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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Is Building a New Browser As Part of Its Windows 10 Push 248

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new dept.
mpicpp sends word that Microsoft may be working on a new browser. "There's been talk for a while that Microsoft was going to make some big changes to Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 time frame, making IE 'Spartan' look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox. It turns out that what's actually happening is Microsoft is building a new browser, codenamed Spartan, which is not IE 12 — at least according to a couple of sources of mine. Thomas Nigro, a Microsoft Student Partner lead and developer of the modern version of VLC, mentioned on Twitter earlier this month that he heard Microsoft was building a brand-new browser. Nigro said he heard talk of this during a December episode of the LiveTile podcast. Spartan is still going to use Microsoft's Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft's Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), sources say. As Neowin's Brad Sams reported back in September, the coming browser will look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox and will support extensions. Sams also reported on December 29 that Microsoft has two different versions of Trident in the works, which also seemingly supports the claim that the company has two different Trident-based browsers. However, if my sources are right, Spartan is not IE 12. Instead, Spartan is a new, light-weight browser Microsoft is building. Windows 10 (at least the desktop version) will ship with both Spartan and IE 11, my sources say. IE 11 will be there for backward-compatibility's sake. Spartan will be available for both desktop and mobile (phone/tablet) versions of Windows 10, sources say."
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Microsoft Is Building a New Browser As Part of Its Windows 10 Push More

Microsoft Is Building a New Browser As Part of Its Windows 10 Push

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  • This is not good news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:28PM (#48692041) Homepage

    Yet another quirky browser to support. More idiots using -yetanotherbrowserspecificcsstag: 0px;

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Yet another quirky browser to support. More idiots using -yetanotherbrowserspecificcsstag: 0px;

      Not really, it's still based on Trident, which is what IE's rendering engine is.

      And it's not a bad thing - I mean, remember when IE6 was king? Now we have multiple rendering engines (Blink (Chrome, Opera), WebKit (Safari, dozens other), Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox)) which serve to keep each one honest and standardized.

      Heck, when you think about it, WebKit has almost become the de-facto web renderer on the Interne

    • at least not if they keep up with the path they started with IE10 and continued on with 11. They've been pushing standards compliance because they can make way more money selling software-as-a-service (Office 365) then keeping browser competition down. Netscape's dead, buried and the built a playground on the burial site. Firefox and Chrome exist to serve ads. It's a different market now that requires different strategies, and Microsoft isn't shy about pivoting.

  • More like Chrome? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:28PM (#48692045)

    Please, not another useless Chrome clone. We already have more than enough browsers with crap UIs, thank you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      It bugs me that things need to copied. Why not try something new? Gah!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Richy_T ( 111409 )

        God yes. What is it with this convergence fetish? So many excellent ideas fallen by the wayside because everyone is trying to be like each other.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      Please, not another useless Chrome clone.

      I agree. Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows. Writing a browser from scratch is a huge project, and while I'm sure it's a tiny fraction of Microsoft's output, that's a fair amount of resources that could be directed elsewhere, while generating a fair amount of good will in the software community.

      • Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows.

        Control. If it's delivered by Microsoft then Microsoft gets the blame when something goes wrong, and rightly so. Also, giving up competition entirely means giving up control over the future of the Net. Finally, having a browser means being able to test net-facing code before implementing it on server.

      • Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows.

        For the sake of argument, why should they? Why should any company be forced to distribute a competing product? It's not like it's at all difficult to install a browser of your own choice.

  • I for one, look forward to a new age of new security vulnerabilities.

    But only is they make Trojan for OS X or Linux

  • At least it's not ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BarbaraHudson ( 3785311 ) <barbara.jane.hud ... minus physicist> on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:30PM (#48692061) Journal
    At least it's not "Your desktop IS your browser."

  • Nth verse, same as the first (Score:4, Informative)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:35PM (#48692105)

    If the JS and rendering engines are the same, then there's nothing new that matters to developers. Making it look like Chrome/FF is not necessarily a good thing, as those browsers have stripped the browser UI of many of the most important elements.

