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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

  > the new engine began as a fork of MSHTML.dll but has 
  > since diverged very quickly

Curiously, this means that Spartan will still be able to trace its lineage back to 1992's NCSA Mosiac (in contrast to Mozilla's Servo, which is a greenfield project). I expect that it will be fascinating to compare the two projects as each matures.

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To be pedantic: even if there is code from MSHTML.dll in Spartan, there's no code from NCSA Mosaic in MSHTML.dll. Internet Explorer originally licensed Spyglass Mosaic, which licensed the name (and the code) from NCSA, but did not actually use any of the code. Though I suspect that there's not actually any Spyglass Mosaic code left in IE these days.

(Edited, I said that there's no MSHTML.dll code in Spartan. That I do believe exists.)

(Source: http://ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html)

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.)

IE is (originally) based on NCSA Mosaic code, by way of Spyglass. Spyglass had nearly 70 or so vendors using the same code if I'm not mistaken.

The original source code of IE 1 can be seen (an Easter egg) in the video on our blog post (at about 40 seconds): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/02/26/a-break-from-t....

That's a really cool easter egg :)

More than 100, in fact. But in the end only one of those vendors actually mattered.

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.

Even though little or no code remain, it's a reminder of how much has happened.

Here is post where Marc Andreessen releases the beta (1993):

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0099.ht...

That's only ~20 years ago.

IE's HTML rendering code was completely replaced with the Trident rendering engine in IE 4. Trident did not use or derive from Mosaic code.

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