
More Details About Project Spartan - nozzlegear
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/30/introducing-project-spartan-the-new-browser-built-for-windows-10/
======
jawns
It seems to me that one reason IE declined was because developers hated it. So
we stopped using it, we stopped relying on IE-only features, we started
implementing features IE didn't support, we threw our weight behind
alternatives, and we labeled IE as uncool. Maybe I'm overestimating how big of
an influence we were, but I don't think our influence was trivial, either.

That's why I'm kind of surprised that this preview of Spartan is not really
developer centric.

You can talk to and write on web pages?

As an end user ... cool. Not really revolutionary, but cool.

As a developer, though, I don't really care, unless it is easy to build things
in IE. For years, IE gave us headaches and heartaches. Give us something that
makes up for that, please.

~~~
jamra
IE lagged behind other browsers. It did not implement the open standards that
the others did. That has nothing to do with developers not liking IE. It has
everything to do with how Microsoft had a monopoly on the browser market.

~~~
chao-
To hear Brendan Eich tell it, Microsoft's mindset went beyond simply "We have
a monopoly so we can do whatever we want." It was a conscious "The web isn't
the future" attitude. From the JavaScript Jabber podcast:

 _" After IE6 they took the team down to a skeleton crew and they stopped
fixing bugs. They had horrendous security bugs and page layout bugs and DOM
bugs and networking bugs. And they just said, 'Ah, the web is over. We’re
going to do Windows presentation foundation,' which became Silverlight. 'We're
going to do .NET. The web, that was a passing fad, sort of like television.'
So…"_

Now whether or not Eich is the absolute authority or not on this, I can't say,
but he certainly interacted with them enough to have a deeper perspective than
the average, frustrated dev in 00's.

(Source: [http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-
javascript...](http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript-
with-brendan-eich))

~~~
m0th87
I interned at Microsoft when they were trying to ramp up from from the
skeleton crew. The impression I got was that this was part of it, but also
that Microsoft was averse to innovating on IE after the US antitrust case.

~~~
TwoBit
Microsoft didn't need to do any "innovating." They just needed to adhere to
existing and emerging standards. Also, Microsoft needs to seriously stop using
that word "innovation,"because the more they talked about it, the less they
actually did. It got to the point that Microsoft fooled themselves into
thinking that everything they did was innovation.

------
pdknsk
I'm still very wary of this new browser. Microsoft keeps saying since IE9 that
they finally delivered, but it's not the case yet. IE still lags behind and
still has quirks.

I actually downloaded the IE11 VM from [http://modern.ie](http://modern.ie)
the other day to give it another chance. A not very pleasant experience. After
boot, I was greeted with a desktop background with some instructions,
presented as a badly compressed JPEG. I'll be honest, and vote me down if you
must, but I'd be ashamed to have delivered this kind of work. Make it a PNG or
a BMP even, it's not going to inflate the 4GB download size noticeably.

As for IE itself, I cannot really judge its rendering because VirtualBox
doesn't seem to run Windows 10 accelerated, and I think the font rendering in
particular suffers from this. I can't say though.

It still has some quirks that need to be worked around. I noticed this
particular JavaScript problem.

    
    
      var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
      xhr.timeout = 1000;
      xhr.ontimeout = function() {console.log('Error')};
      xhr.open('GET', '/');
      xhr.send();
    

This throws an exception in IE11. IE only allows timeout to be set between
open() and send(). It's allowed to be set at any point per specs, even after
send().

[https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-timeout-
attribute](https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-timeout-attribute)

Microsoft has documentation, from the time of IE8, which clarifies this.
Apparently nobody at Microsoft cared to fix this since.

> The timeout property may be set only in the time interval between a call to
> the open method and the first call to the send method.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ie/cc304105.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ie/cc304105.aspx)

So I tried to report this as a bug. IE doesn't have a public bug tracker, only
what appears to be a way to send "suggestions" to the IE team. I read a few of
them. There is little activity. You basically only get a formal PR-like
response.

Microsoft still has much work to do.

~~~
MichaelGG
Windows 10 introduced a major VM-screen-breaking bug a few builds ago. Screens
can't be sized properly anymore. And acceleration seems to be broken (at
least, I hope so, otherwise there's a huge perf regression). Users of VMware
and VirtualBox are complaining. Posts to the forums get "answered" by idiot
moderators that insist this is a VMware problem (despite VirtualBox not being
made by VMware).

VMware says MS broke the APIs for screen resolution and they won't fix and
hope MS does. OTOH, VMware Workstation is pretty much an end-of-life product
with no real updates in quite a while.

Overall, it's bizarre. You'd think that in a beta, usage in a VM would be
really high, leading to not having regressions on such common "hardware".

------
EugeneOZ
Marketing bullshit, 0 technical information. "More Details" = "First, be an
amazing browser .."

------
amelius
The software engineering process in browser development seems completely
broken. W3C delivers only human-readable specs, and no reference
implementation, and no complete test suite. How can we ever expect browsers to
be functionally correct?

