supposedly, from what I have heard, it is a new browser with no legacy code base. And possibly that old IE plugins still work (not entirely sure on this last part).
It doesn’t support any old IE plugins, it contains none of the IE/7/8/9/10 codebase, but instead is based on only the newly written parts of IE11, and it supports Firefox and Chrome addons.
Wow. Why aren't they marketing this? Creating a browser from scratch, considering the current state of web technologies is a huge undertaking. I always thought it's just a re-skinned IE with some touch features.
Not sure about IE plugins but it supports the plugin's from Firefox and Chrome[1]. Technical details would be interesting, but migrating would be little frictionless, if anybody want to try the Edge.
It's a fork of the underlying MSHTML engine, that adds some new standard support and more importantly throws out the old compatibility modes and other legacy.
It will run in parallel to IE, which is here to stay for enterprise customers.
It's not a redesign, it's a completely new browser built clean and based on EdgeHTML.
IE will still be around as a separate browser that can be used in environments it's needed but Spartan/Edge is completely new and the way forward for the mainstream users.
So we set about to create a new engine using IE11’s standards support as a baseline. I watched Justin Rogers, one of our engineers, press “Enter” on the commit that forked the engine—it took almost 45 minutes just to process it (just committing the changes, not building!).
At the risk of getting pedantic... they basically deleted the majority of it.
>> In the coming months, swathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine. Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit). What remained was a clean slate.
At this point, they kept basic stuff any rendering engine would do but it's as clean a start as you can get.
Cleaning up implies they didn't add anything else. This is a major reworking that changes the entire stack.
Do they have to write every single line from scratch again? That would be an enormous waste of time. Even if they started with a completely new repo, they would just copy/paste that stuff anyway. The important bits are all new and that's what matters.
They don't "have" to do anything, nor am I criticizing them. I'm just saying that's it's not completely from scratch like people are saying. If they take this an some sort of attack, it's their problem.
It's a complete rebuilt engine called EdgeHTML, it's not hosting the old MSHTML engine anymore. IE will still be around as a browser program (with updates) for those who need it (enterprises, etc).
It's backwards compatible with WebRTC so it'll work with Chrome and Firefox, but it gives you more control of the protocols so you could build something that doesn't rely on SDP.
Really? With all the new things coming out of Redmond and with them open sourcing the full server side .NET stack[1], the description above still sounds like MS to you?
If I had a dime for every time I read this...you get the point.
Because Microsoft is finally getting their act together doesn't mean they become Google. They simply start to look like a better company.
I really dont see how the two companies interchanged roles.
Google used to seem cool because they gave the people what they wanted and didn't exhibit many signs of being a parasite... but as they grew, they did.
Now Microsoft is giving people what they want because they are the underdog. So in that respect, in a lot of people's minds I think, their roles have interchanged.
That is because MS is currently putting out a lot of things that we simply didn't believe was possible 5 years ago. Suddenly MS is not only relevant again but interesting - heck the technology I am most psyced about (their augmented reality system) is a Microsoft product.
These stories aren't in the front page because it's Microsoft, but because they are interesting. Microsoft is just doing consistently interesting things lately.
We live in the age of shills and sheeple now. A few smart people controlling the narrative over large groups. Don't think the people trying to manipulate you aren't evolving and honing their strategies. Psy-ops and thought manipulation are widely documented practices. In the age we live in we must be vigilant and accept that we are probably being subtly manipulated by corporate interests, unfortunately. Is the poster claiming golang to be a fetish language of HN to distract from the fact that swift is the real fetish language? Am I a shill? No way. No way to know.
The good news is that the corporations who do it have to keep a lot of it secret so it's hard for all of them to align their interests and they end up competing with each other.
After the recent activity with Code and Roslyn, I was hoping for MacOS and Linux download links too. That would be sweet. I'd love to use IE on my macbook and my Mint box.
Browser competition on OS X? Apple refuses. Only Safari is allowed to do the notifications. And, of course, their own shitty websites break constantly on non-Apple browsers.
I develop iOS apps for a living so I cannot just avoid their shameful behavior, either. I would love to be able to do a boycott right now without ending my career.
I hadn't even considered this but I really like the idea!
Since Microsoft are seemingly so keen on producing software for competing operating systems - and with Cortana purportedly among them - I actually consider it within the realms of possibility.
Looking at https://status.modern.ie/ it appears Safari is the laggard of the group. Current versions of IE really haven't been that bad, the biggest problem is going to be getting people off IE8.
