Here's the main source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9217296
Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
71–80 of 213 posts
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#72With this new CEO, Microsoft is a different company. Cloud & Mobile all the way. .NET/CLR is open-source. First class support for Linux and OS X. Commitment to standards. At the risk of sounding like a complete lunatic, here's my prediction for the next 10 years: * Microsoft abandon traditional Windows development. * They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple. Unix and Unix-like OS's…
As long as Microsoft has big customers all-in on Windows, and there are many, so too will Microsoft remain Windows. You can compete with free for as long as free is not what the big players want in their IT operation.
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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'…
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)
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#75Absurdly, users have to install Windows 10 to use this new browser. Why not write it in .net and have it work on all versions of Windows typically found in the wild?
Their goal is to have as many people running the current OS as possible. Every exception like that they make is an exception that keeps people using the old versions and keeps them scrambling to maintain them.
Some people are going to stick on the old OS no matter what. Their computer still works, why buy another?
We can stamp our feet or work with that reality. We have 70% of China on Windows XP with no hope of a modern browser from MS (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484761/microsoft-windo...). At least Chrome will work on those old systems. At least web devs can use modern features on those systems.
If the browser is the primary carrot to get someone to upgrade your OS, the OS value prop sucks.
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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.
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too will give Spartan a chance, and in likelihood will use it predominantly on my tablets and laptop (since I use IE 11 in those contexts today). On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D pa…
That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.
Everything gets faster: computers have 4x the memory and processing power of 10 years ago, browsers are easily 10x faster than they were 10 years ago.
However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".)
People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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'…
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.
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#79You know the world is going crazy when Google is evil, Apple is doing tacky devices and Microsoft makes the best browser
Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
#80Spartan is still Trident, right? So then it's still Microsoft using Microsoft stuff, but eliminating a ton of cruft that builds up over the years due to backwards compatibility.
Historically, Apple (at least under Jobs) were the ones to declare an old standard dead while dragging us kicking and screaming into the future. Microsoft always proudly stood by and told you that your crappy program from 1992 would still be able to run on each version of Windos that came out, no matter how big and bloated the beast became.
Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come? Could the next version of Windows (Not 10, obviously) finally declare the end of backwards compatibility and force obsolete software into a virtualization ghetto?