Microsoft announces Project Spartan, its new web browser for Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft announces Project Spartan, its new web browser for Windows 10

theverge.com

85 pointssz4kerto80 comments

So, it will take a 'snapshot' of the page that you can markup. This snapshot will disable dynamic features of the webpage but still allow links to work. I wonder if they are talking about halting DOM manipulation, or JavaScript execution. Seems this will definitely create new classes of QA test paths.

Pretty surprising that it's coming with a new rendering engine given the good progress Microsoft has been making in bringing Trident in line with the competition.

That's by far the most interesting thing about this, where are the details on that?

Insiders have reported on this previously. Basically the "new" rendering engine is a fork of Trident which removes backwards compatibility and legacy code. They might call it something else, but the new engine is basically Trident, refactored, and without the legacy cruft.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-explorer-12-big-changes-...

Validated by a few other insiders, including Paul Thurrott, Tom Warren (The Verge), and Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet).

So in this case fork = rename.

My understanding is fork = fork + rename. An actual fork did take place, the older branch will continue to be maintained for a separate browser process used by enterprises for compatibility.

Webkit was called called a fork of khtml, if that was a fork then so is this.

Is "new rendering engine" marketing-speak for "Trident with backwards compatibility ripped out"?

I can't be the only person that was really hoping they'd just use Web-kit and help "standardize" how websites render...

really tired of having:

Now instead we'll have:

Instead? Surely you mean, as well. You'll have to support both IE and SPARTAN. It is just another browser we have to deal with.

Every person with SPARTAN will have IE installed too. A site can say "works only in SPARTAN/Chrome/Firefox/Safari" or "Works only in IE" (for different markets).

Conditional comments were removed since IE10. Not that they've been necessary since IE9... Modern IE is a very decent browser.

I don't see how this is any different from calling io.js a "new server-side javascript platform" even though its forked from node. Ripping out the backwards compatibility will do a ton for maintainability and regression testing.

Yes.

Now when you install Windows, you will get no less than two pre-installed browsers (at least for the next several versions of Windows). You will get IE and Spartan... neither of-which you can fully remove since they'll be baked into Windows like IE is now (things depend on IE specifically and don't just rely on the default-set browser)

which may actually be a good thing because it will further reduce the total number of IE/Spartan marketshare driving fewer developers to care. A real win for the web.

Fewer supported browsers is not a win for the web.

Fewer rendering engines might be though. So long as it's an Open Source and freely-contributable engine (like Webkit is today). Or maybe a better defined specification for how things should render.

Today it's a wild west, your site may look great in one browser but terrible in another, etc.

Peter-Paul Koch (ppk) about this, and why developers should call it MSIE12 internally but call it a new browser to non-technical people:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/12/a_new_micros...

I would love to know what this browser is using as a user agent string.

If it's like every single web browser for it, an insanely long amalgam of the user agent strings of every competing browser, every browser that came before it, and the word Spartan.

Or even worse, the UA of another browser verbatim, for "compability purposes".

Probably the same as IE Edge mode, which has disavowed its heritage completely: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh869301(v=vs.85...

I wonder how they can reconcile the name "Spartan" with built in note taking, social sharing, Cortana, and webpage overlay drawing.

It's just a codename, and like all Microsoft codenames the past few years, it's taken from the Halo games. It doesn't really mean anything, and it probably won't be the final name, but who knows.

Cortana made it from code name to product name, as did Windows 7.

XBox too.

Because Halo is the strongest brand Microsoft has built in the last fifteen years.

Well now they own minecraft. So perhaps they can call this "Creeper"

Presumably, as in "scope".

Not a new rendering engine, reading view/list already exist in Safari or with plugins, annotation doesn't seem that usefull. I would have expected more tools to handle tab overload, password management, plugins.

Personally I'm happy to have functionality that previously required a plugin to be built-in. As it is I've sworn off all plugins except adblock for potential security compromises. It's just not worth it.

Great, another bloody rendering engine.

Web content is supposed to render properly on multiple engines. We shouldn't be encouraging a monoculture of webkit.

