The birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine

> Microsoft could have built a more compliant browser any time they wanted too.

That time is now, can we not be excited for it? Have you heard the parable of the prodigal son?

Chrome and friends aren't webkit anymore, but only by way of forking. Otherwise Chrome, Chromium and Opera 15+ are the same engine. The family tree kind of looks like this:

    -- Internet Explorer
    
    -- Firefox
    
    -- Safari
      \
       -- Chrome, Chromium, Opera 15+

    -- Opera 12 (abandoned)

I'm a little unclear on how differentiated Webkit and Blink are in practice, but sadly we have only 3.5 major engines competing at this point.

Haven't they? Since IE7, every new version is more and more compliant. IE11 gives a good experience and seems easy to work with (at least with the web dev I do). It just seems that they got sick of the baby steps approach and needed to start from scratch. They figured out yet another way to handle legacy code and want a new engine, and by new I mean, a Trident-based engine without some/most of the fluff IE has for legacy sites. Especially the active-x fluff that has no place in non-enterprise browsers.

I really don't see this as some big move. They've been doing this stuff for years. I think the consumer oriented Spartan browser is a clever move, but MS was getting there anyway. Seems like they're being clever and using Spartan and web-standards as a way to sell Win10. We're not getting these toys on 7 or 8. Want the new fancy browser? Get Win10.

Opera, Chrome and Chromium are based off the same engine which is a fork of WebKit. If anything competition has gone down the last couple of years with WebKit based browsers becoming the standard despite its bugs & non-standard behavior. It reminds me of IE6 in its heyday.

We got the Gecko family of browsers, the Trident family of browsers, and the WebKit family of browsers. Sure, there are varying JS engines, and Blink and Servo are on the way, but WebKit is the 900lbs gorilla. It is a monoculture in a lot of ways. I use and promote Firefox because I want to check the other vendors.

Microsoft makes, hm, how can I be positive here ... patchy software. There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up. But, very often you'll see these weird, beautiful bits just sticking out all over the place in Microsoft code. The weirdo geniuses at MSFT are allowed to do their thang and leave their mark. And the seminal releases of their software are always the best. Like, there are parts of IE6 that make me go, "how the HELL did Microsoft pull this tech off in 2000?" IE6 was this crumbly tower of awesome. If IE6 were a game, I won that game.

Anyhow, if development on Spartan goes RIGHT, then this browser will be the 2015 version of IE6. It will be the completest vision of kickassitude. There will be weird, crazy bits, and it'll take Microsoft and the rest of us a decade to untangle the proprietary parts. I can feel my blood pressure rising already!! The rage and the triumph and the glory!

> Yes and no - our lives would be much easier if we could just assume that every user runs a WebKit fork.

Just as our life "was easier" when we could just assumer every user ran MSIE.

It was easier for a short while, then the rot set in. I'm not interested in having Google control the web in the same way, that's a road we've taken, we know where it leads and it's a terrible place.

You weren't around for the first browser war, were you?

HTML was the "universal standard", and what happened to that?

Because the vendors sometimes proposed incompatible variants of the same feature before it was standardized. And they would implement it behind their individual prefixes so that you could experiment with both the IE and FF variants, for example.

It's better than typing one thing and it doing 3 different things in 3 different browsers.

It was most often not the case that (a) vendor prefixed APIs matched a particular "version" of a spec nor (b) were interoperable across browsers at any point (e.g. -moz-foo didn't necessarily have the same behavior as -webkit-foo).

The issue isn't vendor versus version prefixes. The issue is sites using early versions of an API, relying on them, and then never removing/upgrading that code.

-webkit-border-radius for example doesn't necessarily match a particular version of a spec. Unprefixed, standard border-radius has been in all the browsers for several years [1]. Yet over 60% of page views (according to Chrome data [2]) still requires this property. So other browsers are forced to support the webkit version of this property for compatibility, which may not have a particular version of a spec for those browsers to reference when implementing support.

If you're interested, I gave a talk with other browsers at Mozilla HQ last week about some new ideas for how we can further improve the strategy for experimental APIs going forward. Check it out and give me feedback if you'd like (@jacobrossi on twitter).

https://air.mozilla.org/web-compatibility-summit-talks/ (Starts around 31 minutes into the video)

[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-gradients [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/css/timeline/popularity...

Do you or I really care abouts boasts from the marketdroids? Cut The Rope doth not a great browser make!