~~~
cpeterso
The W3C does publish specification tests:

[https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests](https://github.com/w3c/web-
platform-tests)

[http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the-
ope...](http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the-open-web-
platform.html)

~~~
gsnedders
To be fair, until a few years ago the testsuites were mostly terrible and
laughably bad — little more than skeletal things to ensure there was some
basic interoperability (and not necessarily covering all the features of a
spec). It took a huge push from a lot of people to get to where we are today;
I remember pushing for the CSS 2.1 testsuite, which was one of the first to
have a reasonable number of tests though it's still far too shallow, to be
largely automatable and getting a fair bit of resistance (because of fear of
delaying the testsuite and the spec demonstrating interoperability of
implementations and reaching REC), and that was in 2010 (though, holy cow,
that's almost five years ago now!).

As far as reference implementations go — I'm on the whole against them (you
can end up having to implement bug-for-bug compatibility, which doesn't help
anyone and if those bugs fall out of implementation details they can lock you
down into specific implementation designs). It's better to have clear,
unambiguous specs (preferably with next to nothing undefined) and multiple
interoperable implementations — because it shows that the spec is clear enough
for multiple people to implement it and come up with the same result. The
machine readable route is a dangerous one — you don't want to end up in a
situation where everyone just uses the same implementation, because
monocultures aren't at all great.

------
forgotAgain
Hmmm

First I thought Spartan was supposed to be a browser that embraced standards
and got rid of years of IE non-standard workarounds.

Now they're extending that model with "Inking and sharing", and distraction
free reading view. So the baseline browser is going to be different on
different devices unless all of the devices are from Microsoft.

I think they're over estimating their ability to control the market's standard
user expectations.

~~~
ulber
Inking, sharing and reading mode are user facing features. Standards in web
browsers have to do with the APIs and rendering and such conforming to
standards.

------
morley
I wish they would commit to the name "Spartan." I don't think the full
"Project Spartan" is a good name for a browser. And replacing it at this point
with something completely different would squander the goodwill from all the
prerelease buzz.

~~~
ericcholis
It's a pretty fitting codename, originating from the Spartan Program from
Halo:

"...using performance enhancing equipment and augmentations to make them
stronger and faster than previously thought possible..."

I think they should stick with it as well.

~~~
pandatigox
It's very interesting how much Halo plays an influence into the Microsoft
world. It started off with Cortana and now we have a Spartan project!

(on a side, I thought it was ironic how the article said "Cortana is more
tightly embedded into the new browser". Like what next? HUDs!?!)

~~~
navait
I think halo is a good smart marketing move to associate future Microsoft
consumer products with halo. The 360 is by far microsoft's biggest consumer
electronic success, and halo it's flagship franchise. Kids growing up now with
the 360 will know it, and it's not associated with the boring windows
enterprise stuff. And if you don't know halo, the names sound okay anyways.

I mean it was that or resurrect clippy.

------
untog
_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._

I'm really, really not sure how this is going to work in an era of single page
apps. Presumably it can only really send the URL, so unless a developer has
been very strict about using pushState (and good on them if they have) I think
we'll see a lot of broken experiences with anything other than article web
pages.

~~~
teamonkey
I assume it's similar to how OneNote does things, which is to create a
metadata-rich copy of the page you select (as opposed to a screenshot, which
isn't searchable) while keeping as much of the formatting intact as possible.

It's probably very useful if you ever do web research or need to review web
content (I do), but I'm not sure this is as big a deal as they're making it
out to be. Might be some box-ticking for marketing ("make sure you find a use
for the pen!!!").

------
MichaelGG
Three requirements for me to consider IE again:

0\. Fix the font rendering. Enough of this WPF/Metro blurry style crap.

1\. Give me an addon/extension system so I can get vim bindings and blocking
systems.

2\. Fix the ugly, unfinished blocky UI around the tabs and address bar, and
stop wasting so much space on the top window border. I know this sounds
superficial, and it is, but IE just looks so ugly, or like an unfinished dev
preview, and for some reason that bothers me.

~~~
300bps
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just include a WebKit or even
Chromium fork right in the OS.

They could have > 90% browser market share again.

