7 ms·

More Details About Project Spartan

95 points by nozzlegear 12y ago

fsaintjacques 12y ago
Clippy is back!
- notahacker 12y ago
  "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-leaked-heres-how-cortana-will-work-in-microsofts-new-browser.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan-leake...
- ethbro 12y ago
  > Clippy is back! Clippy was apparently 1996. Afaik, that's about the same point machine learning was going through a renaissance away from expert systems. As a comment on a previous HN story quipped, most of the 90s ideas weren't fundamentally bad, just impossible to realize with the knowledge and technology of the time.
- jasonlotito 12y ago
  Siri is the new Clippy. Siri keeps popping up without anyone asking, demanding she be attended to.
morley 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
    - rdudek 12y ago
      Well, they do have Hololens project going. Seems better than HUDs.
MichaelGG 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - EugeneOZ 12y ago
    Because of legacy. Spartan based on the old Trident engine, but refactored and without "compatibility" modes and quirks (as they promise). They need Trident to render old sites. Just imagine how huge is amount of old IE-only sites in corp. segment.
    - aout 12y ago
      Completely true. But is it so hard to imagine a fallback instead of a rewrite / refactor? I mean, aren't you tired to develop for X renderers? Couldn't Microsoft adopt something like the Khronos group for once and stop fucking around with proprietary bullshit?
  - UK-AL 12y ago
    Competition is good, it brings invocation. A monotone world would be very boring.
    - OmarIsmail 12y ago
      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.
sergiotapia 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    "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 12y ago
      They should be over 100k commits apart by now. A lot happened in those 2 years.
      - chc 12y ago
        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 12y ago
        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,safari+8 http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safar... 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]
nottrobin 12y ago
sigh if only either Spartan or EdgeHTML were open source
- bobajeff 12y ago
  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.
jawns 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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- 12y ago
    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-with-brendan-eich http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...)
    - majc2 12y ago
      Maybe true, but the bits he's picking out are kinda wrong IMHO. WPF hasn't changed much since it was first done in the mid 00s, Microsoft didn't put the same improvement into developer productivity for WPF as they have for ASP.NET (Webforms -> ASP.NET MVC, vNext etc). WPF workflow is still painful despite it being around for nearly 10 years and Xaml as a concept being around longer.
EugeneOZ 12y ago
Marketing bullshit, 0 technical information. "More Details" = "First, be an amazing browser .."
zshprompt 12y ago
wow looking at that video you'd think software is no longer a male dominated field. problem solved.
- lasfter 12y ago
  Are you criticizing their video for having too many women?
- romanovcode 12y ago
  None of them are developers tho, they're mostly managers.
JamesBaxter 12y ago
Interesting they're saying 20 years and beyond. I wonder if other browser developers are thinking that far ahead.
- mmahemoff 12y ago
  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.
amelius 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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-open-web-platform.html http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the-ope...
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    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.
untog 12y ago
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.
- jamra 12y ago
  It looks to me that they are thinking about some sort of use case that was popular in a management meeting in an attempt to make a browser that does something different than the others. Unfortunately, this forces the dev team to implement a browser, something made for the purpose of general applications, as something more feature specific.
- teamonkey 12y ago
  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!!!").
camhenlin 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Downvoted because you disagree that IE has awful canvas performance? Or just don't want to talk about it?
forgotAgain 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
PebblesHD 12y ago
I wonder how they plan on overcoming the decade or more of stigma attached to Internet Explorer. A pig in lipstick?
pdknsk 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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".
jszymborski 12y ago
Looks like they're trying to scoop Genius (formerly RapGenius) with the "annotate the web" thing.

95 points by nozzlegear 12y ago

fsaintjacques 12y ago

Clippy is back!

notahacker 12y ago
"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-leaked-heres-how-cortana-will-work-in-microsofts-new-browser.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan-leake...
ethbro 12y ago
> Clippy is back! Clippy was apparently 1996. Afaik, that's about the same point machine learning was going through a renaissance away from expert systems. As a comment on a previous HN story quipped, most of the 90s ideas weren't fundamentally bad, just impossible to realize with the knowledge and technology of the time.
jasonlotito 12y ago
Siri is the new Clippy. Siri keeps popping up without anyone asking, demanding she be attended to.

morley 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
  - rdudek 12y ago
    Well, they do have Hololens project going. Seems better than HUDs.

MichaelGG 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
- EugeneOZ 12y ago
  Because of legacy. Spartan based on the old Trident engine, but refactored and without "compatibility" modes and quirks (as they promise). They need Trident to render old sites. Just imagine how huge is amount of old IE-only sites in corp. segment.
  - aout 12y ago
    Completely true. But is it so hard to imagine a fallback instead of a rewrite / refactor? I mean, aren't you tired to develop for X renderers? Couldn't Microsoft adopt something like the Khronos group for once and stop fucking around with proprietary bullshit?
- UK-AL 12y ago
  Competition is good, it brings invocation. A monotone world would be very boring.
  - OmarIsmail 12y ago
    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.

sergiotapia 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  "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 12y ago
    They should be over 100k commits apart by now. A lot happened in those 2 years.
    - chc 12y ago
      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 12y ago
        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,safari+8 http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safar... 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]

nottrobin 12y ago

sigh if only either Spartan or EdgeHTML were open source

bobajeff 12y ago
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.

jawns 12y ago

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 12y ago
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- 12y ago
  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-with-brendan-eich http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript...)
  - majc2 12y ago
    Maybe true, but the bits he's picking out are kinda wrong IMHO. WPF hasn't changed much since it was first done in the mid 00s, Microsoft didn't put the same improvement into developer productivity for WPF as they have for ASP.NET (Webforms -> ASP.NET MVC, vNext etc). WPF workflow is still painful despite it being around for nearly 10 years and Xaml as a concept being around longer.

EugeneOZ 12y ago

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

zshprompt 12y ago

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

lasfter 12y ago
Are you criticizing their video for having too many women?
romanovcode 12y ago
None of them are developers tho, they're mostly managers.

JamesBaxter 12y ago

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

mmahemoff 12y ago
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.

amelius 12y ago

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 12y ago
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-open-web-platform.html http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the-ope...
- gsnedders 12y ago
  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.

untog 12y ago

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.

jamra 12y ago
It looks to me that they are thinking about some sort of use case that was popular in a management meeting in an attempt to make a browser that does something different than the others. Unfortunately, this forces the dev team to implement a browser, something made for the purpose of general applications, as something more feature specific.
teamonkey 12y ago
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!!!").

camhenlin 12y ago

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 12y ago
Downvoted because you disagree that IE has awful canvas performance? Or just don't want to talk about it?

forgotAgain 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

PebblesHD 12y ago

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

pdknsk 12y ago

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 12y ago
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".

jszymborski 12y ago

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