"supposed to"

Progress sucks doesn't it.

Having only one resulted in the IE nightmare. Supporting Gecko and Webkit nowadays is quite simple. I don't mind a new, standards compliant rendering engine.

    Naturally, Cortana will be integrated into Project Spartan
    It'll pop up on relevant pages where Cortana can be useful

Another Internet Explorer I won't be using. Block pop-ups only to have one natively installed.

It reminds me of clippy...

Exactly what I thought. I know that virtual assistance is hot right now, but this seems like a bit much.

I was hoping they'd reference clipping in the presentation today. After they talked about "Cortana" appearing randomly on your desktop and in IE, all I could think of was "it looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help? Get help typing the letter. Just type the letter without help." every... single... time...

I really hope this isn't another Clippy. If "Cortana" gets annoying I'm totally figuring out how to add the Clippy graphic to the UI and rename her "Clippy" (I bet you can personalise the name). Which, after thinking about it, I might try to do anyway just because it would be amusing...

I guess there will be an option for that. Almost everything of the Win 10 stuff that MS showed off today was optional.

I think it would be great for anyone who is visually impaired to have such functionality enabled by default. I imagine it's configurable, usually everything in Windows is, even if you have to hack through the system registry to configure it.

Well, in fairness, they said Cortana would only pop up on "pages where Cortana can be useful." Perhaps this means Cortana will be configured to never pop up.

Spartan looks more like small OS built over bigger OS. Oh, wait, it's trend for years now. Nothing new then? :)

Spartan will reduce Windows to a set of signed device drivers.

(Context: http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/ )

I really wish they would just base IE (or whatever this ends up being called) on WebKit or Blink and call it a day. They could immediately solve 90% of the actual problems people have with their browser, instead of tacking on crap that nobody's asking for.

Once the real problems are fixed, feel free to tack on crap because IE is basically only exists as a way for people to download Chrome anyway.

Build a browser on Webkit or Blink, just like everyone else? There's already dozens of those. You can download Chrome just as well in any browser.

It's great that MS is improving IE, because having a Webkit/Blink dominated monoculture is bad. Didn't we learn this with IE6?

> a Webkit/Blink dominated monoculture is bad

Gecko exists.

Furthermore, having many browsers using Webkit, Blink, and Gecko isn't "bad," and calling it a "monoculture" is a weasel word attempting to link it to the problem of IE's dominance in the 2000s. The problem with the 2000s IE monoculture wasn't just that it was a monoculture, it was that it was closed source, stagnant, and mostly single-platform. Webkit, Blink, and Gecko aren't.

But this software is vapor.

If you are running forwards slower than a treadmill is taking you back, are you advancing?

How is this vapor? Vapor is something that doesn't exist, not something that hasn't been released yet.

Perhaps "vaporware" was meant, but this browser has only been known for two months (I think), and is presumably in heavy development.

There is one Web, yet browsers handle it differently. I'd very much rather have a monoculture in browser rendering engines if that's what it takes to make things just work consistently.

This actually seemed pretty convincing to me:

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-window...

"The reason Microsoft didn’t adopt Blink is simple: Google.

Aside from the obvious issues these two companies have with each other, consider a few other relevant details. Google had split Blink from WebKit earlier because it was always fighting with Apple and wanted control. But now Google is doing what it wants with Blink—as Apple did/does with WebKit—because it’s strategically important to Google. That is, Google could only be counted on to do what was best for Google at all times, and not what was best for Blink generally, and the community of companies using it."

Given how Apple and Google had the public divorce over WebKit, it makes sense that Microsoft didn't trust Google enough to base their new browser on Blink.

I disagree.

I hate IE, especially it's older versions. Dealing with ie 6-10 and all of their crappy warts and stagnation have made my life more difficult and objectively held the entire web back for years. But the reason why they are so crappy are not so much that they are made by Microsoft but because for much of that time they could be. IE 6 was way better than anything else at the time and for more than a decade after that, MS could just sit on their laurels untill others leap-frogged them.

Competition is good. Webkit and Blink are better now, but without competition, there will be no one to push them forward.

