effect" on the regular IE users. So it becomes a technical throwback question of business ethics, morals, & conditions. Might take some brainstorming. The CV compatibility viewing list would allow a number of "broken" legacy sites to be fixed and able to use. The X-UA-compatible version where users used older document programs as a stopgap, meaning they are avid user of IE while sticking to what worked for them in the past as well could be considered an investment or a smarter means of using Spartan or windows 10. This would be a time to focus on pie charts, percentages, averages, division which encompasses real-world remainders. Faced with the challenge of making IE a positive or optimistic experience for its users, ideally your faced with integrating tools and task-management, basically an infrastructure used in the past and adding a definitive newer concept that will also have its own need to stay with the times in the future. So by bringing a web browser that meets our current needs as well as incorporating older technology while staying true to our investors and counterparts. It's pretty safe to say Microsoft has held on to its values and mission statement.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Netscape 4.x was pretty bad but a lot of us held onto it for a long time while we waited for Mozilla to get its act together. On Windows Mozilla was not very usable as I recall until Firefox. However a lot of us using Linux tried various forks designed to get Gecko in shape. In 2001 or 2002 I was using galeon which was gecko with gnome/gtk+. Then phoenix came along and then it was renamed to Firefox and I used it a lot before it hit 1.0. But I don't think it was common to do that on Windows.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Please, please, please enable spartan on Windows 7. Pretty please!Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Could just have used WebKit...Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
So they forked it and then worked backwards to remove their existing features... doesn't sound like they're doing anything new to me. It'd have been more ideal to make a better tool on top of an existing api and improve api if you have better ideas. color me, not surprised.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
"A community effort" Until you open source your rendering engine and let users submit bugs and patches, EdgeHTML will not be "A community effort". Take a look at other leading rendering engines like WebKit, Blink, Gecko and more. They all are open source and they all support web standards faster than MS! Also, even if Windows 10 is going to be free for 7 & 8.1, some users may not want to switch. Spartan/EdgeHTML needs to be on Windows 7!!! You really expect people to UPDATE their entire OS, a risky operation just for a new web browser? Windows 10 is not a service pack, its a entire new OS that changes the UI and introduces driver and application incompatibility.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@ scunliffe - I'm very sorry for the mistake here. We updated the post to fix this. Shoot me a message @kylealden if you have any questions we weren't able to get to and I'll make sure we get you a response.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
multi-threaded touch input? Each finger gets a thread?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
All the people in the photos look amazingly unhappy and discontent. Is this the norm at Microsoft?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
hope it will workAnonymous
February 26, 2015
It's great to see open discussions about IE's product directions. Rock on!Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I really hope it will work on older versions of windows and will be auto-updated. Otherwise, we webdeveloper have to wait 10 years to use the new stuff! Dont repeat the old, bad story of internet-explorer versions :(Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Eli re: "multi-threaded touch input", on the chance that you weren't joking, I'm pretty sure this means that the touch input, and perhaps some simple actions like scrolling, are driven on a different thread than the render thread, or the javascript thread, or something. The result is that each of those things (input/render/javascript/whatever) can hiccup or block, but the rest can continue and hopefully maintain the appearance of responsiveness.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I am beginning to contribute to WebKit, it is not a terrible engine by any standard, however there are a lot of politics. MS made the right choice to go forward on their own technology (as any mature company should). Regarding older browsers, at our company we are already at IE9 base support, as soon as that's over, we will be skipping IE10 to IE11, where I will rejoice. Three years from now, we will probably be only supporting browsers released in the last 18 months. Microsoft has converted me from a vile critic to enthusiast, I embrace your platform with open arms. Long live the new Microsoft.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
...what is the point to have a proprietary rendering engine? Don't they give it away for free anyway..? Woudn't it make sense open-sourcing it to make it better..?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
No mention of Geeko once again and can I remind Microsoft that it was you who tried to force a monoculture on the web your browser has never been best standards and at 8% and losing nothing can save you now...Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Is Windows 10 going to ship IE11 along with Spartan or just Spartan?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Mozillian, all of Mozilla's projects are irrelevant today, including Firefox. Look at these recent browser usage stats: caniuse.com/usage_table.php As of January of this year, Firefox on the Desktop only has around 10% of the market. Firefox on Android has a whopping 0.13%! Firefox on iOS doesn't even exist! Chrome for Android alone has just about as many users as Firefox does on all platforms and for all versions! IE 11 alone almost has more users than Firefox has in total! Firefox is pretty much a dead project at this point. People are leaving it for browsers that actually work. We're living in a world where only two browsers really matter: Chrome and IE. Firefox is irrelevant. Mozilla is irrelevant.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