You and I know the truth. There are seminal, world-beating versions of software that Microsoft has released in the past.

And then, after dominance is attained, they touch up the pig's hair and makeup a bit in the subsequent releases. IE7-11 has been hair and makeup and some botox.

I don't know how Microsoft works internally, I only know history. And, reading their statements, Spartan might be a world-beater at least in quality, features, or developer interest. When Microsoft feels threatened, that's when the sparks fly.

I do not EVER underestimate Microsoft. How quickly did they turn that billion dollar Mojang acquisition around, 2 days?

These days most of my bugs are Firefox acting differently than I expect it to (though perhaps compliant to standards).

I haven't really had to say "IE Issue" unless I was dealing with 8 and lower.

I'm glad I looked up rule 34 real quick; I don't expect there's porn of this.

What's actually involved here is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

To second what Navarr said, I don't really see IE issues these days unless it's on a site that needs to support versions prior to IE9. As often as not, issues in modern IE are due to developers writing code that targets only a single vendor-prefixed version of an API instead of supporting standards, which makes IE look deficient (instead of that sloppy developer) even when it has good support for the APIs that a site uses.

"If people start to switch over, then more sites will be developed to work in IE Lightning."

Based on this sentence, I get the feeling you don't appreciate the value of web standards? If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously ever again (they had 10+ years to make that effort with IE before they lost the browser war) all they need to do is render pages correctly, not in their own special way. That also means not inventing special-to-Microsoft codes.

Microsoft has a long record of screwing the greater community for their own self-interest. For example, sabotaging Java.

i think that is what they are going against...

Have you used IE in the past few years? IE is (by far) already the fastest browser on my two Windows 10 machines right now. That was also the case when they were running Windows 8 and 8.1 in the past. The latest versions of IE make Chrome feel like Netscape Communicator 4, and they're noticeably faster than Firefox too.

If it had a nice LastPass extension, Ghostery, Buffer, and a few others, I'd probably be using IE as my default browser right now.

Actually, our approach is effectively yielding the results you're looking for.

Removal of old IE legacy cruft is slimming Spartan's disk and memory footprint when compared with IE. Advances in the Chakra engine are pushing performance ahead. We're rearchitecting our DOM, which is yielding perf and security wins too. We're planning an extension platform also, with top add-ons like ad block being a clear target.

There's a bit of a catch 22 with "get users" and "watch compatibility fix itself" as broken compatibility is often cited as a top reason for users to switch browsers. It's hard to grow users without investing in compatibility.

So what we're doing is defining our "blend" of investments. Right now we have a heavy amount of interop investments in our blend as we think that's important for users. Over time (months, not years) the major interop gaps will disappear and I expect we'll see a shift in that blend to increase investments in other areas.

(Jacob Rossi, Spartan platform engineering team)

>This entire project seems to be about improving compatibility with older websites, by adding more algorithms and layers to the rendering process.

Uh... isn't that exactly the opposite of what they're actually doing here? Did you read the article? They're creating a new rendering engine that has all the backwards compatibility crap stripped out, so that they don't accidentally break compatibility while making changes to the layout engine they're using for legacy sites. (I.E. They're removing layers from the rendering process, not adding them.)

> Or, leave IE11 as the default now for compatibility, and spin off a new browser called IE Lightning.

Uh... they kind of did. It's called Spartan.

the point is you should be doing feature tests, not browser tests.

We have actually been updating Internet Explorer for some years now. We don't touch machines that have opted out of updates, but for everybody else we've been moving them forward regularly.

Spartan is neat because it's a separate app, built on a different architecture that will not only continue to allow us to update in an evergreen fashion, but it will allow us to do so at a much faster rate.

And yet here we have Project Spartan that will only work on Windows 10+. Who's to say Spartan 3.0 won't required Windows 12+, too?

I think this is what the above commenter was referring to. This is really what causes IE fragmentation - refusing to update it past a certain point.

Probably just anecdotal based on discussions here at HN [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045305

Personally for me? I am deeply concerned that internet explorer becomes not terrible.

People would be stupid enough to then use it.

Then microsoft would have more clout.

They would immediately use that clout to cause enormous industry problems, push bad standards, fail to comply with open ones, push windows specific extensions, ect ect ect.

I am 100% concerned that internet explorer might not suck. If that happened, the internet would be in a much worse place.

