5 ms·

It's interesting that they decided to start from scratch with a new rendering engine. (I imagine the UI itself could have been updated without a lot of trouble.

by cpr 12y ago

It's interesting that they decided to start from scratch with a new rendering engine. (I imagine the UI itself could have been updated without a lot of trouble.) They probably looked at the thousands of special cases in the old spaghetti code, maybe took a gander at the Blink/Webkit sources ;-), and then decided, "Hang it, we can do this ourselves, and do it right." Likely a pretty fun project, betting against the "never start from scratch" common wisdom of the crowd.

asyncwords 12y ago
Curious that they're calling it a 'new' rendering engine at all. I could have sworn they said somewhere that it was still the same Trident engine, but without the legacy IE bits. Also, according to Paul Thurrott [1], the browser team was considering WebKit/Blink and ultimately decided to stick with Trident – apparently because of Google's control over Blink. [1]: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-windows-10s-spartan-isnt-going-suck#.VL5onjELVEw.reddit https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-window...
- cpr 12y ago
  Thanks, that's a helpful link. 'Twould be delightful to know just how they treated the existing Trident sources...
- bad_user 12y ago
  Well, I for one am glad that Microsoft decided against WebKit/Blink. Because of its popularity as a rendering engine, being used by Safari, Chrome and Opera, both on the desktop and on mobile phones, it is quickly becoming a monoculture. Even if we are talking about an open-source project, to me it smells too much like the lock-in that IExplorer once had on the market and people might not remember, but IExplorer was at some point very innovative and the best browser available. And many people also don't remember what happened after that. So even though I'm very grateful about WebKit/Blink, we really must avoid repeating mistakes of the past. Multiple implementations of a standard are very healthy, monocultures are not. However, I also think that given this overhaul, Microsoft should open-source this rendering engine. I really hope they do it and it would be in their interest to do so.

by cpr 12y ago

asyncwords 12y ago

Curious that they're calling it a 'new' rendering engine at all. I could have sworn they said somewhere that it was still the same Trident engine, but without the legacy IE bits. Also, according to Paul Thurrott [1], the browser team was considering WebKit/Blink and ultimately decided to stick with Trident – apparently because of Google's control over Blink. [1]: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-windows-10s-spartan-isnt-going-suck#.VL5onjELVEw.reddit https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-window...

cpr 12y ago
Thanks, that's a helpful link. 'Twould be delightful to know just how they treated the existing Trident sources...
bad_user 12y ago
Well, I for one am glad that Microsoft decided against WebKit/Blink. Because of its popularity as a rendering engine, being used by Safari, Chrome and Opera, both on the desktop and on mobile phones, it is quickly becoming a monoculture. Even if we are talking about an open-source project, to me it smells too much like the lock-in that IExplorer once had on the market and people might not remember, but IExplorer was at some point very innovative and the best browser available. And many people also don't remember what happened after that. So even though I'm very grateful about WebKit/Blink, we really must avoid repeating mistakes of the past. Multiple implementations of a standard are very healthy, monocultures are not. However, I also think that given this overhaul, Microsoft should open-source this rendering engine. I really hope they do it and it would be in their interest to do so.