    Trident is ancient hacked up garbage that MS needs to replace.

  • rumor alert (Score:5, Interesting)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:35PM (#48692115) Journal

    Enh. TFA seems long on speculation. I can see Microsoft doing this in an effort to (a) create a browser that is performant on portable hardware, (where their competition clearly beats them [imgur.com]) and (b) try to (eventually) dump the millstone of decades of backwards compatibility, which is, in general, a good thing. [1] But just because it's a logical move is not proof in and of itself that Microsoft is actually doing it.

    But I wonder how different, and especially how "lightweight" this hypothetical browser can be if it's using the same rendering engine? Wouldn't it just be IE with a different skin?

    [1] apropos of nothing: Over Christmas break, at my daughter's request, I installed an old Windows 95 game on her Windows 7 PC, and it worked! I was deeply impressed. And a little appalled.

    • Over Christmas break, at my daughter's request, I installed an old Windows 95 game on her Windows 7 PC, and it worked! I was deeply impressed. And a little appalled.

      I won't be impressed until you successfully some of the early DOS games (like Lunar Lander) where the speed of the game play was dependent on the 8086's clock frequency. I've probably even got the 5.25" installation floppies laying around somewhere...

      And if you manage to install them, and can stay alive longer than 0.1 second - I'll be REALLY impressed! I remember the first time I tried one of those on a newer machine with a 20MHz 80286...

      • Over Christmas break, at my daughter's request, I installed an old Windows 95 game on her Windows 7 PC, and it worked! I was deeply impressed. And a little appalled.

        I won't be impressed until you successfully some of the early DOS games (like Lunar Lander) where the speed of the game play was dependent on the 8086's clock frequency. I've probably even got the 5.25" installation floppies laying around somewhere...

        And if you manage to install them, and can stay alive longer than 0.1 second - I'll be REALLY impressed! I remember the first time I tried one of those on a newer machine with a 20MHz 80286...

        Maybe you're just slowing down in your old age. :-)

        A little off topic, but that's actually a solved problem. Google "moslo" or wiki "slowdown utility". I seem to recall I had to research this in order to play the original Wing Commander on a modern machine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        I've done it. There are DOS emulators that will let it run, and have arbitrary clocks inside the VM. So you can run it at 4.77 MHz, or 10 or 20. Now, installing it under Windows with nothing else wont work because it'll not access the HAL correctly. Not that you "install" DOS games. You run them. So running them under a DOSBox or VM doesn't break the rules, does it?

        I remember my XT with a turbo button (4.77 to 8 MHz). I'd play on one and the other, and as you note, it's like a whole different game.

      • I won't be impressed until you successfully some of the early DOS games (like Lunar Lander) where the speed of the game play was dependent on the 8086's clock frequency. I've probably even got the 5.25" installation floppies laying around somewhere...

        And if you manage to install them, and can stay alive longer than 0.1 second - I'll be REALLY impressed! I remember the first time I tried one of those on a newer machine with a 20MHz 80286...

        I tried such a game. I don't remember what it was, but I was barely holding on on a game that I was good at on the 8088. When I later upgraded to a 386, there was NFW I could even begin to play it.

      • I tried Syndicate and was dead in about 30 seconds. Mouse scroll speed was like Warp 6 with no way to slow it down.

    • I was deeply impressed. And a little appalled.

      Why? Microsoft is all about being held back by backwards compatibility.

  • Support Yet Another Browser (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:46PM (#48692199) Homepage

    Right now, if I make a website or web application, I need to test it on Chrome, a couple different versions if IE, and FireFox. If I have the time, I can test it on Safari and Opera as well. I also need to test my site/application on my laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone. The latter two in both Android and iOS. After all of this, I can rest assured that my web site/application will work fine - at least until someone comes in with a weird configuration that I didn't test and it all blows up*.