payripo.com This is much better addonAnonymous
February 26, 2015
I like this new direction Microsoft. Stay on course. Web standards to the max. By the way for those saying Mozilla is irrelevant I disagree. Much better UI than Chrome although I do use Chrome. The main reason I like firefox is as a web development tool. None of the copy cat tools whether the one in IE or Chrome match firebug. I also hope MS is willing to open up easy built in compatibility for popular languages and platforms like ruby on rails or python django even if they arent in the .NET hemisphere.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Will it get PRISM for free?Anonymous
February 26, 2015
"Community effort", haha, nice one. BTW, I hope you fix the starting page to get a real browser faster.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
@Joe Raby, Whisky Tango Foxtrot - I believe Microsoft stated that only Internet Explorer will continue to support ActiveX, Browser Helper Objects and other legacy extensibility methods. Project Spartan will not support those. Instead, Microsoft is looking into a web based extensibility model (HTML, JavaScript and CSS, just like Chrome and (the last iteration of) Firefox extensions).Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Seeing that activex became AJAX, i think its unfair to say IE put non standard things in browser.We wont have had all this plenty features to play with nowAnonymous
February 26, 2015
Microsoft is finally waking up ... :)Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Satan+PR... SpartanAnonymous
February 26, 2015
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February 26, 2015
Spartan looks great - can't wait to try it (do we get a new build today ;) ). Already, the EdgeHTML engine feels great in build 9926 - although there are compatibility issues still. While I understand why the Spartan browser itself is a Windows 10 exclusive, since it uses all kinds of Windows 10 specific features. However, the EdgeHTML engine does not need to be a Windows 10 exclusive. To really move the web forward, you need EdgeHTML on Windows 7. The best thing would probably be to just reuse the IE11 UI, and just import the engine switching from Windows 10, so that it can use both MSHTML and EdgeHTML.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Looking forward for a blog post detailing how the improvements made to Spartan will translate to mobile devices such as phones and tablets. The mobile IE experience, even with the latest update, is still quite terrible for many websites. Admittedly, the small marketshare of Windows Phone likely contributes greatly to this situation. I'd be interested to know how you plan to address this.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
Also, I agree with a previous comment: absolutely in no circumstance should the new browser allow third party "toolbars". Those of us maintaining our parents' computers thank you.Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I am really hoping you will support the picture element in Spartan. Please do! Chrome and Opera already do and Firefox will in ~12 weeks when it releases version 38. Microsoft needs to get on board with this!Anonymous
February 26, 2015
I feel sorry for the developers. Based on some of the comments in here, Spartan could be completely FOSS, come with a puppy and cure cancer, but people still wouldn't like it based on Microsoft's browser antics YEARS ago. I wonder even if anyone working on Spartan was working on IE back then?Anonymous
February 27, 2015
I have a new web app. Works fine in FF and Chrome and IE11 sort of fine. For IE 8 and IE 9 sort og awful. IE is a pain. People say of FF and Chrome also have non standard features. Maybe they do yet somehow they are both able to render web pages in a similar manner. I would like it if Sparta supported server side events. IE doesn't. They have a dismal event mechanism they want you to use or you can use web sockets.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
Come on all you negative folks - move forward like the IE team are.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
IE is the best browser.... to use once to download a real browser.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
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February 27, 2015
if (browser.name === "Internet Explorer") { computer.download("Google Chrome"); }Anonymous
February 27, 2015
Good to know that IE is making progress. While i hate Webkit because of vendor prefixes and firefox to do not have well implemented CSS and javascript animations,i also appreciate the way they add features. IE10+ handles way way better css animations than the competition,but still lags behind in terms of features. i(we) just hope that all the requested features get supported before windows 10 completion.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
Simply stated, not maintaining the millions of lines of c/c++/com based IE code will be a great benefit to Microsoft. It's a good time to obsolete the thousands of internal corporate IE specific web applications.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
Com dead, ... well on its way... ActiveX dead, c based DLLs / APIs from MS declining.... all goodAnonymous
February 27, 2015