We just need to implement an HTML renderer (or two or three) in JS and then ship the renderer with your site.

Try this: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/b986f3e3b54499e63903405c...

To be fair, it's extraordinarily slow even in Chrome, but IE11 rendering on this page is pretty bad.

Here's one:

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/4381/file...

It's not even that big, and it's nearly impossible to scroll it.

Internet Explorer 1.0's "About" box claims it is "Based on NCSA Mosaic": http://utilu.com/IECollection/img/iecollection_ie100_win40nt...

(Curiously, Internet Explorer 1.0 showed a version number of "4.40" in the about box.)

Up to IE6, the about dialog mentioned Mosaic licensed code. There are UI related glitches (mouse pointer and scroll related code) in IE8 that were never fixed since Mosaic. There is still a lot of UI code and API related stuff from IE3 in IE11.

They can't. All of the success MS has is based on enterprise - Apple are lucky in not having that restriction. At this point, if MS decided to say F everyone it would come back to bite them very hard.

I have a lot of respect to these IE devs for not just quitting and doing something easier, to be honest.

Apple didn't have a huge market to lose. Or to sustain through several decades of compatibility.

Also, Microsoft makes the vast bulk of its income (90-95%) from partners. It can't just decide to change everything, it has to move thousands of partners along.

I understand the language. I don't understand what they mean by "patterns". Common edge cases where js/css/html is broken in specific ways?

If you write html/css in a relatively compliant way, things will not be so broken that a browser vendor needs to account for them in a "long tail". If your js is broken, well tough luck.

Are they just talking about how to implicitly handle commonly malformed HTML, as all browsers do?

Partly due to the different sandboxing implementation, Chrome had their own already and Apple was pursuing something called WebCore2 IIRC.

Your point? That is also too bad.

Their problem is more that it's not installed on Mum's phone or tablet. :)

Exactly, this is the thing people keep forgetting. IE has a market for people who don't change the default browser from their computers, and it's a good thing they are getting a better, modern browser (not that IE11 is bad, mind you).

That's the part I find interesting - despite being good enough for all the major sites on the internet, they kept bumping up against cases where it didn't work. But I don't understand why they needed a new browser to fix that; the article implies that all it required was a change in focus.

They can't. They said in a court of law that IE can't be separated from Windows.

That would be a first.

It is always write once, debug everywhere and always will be.

To try WebKit you don't need to. It builds a very basic browser, either GTK+ or Qt based.

Please, let's not pretend remote.modern.ie OR the VM's are ANYTHING close to running the browser locally. They are, at best, a band-aid. Yes, pjmlp, safari is OS X-only now but just because I'm a Mac user does not mean I support that decision, I don't. Also you know how many times in the past 10 years I've heard someone say "Well it works in Chrome/FF/IE but not in Safari?" Never. That's not to say it never happens but I've spent many agonising hours trying to make IE behave when it works PERFECTLY in Chrome/FF/Safari. I've had a handful of "It works in FF but not Chrome" and "It works in Chrome but not FF" but I've got a landfill full of "It doesn't work in IE".

Things I need before I'm going to pretend IE isn't a steaming pile of shit, hell I'd settle for just 1-2:

* Evergreen browser (I'm sick of dealing with 7/8/9, I don't look forward to playing the same song and dance with 10/11/12/etc)

* Cross-platform (Testing on Linux or a Mac is painful)

* Open source (IE is the ONLY major browser that is not OS, and yes I know Chromium != Chrome but I'd be fine with IE doing the same sort of thing)

What about to my Mint pc?

This approach doesn't need to depend on Java. It would preferably use a minimal, non-garbage-collected VM, or something along the lines of NativeClient (or simply asm.js initially).

"It can't be indexed" happens to hold for a lot of websites that are basically single-page web-apps and which build their contents from within javascript. Fortunately, Google and others are using AI techniques to index pages. No need for special markup, or special structure.

Text-selection can be built into the render-engine of choice. Granted, this is not a guarantee that it will work for all websites, but even today you can turn off text-selection for a website, so you don't have that guarantee now either. Also, AI or OCR could help here. As an added benefit, it would allow one to even select text in an image.

Also note that this doesn't work so well in JS, because JS is not a multi-threaded language and it typically suffers from garbage-collection pauses. This is not good enough for UI work, unfortunately. And also not good enough as the target of compilers.

But, granted, to get this started, JS (or the asm.js subset) could be used initially (and be replaced later).