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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer is generally regarded as a reason we can't have nice things, so this is a huge step in the right direction for Windows users.

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IE11 trident rendering engine was already renamed to "Edge", press F12 check it out (then see in the bottom bar -> top right). The step from IE11 to IE12 aka Edge from the render engine is not as huge an outside might think (reading only the PR) - it's still a great step forward so don't get me wrong. The GUI window app has been completely scrapped in favor of a WinRuntime app "Edge" instead of the old iexplore.exe that code can be traced back to at least Internet Explorer 3 (and maybe even IE 1).

Partially correct. EdgeHTML was in IE11, but wasn't a renamed MSHTML (check your system32, you'll see both DLLs in Win10). It's a departure from MSHTML that's been seriously changed, lots of cruft removed and a lot of interop added.

Fun anecdote - last week someone at Steam wrote one of the sale pages using entirely -webkit- prefixes. It showed up blank in Forefox, but rendered fine in Spartan and Chrome.

I don't find the fact a brand new browser already supports legacy 'webkit-' prefixes a fun fact...

In truth, neither do I. But Edge/Spartan follows the developers, and sometimes that involves being interoperable with poorly designed sites that have fallen prey to browser-specific prefixes.

From a business sense, it works because if it works in Chrome and fails in Spartan, it's our fault. From a user experience sense, it also works because they deserve to have their sites work.

It's not really that big of a change. It's a new UI, and a fork of Trident with some old stuff removed. But web developers who complain about Microsoft not instantly implementing everything Google comes up with will continue to complain, despite it having pretty good standards support and being perfectly modern.

Have you seen the compatibility table for ES6 [1]? They did not just remove old stuff they currently leading when it comes to JavaScript.

[1] https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Sure, I am aware IE11/Edge is perfectly modern. I've been a fan for a while now: about three years ago, I remember that IE9 had far better 2D canvas acceleration than Chrome or Firefox (this may even still be the case).

However, I constantly see people complaining online about IE. What can I do.

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