~~~
UK-AL
Competition is good, it brings invocation. A monotone world would be very
boring.

~~~
OmarIsmail
This is not a universal law of the world. There are times when using a common
technology is better.

In this specific case why is "competition good" and who cares about boring
when it comes to developer's productivity. Being able to code against one
browser and being certain that it works properly in all browsers would be a
tremendously wonderful thing for everyone.

To sacrifice that ideal vision so that things aren't "boring" doesn't seem
worth it to put it kindly.

~~~
UK-AL
Then you get no one trying different js engines, or trying different
approaches rendering.

IE6 was pretty much a monopoly, how well did that go?

~~~
OmarIsmail
Webkit does not include the JS engine. And the different approaches to
rendering is also incorrect. Google has Blink which is - for all intents and
purposes - Webkit.

IE6 was closed source, and under control of one company. Webkit is open source
with contributions from many major organizations.

------
fsaintjacques
Clippy is back!

~~~
notahacker
"going to a restaurant's home page will bring up a message, reading “I've got
directions, hours, and more.” Clicking the message brings up a sidebar with
the restaurant's contact information, location, reviews and an OpenTable
reservation link" [1]

More pay-per-click than paperclip?

[1][http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan-
leake...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan-leaked-heres-
how-cortana-will-work-in-microsofts-new-browser.html)

------
camhenlin
So how about its speed? Internet Explorer on mobile and other devices (like
Xbox) has always had horrifically bad canvas performance, rendering the
majority of HTML5 games unplayable on those devices. Will Spartan be
addressing that in any way?

~~~
camhenlin
Downvoted because you disagree that IE has awful canvas performance? Or just
don't want to talk about it?

------
sergiotapia
The main thing that excites me is that it's not Webkit. Google has infested
it's rendering engine into everything, even my favorite: Opera.

Having competition is great, I will give this browser a genuine shot.

~~~
tree_of_item
WebKit doesn't belong to Google (Apple started the project as a fork from
KHTML), and they don't even use it anymore, they forked it in to Blink, which
is what Opera uses.

~~~
chc
"They don't even use it anymore" is a bit of an exaggeration. "They made a
fork of WebKit and renamed their fork Blink" is more accurate. It's still
pretty close to the same thing.

~~~
ahoge
They should be over 100k commits apart by now.

A lot happened in those 2 years.

~~~
chc
Well, sure, but a lot more happened in the preceding 10-15 years. Blink still
has more in common with WebCore than it does with, say, Gecko, Trident or
Presto.

~~~
ahoge
As a web developer or user, you can't really see the similarities anymore. The
basic stuff like CSS 2.1 works the same everywhere. It's the new features
where the browsers differ.

[http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safar...](http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safari+8)

Chrome matches Safari in 57 cases. However, Chrome matches Firefox in 61
cases. So, going by the implementation status of those features, Chrome might
as well be using a fork of Gecko.

Here is the script I used:

    
    
        for (let b = 1; b < 5; b++) {
          let r = [0, 0, 0, 0];
          [].forEach.call($$('tbody tr'), function (row) {
            for (let i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
              r[i] += +(row.cells[i + 1].className === row.cells[b].className);
            }
          });
          console.log(r);
        }
    

Output:

    
    
        [130, 35, 36, 48]
        [35, 130, 61, 36]
        [36, 61, 130, 57]
        [48, 36, 57, 130]

------
JamesBaxter
Interesting they're saying 20 years and beyond. I wonder if other browser
developers are thinking that far ahead.

~~~
mmahemoff
They say that. 20 years ahead is way too hard to predict with any meaningful
features. (Does Spartan ship with JavaScript events for brain interfaces?)
Really it just boils down to the fact they're starting a big browser project
with a fresh slate from today.

The most a browser can really do is make the architecture sufficiently modular
and extensible based on a layered architecture. The web stack has always done
pretty well at that anyway and even more so with the newer low-level standards
like fetch and service workers.

------
PebblesHD
I wonder how they plan on overcoming the decade or more of stigma attached to
Internet Explorer. A pig in lipstick?

------
jszymborski
Looks like they're trying to scoop Genius (formerly RapGenius) with the
"annotate the web" thing.

------
nottrobin
_sigh_ if only either Spartan or EdgeHTML were open source

~~~
bobajeff
I actually asked the IE team about that. They said they weren't planning on
doing that.

Which I think is a shame because I like being able to follow comments in
Mozilla's/WebKit's/Chromium's issue trackers and mailing lists. It gives you a
much clearer idea on what's being put into the browser's and when they'll be
available (or why they won't).

Their are other reasons such as not having to worry about them trying to lock
me into their OS because websites will only work on their browser and it's
exclusive to their OS. Also, making everyone have to reverse engineer bugs to
get sites to work.

------
zshprompt
wow looking at that video you'd think software is no longer a male dominated
field. problem solved.

~~~
lasfter
Are you criticizing their video for having _too many_ women?

