A new Microsoft browser?

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/12/a_new_microsoft.html

by cleverjake • 12 years ago

155 120 12 years ago

At this point, Microsoft has pulled the plug on so many of its products & services over the years that developers and users are cautiously avoiding everything it puts out. Even if it's good.

From Zune (iPod competitor), to Kin, to Origami (small touchscreen laptop), to Games for Windows Live (steam competitor), to Live.com (google competitor v1), Bing.com (google compeititor v2), Expo (craigslist competitor), whats-it-called? (twitter competitor for natural disasters), Expression, Silverlight (flash competitor), Windows Live Spaces (wordpress competitor), Windows Phone...

Microsoft loves to start things, then leaves them to rot.

The Micro-Cycle:

1) See someone make money. Get starry eyed.

2) Rush into industry with product.

3) Let product/service rot.

4) Sunset product/service.

quesera2• 12 years ago

See also: Yahoo, but with #2 as "Acquire at large premium".

Any company with more cash than cultural relevance will do the same.

I don't think bing belongs on your list though. It's not making headway in the market, but it's not dead yet either.

ChrisNorstrom2• 12 years ago

Yeah, Bing and Windows Phone are still going but Bing is losing $3 billion a year, and Windows phone is losing market share despite sales increasing. It's only a matter of time before their plugs are pulled.

joenathan2• 12 years ago

Google abandons projects swiftly when they think that don't make sense; Wave, iGoogle, Reader, Glass?, Buzz, Plus?, Answers, Google Video, Google Checkout/Wallet, Orkut, Picasa, Gears, etc... When you are a large company you need to focus your resources into areas where you can be effective and not stretch yourself too thin.

frozenport2• 12 years ago

Yeah, but these aren't software platforms.

TheSoftwareGuy• 12 years ago

Did I miss something? When did Google give up on glass?

imron• 12 years ago

Google doing it too doesn't somehow absolve Microsoft's transgressions.

People are also weary of Google doing this and you see comments on it in almost every discussion on HN of a Google product.

tdkl• 12 years ago

and not stretch yourself too thin.

But they are. Keep, Fit are prime examples of stretching but offering a mediocre "service".

The way I see it, Google turned hard into a direction from building services with APIs into data collection silos. Google+ with Photos, Keep, Fit, Now. The data is even isolated from each other or really hard to access : - you can't access Keep data anywhere, or what you upload on it - Google+ Photos are available on web, not in Drive. You can see Drive photos in it, but you can't edit them with auto awesome

Fit is so basic that it offers practically nothing that it doesn't already exists out there. Data representation is in a form of one graph of total calories/steps. It does require you to enable location tracking though, to be able to automatically track steps/workouts (how suprising), which takes a major effect on the battery life.

Google is coming for your data and coming hard.

frozenport2• 12 years ago

>Windows Phone

Hey! When did Windows Phone die?

MichaelGG4• 12 years ago

Probably referring to Windows Mobile. The platform that came out of nowhere, killed Palm and got total PDA/smartphone dominance... then suffered the IE fate because terrible management decided to remove resources since they had "won".

Not everyone remembers, but it was viewed as near-impossible to dethrone Palm, but inside of what, 5 years?, MS had Palm selling WM devices.

dummyfellow2• 12 years ago

Microsoft also has tons of product they supported for years. From Windows, to SQL server, to Sharepoint, to dynamics, to Office, to Visual Studio, to xbox, to ... Also live.com rebranded and bing,WP are still alive and well funded. If you look for a company to never shutdown a product which isn't getting traction, you are living in a dreamspace and need to wakeup.

yzzxy• 12 years ago

To be fair, the original Xbox was quietly removed from store shelves and software development halted immediately after the 360 was announced. Contrast this with the average console support cycle of several years into the new generation.

stinos• 12 years ago

Microsoft loves to start things, then leaves them to rot. The Micro-Cycle...