Would be nice if it was more than "fairly respectable". Also, I wouldn't trust http://status.modern.ie too much. For example, IE is missing some IndexedDB features https://github.com/InternetExplorer/Status.IE/issues/104 but you'll see no mention of that on their status site. From there, it looks like everything is perfect.
And don't just look at the headline numbers, look at the tests that actually fail, because some are more important than others.
The only test that fails in Chrome [1] is only marginally meaningful. It would be nice if they got it working, but all the tests that actually use IndexedDB pass in Chrome. 100%.
Firefox is almost as good as Chrome, but it fails on tests of error handling for a few edge cases that are very unlikely to occur in the real world.
IE and Safari have many failures for tests of core functionality (Safari is even worse than IE if you look at the individual tests that fail, rather than the overall %).
It should auto-update with no option to be disabled not even as a GPO in an enterprise. If update is disabled via firewall, it should prevent itself from running.
The problem with IE isn't really standard adoption, is how long old versions stay around.
ICQ had a feature for writing on websites, and even chatting with others visiting the same webpage. That was around 1998. It didn't work out, despite the penetration of ICQ at the time.
I wouldn't underestimate the power of time. Maybe at the time the web wasn't about information as much as today. Maybe MS implementation will be smoother and more integrated. Maybe people minds have changed. So many things died in the past only to be reincarnated slightly differently now they can but seen under the right light.
Website annotating is a feature people keep reinventing every few years. (e.g. rbutr as the most recent example, but there have been several before.) It usually founders on (2) getting sued by people who don't like the annotations on their website (1) no way to actually monetise this.
It's an in-browser tool, not a product. Maybe MS plan to analyse cloud stored annotations but I don't think they want to make money out of it. And how legal is it for a website author to say anything about what I do when I'm visiting it ? I can store the URL and a little doodle in a file, can they sue me for doing this ?
It isn't (slam-dunk under CDA section 230), but that never stopped a pissed-off crank from bringing a harassing case. Yeah, that's unlikely to affect Microsoft.
Assuming you're making annotations for yourself, the copy of the annotated page in your cache is referenced, and bookmarks for where you annotated are stored in some other local file.
If they're sharing all annotations with other users of the browser, the bookmarks get stored on Microsoft servers and reference, perhaps, a digest of the annotated page.
IANAL, but printing the page - the function every browser out there has had since forever - is, technically, creaton of a copy. Taking a pencil and drawing over that page is creating a derivative work. Passing that document to others is distribution.
Guess that goes under "fair use". Or something like that.
I don't know why comments here think it is Metro IE repackaged. It doesn't look anything like it (it looks more like Chrome than Metro IE), doesn't have the same rendering engine, supports crazy amount of new functionality:
1. Google Now styled contextual cards appear as soon as you start typing in address bar to search.
2. It does have support for Hubs, probably the best feature of Windows 8.
3. Annotations, so many ways of annotations. Not only it is natural, there is actually no easy way to annotate the web in any browser today.
4. Reading lists - not new, but new in MS realm.
5. Lastly, the hidden weapon - Cortana. It is integrated every-freakin-where in the browser. It is like Siri had sex with Google Now.
This is really exciting. I think it can be better when companies like Microsoft demonstrate tight top-to-bottom integration.
But it's also hard to forget previous behavior when they used that same integration to screw people over. Let's hope they follow a more benign path this time.
Pretty sure he's talking about bundled IE and OEM licensing terms prohibiting preinstall of a competing browser, which probably stalled the development of web standards by a few years.
That's not what stalled the development of web standards. That's what helped them win the browser wars, during which, mind you, nobody was really trying to follow any standards. Everyone was racing to introduce proprietary features. Microsoft won partly by strong-arming OEMs into not pre-installing other browsers, and partly by simply building a better browser.
But just as they won, they got sued big for antitrust, and they let IE languish, which may or may not be due to the lawsuit. This was what slowed adoption of new features because sites were overwhelmingly designed for IE, and IE was not improving at all.
Why does any of this matter? For all practical purposes, this is IE - nobody would choose to use it, but because it will come bundled with Windows, a lot of people who don't care to switch browsers will use it. That's all there is to it.
A lot of people seem to not realize that the last reiterations of IE have actually worked to keep up with web standards, not to redefine them. Microsoft is actually trying their best to support web standards, when all other browsers break your code you will appreciate their hard work. But no, "it's just IE, it's just Microsoft" so let's not use the evil companies software? Come on, don't be so quick to jump the gun, do a little more research. This is precisely why they're dumping IE, and starting fresh, too many misconceptions exist about IE, but also this allows them to do new things.