> IE is basically only exists as a way for people to download Firefox anyway

If everyone is based on WebKit then we'll eventually wind up in an IE 6.0-type situation where nothing moves forward because there are too many cooks in the kitchen. I think the competition between WebKit, Gecko, Trident, and KHTML is healthy and spawns innovation.

Honestly I hope Microsoft keeps trying to make the best browser possible if for nothing else just to keep WebKit on its toes. Otherwise the others will spend less and top engineers will grow bored and move on to impactful problems.

IE 11 is fine. Good, even. They've already solved 90% of the actual problems people have - just not developer perceptions.

I don't want a rendering engine monoculture.

Yeah IE11 is fine, if you want basic ACID compliance and ES5 support, but this is 2015 and Chrome and FF leave IE in the dust when it comes to modern (i.e. as of 2015 modern) features like WebRTC, shadow DOM, web components, 3D transforms, yadda yadda.

Right, it's a little old. But it's not fundamentally broken. And one of the proposals in Project Spartan is for the browser to be in the MS App Store, and for it to update automatically. That would be huge.

Peter Bright suggests Microsoft should open source Trident: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/its-ti...

Will Project Spartan continue Microsoft's trademarked aversion to standards-compliant DOM rendering?

If it's not cross-platform, I'm not sure why they're bothering. They seem to think that the turn-off is simply standards compliance. While that's a big deal, a bigger deal is having to learn a whole new workflow when switching between operating systems... at least in my world.

And how big is your world?

Roughly 40,000 employees and customers. But apparently hacker news doesn't approve so I guess we're the minority.

So... they are trying to make the Web more shareable with a proprietary annotation feature, thereby introducing a new category of UX issues, bugs and incompatibilities.

I suppose that would be kind of neat if the Web wasn't already the most shareable medium in the world (you've heard of URLs?).

MS is way behind in standards implementation (yes still, even in IE11). Yes this software is pure vapor, but has their browser project office heard of feature prioritization?

MS has not, cannot and will never change. They are onto a losing strategy long-term (just review your GA logs). And for that I am glad because as a developer for the Web, I hate them with a passion.

Those who have heard of URLs might also have heard of link rot.

The use case presented was the sharing of a news article. If I email a colleague a hyperlink to an article it would be highly unusual to experience link-rot in the expected timeframe for them to open the email and click the link.

I might experience one 404 a month. Even if you multiply that by ten to account for selective memory, link rot is a good example of something that sounds like it will be a massive problem, but generally isn't in reality.

While the web is the most sharable thing ever, it's not the most annotatable or drawable medium. This annotation feature will let corporate office monkeys communicate changes to their intranet sites easier than using vague text descriptions or printouts (or, kill me, scanned printouts).

And guess who the primary target audience is for MS browsers? Corporate office monkeys.

But as most corporate monkeys know, Windows includes a snipping tool already with an annotation feature.

"Chief among those new features is new inking support that lets users annotate web pages and sync all of those notes to OneDrive and share them with collaborators"

In other words, your web browsing is reported to Microsoft so this markup will be in sync. Will that information be made available to advertisers? Will Microsoft backdoor HTTPS to make this work?

So all cloud services are inherently suspect? Then why call one in particular out at all?

This is no different than saving a web page for reading later on instapaper or the like.

With a service like instapaper you select what is being reported. If it not possible to turn off the Spartan Annotation, all of your web activities are reported.

And you know this how? Have you had extensive time with it to know that?

Nothing in the demo showed that Spartan Annotation was by default on for every page. In fact, it most likely will only turn on if you explicitly start markup mode.

It actually would work the same way since Spartan would be saving an snapshot of the website once you create a comment on it.

If you don't annotate anything, there's no annotation to be reported to Microsoft. (And if Microsoft wanted a log of your browser activity, they could just put a back door in your browser.)

That back door for sending browser activity to Microsoft exists, it is called the Bing bar.

You manually turn it on. That was obvious from the demo.

Why would Microsoft have to backdoor HTTPS if they control the browser?

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