You seem to be claiming this is going to happen to IE as well? Seems a bit far fetched, given it is still used by millions of people and something like 20% of all desktop browsers used is IE.

s_extra_s• 12 years ago

It's a good idea to create a new browser that updates automatically every few weeks like chrome rather than IE, which normally can't update automatically because of corporate policies.

Encosia• 12 years ago

IE has been automatically updating for a while now.

sharkweek• 12 years ago

Yes but... I used to work for a large financial institution that wouldn't let any of us do anything to our computers so we were all stuck with outdated IE that didn't update itself automatically

kijin• 12 years ago

But then corporations will simply disable automatic updates for PCs under their control. Don't underestimate the stubbornness of corporate IT departments!

frik• 12 years ago

IE 11 has automatic updates, check out its "info" dialog! Though I saw several corporate PCs where the admins turned the autoupdate off.

Older IE got updates through Windows Update. The last IE version for WinXP was IE 8.

If IE 12 doesn't come with a transparent IE compatibility mode and just starts a IE 11 window, corporate admins will probably set IE 11 as default browser.

So developers of enterprise websites are stuck with IE 11 and its almost finished but a bit broken HTML5 support for years to come :(

jlmorton• 12 years ago

It would be really nice if all browsers had an expiration date. If they haven't been updated in 12 months, they simply cease to operate in any way except to update themselves.

gregclermont• 12 years ago

I've heard once or twice that, after one of the IE-related antitrust cases, Microsoft has been imposed a pretty heavy official procedure to release a new version of IE, that contributes to the slowness of the release cycle. If that's real, I wonder if this fork could have the additional benefit of circumventing this procedure.

Silhouette8• 12 years ago

It's a good idea to create a new browser that updates automatically every few weeks like chrome rather than IE, which normally can't update automatically because of corporate policies.

If IE is there primarily to access the corporate intranet and other work-related sites, as usually seems to be the case in this kind of environment, then that stability is a feature, not a bug.

The last thing you need as a sysadmin for an organisation with thousands of members is someone who thinks they know better "upgrading" their browser to a new version that no longer works properly with critical business sites/apps, has unknown or at least untested-by-IT security issues that therefore may or may not require mitigation at corporate tooling level, and so on. This is particularly true if, as almost invariably seems to be the case, that individual won't be the person who takes the flak when something breaks, violates regulatory compliance, creates a security problem, etc.

I doubt there is a single organisation anywhere in the world that has IE locked down at corporate level, yet where any legitimate business purpose would be better served by having browser software updated every few weeks.

nawazdhandala• 12 years ago

I actually think Microsoft is re-branding IE rather than completely rewriting it.

cleverjake• 12 years ago

why not both?

keeperofdakeys• 12 years ago

This is what the author of the article suspects, a fork of IE that will remove compatibility modes. Did you read the article, or just skim it?

gosukiwi• 12 years ago

Rumors say it's the same rendering and javascript engine but the UI will get more similar to Chrome and FF and there'll be extensions. Also yeah no backwards compatibility it seems, and more regular updates. Sounds good to me.

userbinator• 12 years ago

but the UI will get more similar to Chrome and FF

I don't think this is a good thing at all. People choose to use different browsers partly because they have different UIs, and UI changes are particularly jarring as evidenced by all the "I'll use browser Y" complaints when browser X changes something about their UI... only to be followed later by "I'll use browser X" when Y changes. There's no longer any real choice, it's just an illusion of choosing between narrowing alternatives.

Especially to see browsers' UI turning into clones of Chrome is sad, since I personally hate the "hide everything away that could possibly confuse users" and the associated "treat users like idiots" mentality that's particularly prevalent in browsers today. IE is one of the few browsers remaining that had relatively more UI, but I'm not surprised to see it disappearing... the trend seems to be to turn browsers into glorified televisions, with UIs like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8670503

wideroots2• 12 years ago

I will give it a try if the new browser no longer supports ActiveX and has better extension supports similar to Chrome.

UnoriginalGuy• 12 years ago

ActiveX isn't a major concern, in current IE if you look in the security tab in the Internet context, it is pretty locked down and damn near depreciated.