> Microsoft is actually trying their best to support web standards
That's good. So does every other browser since forever.
> when all other browsers break your code you will appreciate their hard work.
I am a webdev, and I use Firefox as my main browser for work. When I am done with a feature or a new page I usually test it in Chrome and it works without problems. Then IE, and I still have to tweak the hell out of the code to make it work there as well. So ms is not there yet.
What you fail to analyze is why MS got that way. They got there because they dropped the ball on IE post XP.
When MS stretched violently with IE 6 back then, they changed the web landscape forever, they were light years ahead of competition. The practically invented AJAX. If MS can do with Edge what they did with IE 6, the future is very bright.
Since IE 6, most changes in web technology has been incremental. The powerful changes like WebGL are not enough mainstream. MS was, and still is, in power of forwarding things fast. So when you look at it like that, this is all good news.
I, for one, am planning to give it a fair shot. I'm intrigued for the following reasons:
* I love the idea of Cortana and Annotation in my browser.
* Microsoft have lately proved pretty capable of producing fast and power-efficient browsers
* Native OS integration could provide some nice features (share charm, good hi-resolution rendering support, native touch-gesture support).
* Hoping for Ad-Block support - that's the only add-on I really use
Of course if none of that pans out, I'll be back to Firefox.
I would jump off of Chrome in a heartbeat if there were a viable option for me. I actively search for Chrome alternatives every once in a while and I love when a new browser comes out. Unfortunately, it looks like they went Metro in Edge and I'll probably hate it. The only thing Metro means to me as a power-user and a developer is less control. Even on my Surface Pro and my little Dell tablet running Windows 8 - I use Chrome in desktop mode and I don't use any Metro apps at all.
(EDIT: Actually, there is one Metro app that I use regularly on my HTPC and tablets and that is Netflix.)
Hm, nice hype. But what about standards support? For instance, IE since IE10 has been missing some parts of the IndexedDB API. Last I heard, they weren't planning to fix it any time soon https://twitter.com/IEDevChat/status/533338659555008512
This is stuff that a single engineer could easily implement in a couple weeks. Firefox and Chrome have open source implementations and open source unit tests (the W3C has open unit tests too), which makes things even easier. Guess it's too much to ask of a company with the meager resources of MS, though...
> This is stuff that a single engineer could easily implement in a couple weeks.
Just because it can be done by 1 person, doesn't mean there are resources to do so. How many other one person for couple of weeks features are there, you think?
I know. It's not realistic to expect tiny non-profits like Microsoft to have the engineering resources of huge corporations like Mozilla. A man can dream, though...
If resources are such an issue, maybe Microsoft should go the Netscape path and consider making their browser open source? I'm sure many people would be interested in donating their time to help them support some of these tricky standards. I would love to help them get IndexedDB right! I know some other similarly minded people too.
Oddly enough, running a whois on the above returns a different company/person then microsoft. I suppose Microsoft paid them to forward this, or they're much nicer people then I am... Missed opportunity for a prank.
caniuse.com already lists Edge for standards support and, just like IE, it falls short in many areas despite what Microsoft claims and in far more areas of compliance than any other browser.
I love how advertising shows people drawing annotations. It always looks so pointless.
Why did they circle that boat? Who is going to see it? What is the circled date on the other example? Did it get added to a calendar, or did it just go nowhere?
Can't they at least show cool young people working in a beach shop circling pictures of surfboards for no reason, like actual stylus users?
Unrelated to making fun of advertising... What happens to these examples when the site gets updated? Does it store a local copy? What if you want to update it later, but your local copy is now out of date?
I did just download Windows 10 to try in a VM, so I guess I'll find out!
"Inking and sharing so you can capture and communicate your thoughts: Everyone uses the Web routinely to share questions, thoughts, info and comments with friends and colleagues. Now with new inking capabilities, Project Spartan enables you to write or type directly on the page, comment on what’s interesting or clip what you want – then easily share this “Web Note” via mail, or a social network. Researching and collecting information from the Web is just as easy, as you can save your notes directly to OneNote."
A small niche, but since you asked: web developers and content editors. I often have to give critical feedback on web pages and I don't even do that for a living.
Question, am I the only one that right now see an abnormal usage of ram by spartan(edge) compared even to chrome? I mean for the same exact page spartan requires about +120% more ram than chrome, and chrome is not really a memory-light browser.
