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Comment by mishoo | Hacker News Reader

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

That had more to do with the fact that Windows depends on the Trident than the other way around. Stuff like the help files used mshtml.dll.

But this is another Browser:

> 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.

This is a good point. While I have my doubts that it will be an entirely new browser, by simply renaming it they might be able to offer a version for non-Windows OS-es without making earlier statements seem ridiculous. And they should.

The actual court case you're referring to has to do with the bundling of IE with Windows and how it can't be pulled out. Remember that IE actually used to be cross-platform until version 5 with IE for Mac although it used a different rendering engine (Tasman vs Trident).

Spartan isn't IE.

I know this is this is the narrative they are trying to promote but I remove code from my projects all the time but don't feel it makes it a different project.

Spartan isn't a subset of IE either. We've added support for nearly 50 standards, and more. The delta between IE and Spartan is massive, and growing quickly.

Interesting, if it's a complete fork does that mean IE is not going to be maintained? I thought IE was going to continue on for the time being. If there isn't a common codebase does that mean you're going to be duplicating work? Why?

Internet Explorer will stick around for legacy applications, but Project Spartan uses EdgeHTML (a fork of MSHTML) and is meant to be used with the web moving forward.

Citation? IE shipped on Mac until Safari was released.

Mac IE used a different rendering engine than Windows IE. Windows' is (was) called Trident. Mac IE's was called Tasman[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

“Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free. Those who opposed Microsoft's position countered that the browser was still a distinct and separate product which did not need to be tied to the operating system, since a separate version of Internet Explorer was available for Mac OS.”

— from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

This isn't legacy IE but a new engine. It's like saying Chrome can't run on Linux because MS said IE can't be separated from Windows. Nonsense, but I get your point ("MS lied back then").

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