    Now Microsoft is going to add in "Spartan" as a new web browser for me to test on? If they are going to sunset IE and switch to Spartan, that would be one thing. Yes, IE usage would remain for awhile but it would be a constantly dwindling population until it got small enough to simply ignore due to time constraints. If they plan on running with two different browsers, though, they're just making the lives of web developers everywhere even harder.

    * Anyone who says "just code to standards and your web site/application won't have problems" hasn't coded anything too complex. There are always browser quirks and what works in one browser isn't guaranteed to work in another one. Though, usually, I've found that IE is the problem-browser (especially older versions) and Chrome/Firefox/etc work nicely with, at worst, minor issues.

    • If it uses the same rendering and js engine, then you can probably mostly ignore it.

      The only thing I ask of Microsoft is that Trident sees more regular improvements (toward standards compliance) independently of major IE version releases.

      • They could pitch Spartan as a separate product, in perpetual beta and coexisting side-by-side with IE dlls.

        Then once every 6 months, sync IE 12.x with the improvements.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shados ( 741919 )

        Even with the same rendering and js engine... some stuff like auto-complete behavior can differ (it was a big plague for AngularJS dev for a while until they changed how they detected textfields updates), security settings can be different (ie: what kind of certificates Chrome consider valid for SSL vs other browsers), a bunch of weirdo edge cases (jsonp over https failing in very specific scenarios on some android versions), and so on and so forth.

        Safari's pretty damn popular (relatively speaking. Its too

  • Does it use or support ActiveX? (Score:3)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @04:47PM (#48692209)

    If so it's dead on arrival.

  • Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rinikusu ( 28164 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @05:05PM (#48692329)

    Sometimes I wonder if IE's biggest problem these days is marketing and the negative reputation they've built with older version of IE. I had to use IE recently here at work and it's not bad; certainly not the horrible, buggy, bloated POS it was in the 90s (comparatively speaking). I still prefer IE and Mozilla (plugins, etc), but if faced with a modern IE I wouldn't loathe it. So, IE isn't so bad anymore. But because it was so shitty for the longest time, I really don't want to go back to it. Perhaps this is what MS has realized: They're going to have to change the name so people won't associate the new browser with bad memories of the past...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

      Ugh, sorry, trying to type and take a call at the same time.. I meant I still prefer Chrome and Mozilla, not IE and Mozilla.

    • From a front-end developer's perspective, IE sucks for two reasons:

      1. It used to be bad
      2. It takes the average IE user forever to upgrade

  • Creating a new browser means reinventing old and new bugs. MS is still getting rid of bugs in Windows Explorer in version 11 and the new browser will take at least 11 or more versions and hundreds of patches to even come close to other, more mature browsers. What are they thinking?

  • Hope it's not tightly integrated like IE (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TechCurmudgeon ( 3904121 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @05:42PM (#48692575)
    I always thought IE's big security problem was its tight integration with the Windows OS. Too easy a path for malware into the core of the system. I hope this new browser just sits on top of the OS like a regular application, and every other browser. Updating the browser would be easier too and not require a reboot either. Let MS do this and remove IE completely and just leave behind what elements needed for their file manager!
    • Is that still true? Has anyone actually verified that the OS or file manager still uses IE components?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • How fast is the VBScript engine?!

  • We already have the original Internet Explorer and the metro "Internet Explorer", which isn't quite the same thing, and now a whole new browser (new but still using the same rendering engine and javascript engine as before).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by deniable ( 76198 )
      Immersive IE, the metro/ modern / Windows 8 store style Windows app version is slated to go away in Windows 10, so there'll only be two browsers. Given MS and their complete inability to name things I expect the difference will be IE / IE for business or IE / IE Express but I probably need more coffee to get more confusing.

  • Something new with lots of holes to PEN test!

  • End of click to infect? (Score:3)

    by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Monday December 29, 2014 @08:31PM (#48693393)
    It's worth killing IE dead if that stops people turing their MS Windows PCs and the file shares they are connected to into a malware swamp with just a single click.

    If I sent an accurate description of the malware situation now back in time to 2000 it would be discarded as a blatant attack rant on MS disguised as incredibly unlikely SF.

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