Anyone else get the feeling that .net is being groomed to be the "runtime" of the internet (I'll stop short of calling it "OS" as that would seem presumptuous :-)? To the extent where you could run any .net supported language on any OS as well as your browser (C#/F#/VB/Managed C++/etc). Granted the browser version would need to be well sand-boxed but penetrating the Javascript market would be huge. I'm predicting Edge will eventually explore this path.
btw- anyone know who the father of .net would be? wikipedia states that .net was created in the late 90's under the next generation windows services umbrella. 1999 is the date that is given when Anders started to assemble the C# team (again wikipedia). Timing seems roughly right but guessing .net preceeded his work on C#. tx
I doubt Edge will do this only because of one feature I was surprised to see Microsoft add support for... ASM.js.
ASM.js lets supporting browsers run optimized JavaScript code at near native speed and is backwards compatible with all browsers (just running the code slower).
With ASM.js Microsoft could bring .NET to all browsers without even needing to update the browsers themselves (just running faster when in a browser that supports ASM.js).
So far only Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox support it, I'm waiting for Google Chrome to jump on the bandwagon honestly as it's genius.
Also if you want an idea of how powerful it is, it helped Mozilla run the Unreal 4 Engine in Firefox at 1080p in 60FPS without lag.
Does it support managing dozens (up to 100) tabs like Firefox does with its Tab Groups feature? I'd find it very hard to use a browser that doesn't have a way to deal with tab explosion. Both Chrome and IE are virtually unusable with lots of tabs opened.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] thread[1]. http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br...
It will run in parallel to IE, which is here to stay for enterprise customers.
There's always new standards, so of course there is new standard support, just as IE is getting new standard support.
Effectively it is a redesign and rebranding of IE. Nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.
IE will still be around as a separate browser that can be used in environments it's needed but Spartan/Edge is completely new and the way forward for the mainstream users.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/03/24/updates-from-t...
So we set about to create a new engine using IE11’s standards support as a baseline. I watched Justin Rogers, one of our engineers, press “Enter” on the commit that forked the engine—it took almost 45 minutes just to process it (just committing the changes, not building!).
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
>> In the coming months, swathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine. Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit). What remained was a clean slate.
At this point, they kept basic stuff any rendering engine would do but it's as clean a start as you can get.
Do they have to write every single line from scratch again? That would be an enormous waste of time. Even if they started with a completely new repo, they would just copy/paste that stuff anyway. The important bits are all new and that's what matters.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
It's backwards compatible with WebRTC so it'll work with Chrome and Firefox, but it gives you more control of the protocols so you could build something that doesn't rely on SDP.
2. stagnant platform
3. not proper direction
4. rushed release
5. longer and less transparent updates
etc.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595905
As for open sourcing, I don't see how that invalidates any of the points. None of them had "keeping platforms proprietary".
Alternatively, please point to a company that you think has proper direction and tell us why.
2 - the platform is not stagnant, be it Windows or .NET - new things are coming out;
3 - there is a proper direction, less towards Windows/Office as desktop apps and more towards services;
5 - the updates do happen more often, and at least for .NET they're done in a transparent way (being open source and all)
Because Microsoft is finally getting their act together doesn't mean they become Google. They simply start to look like a better company. I really dont see how the two companies interchanged roles.
Now Microsoft is giving people what they want because they are the underdog. So in that respect, in a lot of people's minds I think, their roles have interchanged.
Hint: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365060/microsoft-caught-astr...
#Reputation_management
The good news is that the corporations who do it have to keep a lot of it secret so it's hard for all of them to align their interests and they end up competing with each other.
But so far it doesn't seem like that's on the table...
I develop iOS apps for a living so I cannot just avoid their shameful behavior, either. I would love to be able to do a boycott right now without ending my career.
Since Microsoft are seemingly so keen on producing software for competing operating systems - and with Cortana purportedly among them - I actually consider it within the realms of possibility.
I think it should be standards compliant in every conceivable way.
But don't believe me, believe the results of the W3C test suite: http://w3c.github.io/test-results/IndexedDB/all.html
And don't just look at the headline numbers, look at the tests that actually fail, because some are more important than others.
The only test that fails in Chrome [1] is only marginally meaningful. It would be nice if they got it working, but all the tests that actually use IndexedDB pass in Chrome. 100%.
Firefox is almost as good as Chrome, but it fails on tests of error handling for a few edge cases that are very unlikely to occur in the real world.
IE and Safari have many failures for tests of core functionality (Safari is even worse than IE if you look at the individual tests that fail, rather than the overall %).
[1] https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/blob/master/Indexe...
The problem with IE isn't really standard adoption, is how long old versions stay around.
