Comment by xxxyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxxyy | Hacker News Reader

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Isn't this just a marketing stunt? The article contains no engineering facts, just the branding thing. I mean: I expect the "new IE" to inherit code and practices from the "old IE". Unless I'm proven otherwise.

Modern IE is actually pretty respectable. Its biggest issue is that unlike its competitors, it only works on a single platform.

As does Safari. Apple hasn't updated the Windows version in well over a year.

July 2011, and a lot of people still use it and want full functionality because being 4 years out of date isn't publicized enough

WebKit / JavaScriptCore run on both Windows and Linux.

Just because it's not packaged as Safari doesn't mean it's not available.

While this is true, there isn't really a common browser distribution that uses that setup for non-OS X platforms, though. Chrome/Chromium/Opera use Blink now.

For all practical purposes, Safari is an OS X-only browser.

"Safari" aka WebKit + JavaScriptCore is also on iOS with a separate UI from OS X "Safari," similar to how you'd have a separate UI if you use WebKit + JavaScriptCore on Windows.

Whether it's popular on Windows is also irrelevant with regard to the fact that it does, indeed, work on Windows.

Speaking from practical experience, iOS' Safari is quite a different beast from the desktop version. `position:fixed` in a scrollable, element, for example, has completely different behaviors depending on the platform Safari is running on. You have to treat desktop Safari and iOS Safari as different browsers for development and QA purposes.

Windows Phone uses Trident + Chakra for its IE deployment, as well, so if we're going to make that argument, then IE is multiplatform, as well :P

WebKit + JavaScriptCore ("Safari") is available on ALL platforms.[1]

1. Within reason, of course. It's not on my router (but maybe it could be)

It's available, but it's not used. I get what you're driving at here, but for practical purposes, Safari-OSX is a single-platform browser and Safari-iOS is another single-platform browser. You can't just target "Webkit" and call it a day.

I don't know what Modern IE is other than a testable version of IE. No version of IE is respectable since it can't hold a candle to any other major browser.

While it is mostly marketing (i.e. still using Chakra and Trident engines), the biggest change from a web developer's perspective is that the new Spartan browser will be evergreen[1].

[1]: https://plus.google.com/+PaulIrish/posts/f15yUhu4tE3

I may be wrong, but I believe that they replaced the old rendering engine (Trident), with a new one (EdgeHTML.dll).[1]

But Trident will still be around, for compatibility with old websites (especially for enterprise applications).

So, it's not just marketing...

[1] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...

EdgeHTML.dll is just a fork of mshtml.dll, which started somewhere after IE11 and stripped out all the compatibility modes (except quirks and limited-quirks, both of which are starting to get properly standardised) and then started refactoring the code to get rid of all the less nice design decisions caused by having to keep the IE7 code working through a bunch of ifs.

Wonder which rendering engine they'll use for desktop email?

IE has been evergreen since version 10. The biggest change is that this is not Trident. It is a new rendering engine, called EdgeHTML, which started as a fork of Trident. That might sound odd, but Trident and the rest of IE had accumulated years of technical and backwards-compatibility debt: All the different document modes and obscure features from the ActiveX era that couldn't be removed because enterprise intranet sites relied on them.

So what Microsoft have done is create an entirely new browser, using the EdgeHTML fork, while keeping IE around only for enterprise installs. Then they went on a killing spree in the EdgeHTML source, ripping out all the crap that they were previously stuck with, then adding new features into their newly cleaned-up codebase. This will then form the basis for the new, consumer facing browser in Windows 10.

They should have done this EdgeHTML rewrite/legacy cruft split with IE9 rather than layering on more kludges.

They should eliminated native code apps in user mode in Vista and forced developers to ship only managed code with legacy native code apps running in a virtual machine sandbox.

They should have finished WinFS and transcended the files and folders thang. (No, SQL Server does not count as WinFS, it should have been THE file system in Vista.) They should have fixed the file locking thing on open files, geez I hate hate hate that DOS backwards compatibility.

They should have done something/ANYTHING amazing with WinCE beyond pocket office with the insane lead they had. I was running .exe's and playing DOOM at a decent clip on my Samsung phone in, when, 2004?

There's so many wouldda couldda shoulddas I have lined up in my mind wrt Microsoft. Makes me sad.

I truly hope Microsoft wants to win this new browser war. I truly hope there is some fire left in you M$. Show me what money combined with hardcore computer science can really achieve!

Yea, IE9 was very different from IE8, much more than IE8 was different from IE7, and they already had to separate the JS engine into jscript9.dll.

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