Like others suggested; what matters is if you open source the code and start contributing, your efforts will yield fruits many times more and the new rendering engine will be robust than anything out there. Come on GitHub and bring your code with you. We are waiting for IE (<3) !!! We are waiting for something comparable to v8, i.e. Chakra. Who knows there emerge more projects like node.js based on Chakra, given its compliance with standard matches to (and in some areas even better than) v8. Give it a try! Look at the pace of contributions on io.js repository. In 2 months they released 4 significant versions (today they are at v1.4.1)! It will be a big leap towards the betterment of Web and mankind, if IE just jump on GitHub! It is already 2015! Do not drag it further. Best Wishes. ~ Some citizen from GitHub world.Anonymous
February 27, 2015
Take your new browser and shove it.Anonymous
February 28, 2015
In my experience, it is always easier to write software when you can forget about legacy compatibility.Anonymous
February 28, 2015
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February 28, 2015
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February 28, 2015
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March 01, 2015
That article reads like an embellished resume. Leaves a bad taste. -sez the "long tail"Anonymous
March 01, 2015
What about API for plugins/extensions in the new IE? Is there plans to make a good API and a site for third party extensions? Both FF and Google Chrome have a good API for extensions, but IE does not.Anonymous
March 01, 2015
Never. ever. ever. do compatibility mode again. That feature is the bane of existence of web developers. Having to consider browsers that were almost IE-# but not quite. This was the worst choice ever done by Microsoft for the web, you should've just let things break. Companies would have been forced to fix their broken by design applications for their users, as they should be forced. You as a web provider do not get to dictate your clients' environments. The only requirement must be a secure web browser which by definition means a fully updated web browser.Anonymous
March 03, 2015
@Chris, you will not feel the importance of compatibility mode if you don't live in Enterprise. Microsoft is serving millions of enterprise customer and it can't just ask them to ditch their legacy Apps and internal web-based system to adopt new standards. That is why IE will live to serve the backward compatibility.Anonymous
March 03, 2015
Microsoft, please don't forget to test your own applications. I'd love in the future, if I could tell management that both their legacy SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2013/Online will work in one IE, in Windows 7, using the same 'mode', and same rendering engine. It means Microsoft themselves, also need to fix their own applications too, as oposed to just tellign us end users, as a bandaid, to '...just run it in Enterprise or Edge mode' versus, them fixing their apps/platforms to run in the newest standards compliant browser, or telling clients they need to overhaul and upgrade their entire infrastructure. I hope Microsoft do not forget their own backyard, when it comes to compatibility testing with their future browsers. For example, many large corporations are still using SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2007 only fully works in IE 7-9, because of it's heavy reliance on Active X. SharePoint 2007 will not run in 'Edge' mode in IE11, only in 'Enterprise'(backward compatible) mode. SharePoint 2013/Online requires a modern standards browser or 'Edge' mode in IE11, for HTML5 rendering, however, it still has some functionaility that requires Active X, which means it can still only fully function using IE only. This means corporations still have to support legacy applications and still have modern standards browsers. It is a daunting task from a development standpoint when we as 'citizen developers' are left to develop for multiple Microsoft software/plaforms and use only one corporately accepted browser. Corporations are then telling us developers to make our applications browser agnostic, it becomes very difficult when debating the pros/cons of doing so, to the upper management with no real understanding of the underlying rendering engine nuances, and Microsoft's various software reliances on other Microsoft technologies (IE (modes), Active X, OS browser restrictions, version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft's slow implementaiton of Web Standards (HTML5, CSS3, ECMCA 5 and 6, proprietary extensions/APIs, etc).Anonymous
March 04, 2015
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March 17, 2015
Funny how the websites that seem to be broken in IE were mostly written by people using Chrome specific features.Anonymous
March 17, 2015
I think you should name the new browser: "Spartacus"Anonymous
March 17, 2015
Does anybody really use a clear glass taskboard? Like in the movies people writing on clear glass whiteboards. I have yet to see it.Anonymous
March 17, 2015
(また日本語すみません) Windows 10が今夏発売という情報を見ました。 しかもこれは貴社の公式発表のようですね。 Spartanもいかがでしょうか。こちらも楽しみです。Anonymous
March 19, 2015
When digital signature from dongle fails to read from sites listed at startpage.com/.../search your browser has failed miserably. :DAnonymous
April 27, 2015
I think it will be great browser and a nice name; the second league of things coming down!!!Anonymous
April 29, 2015
The Best thing IE team can do is pay each developer that struggled countless hours to make things (halfway) working, The management didn't change, the old stubborn attitude didn't change either, Microsoft is like the "chains" that hold on to a f22 with full engine thrust and not letting it take off.. (the web is the f22) Look at status.modern.ie and you will see tons of things "under consideration". what consideration?? while each browser is way ahead you are still considering?? Just close your shop and stop making browsers!!!