How can they implement this without copying the website in some form? It would constitute basic copyright infringement.
If they're sharing all annotations with other users of the browser, the bookmarks get stored on Microsoft servers and reference, perhaps, a digest of the annotated page.
No copyright infringement required.
Guess that goes under "fair use". Or something like that.
1. Google Now styled contextual cards appear as soon as you start typing in address bar to search.
2. It does have support for Hubs, probably the best feature of Windows 8.
3. Annotations, so many ways of annotations. Not only it is natural, there is actually no easy way to annotate the web in any browser today.
4. Reading lists - not new, but new in MS realm.
5. Lastly, the hidden weapon - Cortana. It is integrated every-freakin-where in the browser. It is like Siri had sex with Google Now.
But it's also hard to forget previous behavior when they used that same integration to screw people over. Let's hope they follow a more benign path this time.
But just as they won, they got sued big for antitrust, and they let IE languish, which may or may not be due to the lawsuit. This was what slowed adoption of new features because sites were overwhelmingly designed for IE, and IE was not improving at all.
That's good. So does every other browser since forever.
> when all other browsers break your code you will appreciate their hard work.
I am a webdev, and I use Firefox as my main browser for work. When I am done with a feature or a new page I usually test it in Chrome and it works without problems. Then IE, and I still have to tweak the hell out of the code to make it work there as well. So ms is not there yet.
When MS stretched violently with IE 6 back then, they changed the web landscape forever, they were light years ahead of competition. The practically invented AJAX. If MS can do with Edge what they did with IE 6, the future is very bright.
Since IE 6, most changes in web technology has been incremental. The powerful changes like WebGL are not enough mainstream. MS was, and still is, in power of forwarding things fast. So when you look at it like that, this is all good news.
* I love the idea of Cortana and Annotation in my browser. * Microsoft have lately proved pretty capable of producing fast and power-efficient browsers * Native OS integration could provide some nice features (share charm, good hi-resolution rendering support, native touch-gesture support). * Hoping for Ad-Block support - that's the only add-on I really use
Of course if none of that pans out, I'll be back to Firefox.
Where is this conclusion coming from? If a new engine won't make it not "IE", then what will?
(EDIT: Actually, there is one Metro app that I use regularly on my HTPC and tablets and that is Netflix.)
Or we will have to maintain websites for each version for several years, like IE?
This is stuff that a single engineer could easily implement in a couple weeks. Firefox and Chrome have open source implementations and open source unit tests (the W3C has open unit tests too), which makes things even easier. Guess it's too much to ask of a company with the meager resources of MS, though...
Just because it can be done by 1 person, doesn't mean there are resources to do so. How many other one person for couple of weeks features are there, you think?
If resources are such an issue, maybe Microsoft should go the Netscape path and consider making their browser open source? I'm sure many people would be interested in donating their time to help them support some of these tricky standards. I would love to help them get IndexedDB right! I know some other similarly minded people too.
Oddly enough, running a whois on the above returns a different company/person then microsoft. I suppose Microsoft paid them to forward this, or they're much nicer people then I am... Missed opportunity for a prank.
http://www.browserfordoing.com/en-us/favicon.ico
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/a/a1/Internet_Expl...
Why did they circle that boat? Who is going to see it? What is the circled date on the other example? Did it get added to a calendar, or did it just go nowhere?
Can't they at least show cool young people working in a beach shop circling pictures of surfboards for no reason, like actual stylus users?
Unrelated to making fun of advertising... What happens to these examples when the site gets updated? Does it store a local copy? What if you want to update it later, but your local copy is now out of date?
I did just download Windows 10 to try in a VM, so I guess I'll find out!
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/30/introduc...
"Inking and sharing so you can capture and communicate your thoughts: Everyone uses the Web routinely to share questions, thoughts, info and comments with friends and colleagues. Now with new inking capabilities, Project Spartan enables you to write or type directly on the page, comment on what’s interesting or clip what you want – then easily share this “Web Note” via mail, or a social network. Researching and collecting information from the Web is just as easy, as you can save your notes directly to OneNote."
ASM.js lets supporting browsers run optimized JavaScript code at near native speed and is backwards compatible with all browsers (just running the code slower).
With ASM.js Microsoft could bring .NET to all browsers without even needing to update the browsers themselves (just running faster when in a browser that supports ASM.js).
So far only Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox support it, I'm waiting for Google Chrome to jump on the bandwagon honestly as it's genius.
Also if you want an idea of how powerful it is, it helped Mozilla run the Unreal 4 Engine in Firefox at 1080p in 60FPS without lag.