Intranet is more liberal. But a lot of enterprises add their internal portals to the trusted list if they still depend on ActiveX (as a depressingly large number do).

Chrome and Firefox's extensions are better. Although Firefox's extension model is a little clunky due to how old it is (or at least it was last time I used it).

parag_c_mehta• 12 years ago

Yes but a good browser with Chrome's features will be a great alternative. Right now Chrome has become a big memory hog and is slowly going to competition with old IE.

Animats• 12 years ago

Chrome and Firefox's extensions are better. Although Firefox's extension model is a little clunky due to how old it is.

New-style "Jetpack" add-ons in Firefox and add-ons in Chrome are very similar. I have the same add-on for both platforms, and there's about 80% code commonality. If Microsoft does something reasonably similar, that would be convenient for add-on developers.

wideroots2• 12 years ago

If Microsoft kills ActiveX in the new browser, it will force everyone to stop depending on ActiveX. You would be very surprised how many websites outside of the U.S. still depend on ActiveX, and these are critical websites like banking and government. Hence, killing ActiveX support is important to me.

MichaelGG4• 12 years ago

Lack of an addon architecture is what completely killed IE for me. No adblock is a no-go. (It's also the non-idealogical reason I use FF on Android: Chrome is locked down.)

vcjohnson• 12 years ago

Pretty sure IE has an adblock extension

imarihantnahata• 12 years ago

Adblock for IE: https://adblockplus.org/releases/adblock-plus-12-for-interne...

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

IE11 has adblock built-in. I don't recall the name, but it's somewhere in the advanced options. It takes the Adblock rules files.

ynniv• 12 years ago

Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I’ve come to the conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12. Still, I think we web developers should support the “new browser” narrative.

This is how you start an article. I didn't read any farther, but my already high opinion of quirksmode.org is even higher.

beaner• 12 years ago

Why? I don't get anything particularly insightful at all from this snippet.

brink• 12 years ago

I think that he means that there's no storytelling cruft that just fills paragraphs and wastes time. It's short, concise and rich in information.

gpvos• 12 years ago

Although he left out all the details, after the first paragraph you know enough to decide whether you want to read the rest of the article or not.

The "inverted pyramid" someone else linked to here means that the information is presented from most to least important, so you can stop reading the article anytime when it starts to bore you, and still know you have read everything you want to know.

jmduke• 12 years ago

In case you weren't aware, this is referred to as the inverted pyramid (and of course I totally agree -- this is how you start an article):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

jn• 12 years ago

Absolutely agree. I cringe every time I see a long blog post with a self-effacing "tl;dr" block, especially when it's placed at the end of the article. Just follow this "journalistic" style instead and you'll be doing the reader a big favour.

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

It's probably one of the reasons why the BBC News website is popular. All articles were originally written so that the first three or four paragraphs could be cut off, and presented as full articles on teletext (a tv text service), so the whole story had to be summarized within that space. They still write their articles in that way, even though teletext is increasingly un-used.

I should say, though, that it does mean that the content of that summary, and of the headline, becomes extremely important. For instance, you could nominally cover a news story, but write a boring headline and summary, and very few people will trudge through that to find the really important details later on. You do sometimes find that occurring on the BBC site, especially when it's a story which might raise a lot of controversy within government.

brickmort• 12 years ago

I don't mean to be so disparaging, but Microsoft really should just take IE out back and shoot it.

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

That's not really helpful. IE is no longer a shitty browser; why should it be killed off?

nailer5• 12 years ago

It really is. Even in IE11 there's a bunch of busted basics. The CustomEvent constructor is broken out of the box.

Edit: see details in post below.

gaius• 12 years ago

When IE6 came out, it was a breath of fresh air; the fastest, most stable, most featureful, most standards-compliant browser available. It was the final piece of the puzzle that let corporate developers move away from desktop apps and onto the web wholesale.

Sure it has overstayed its welcome. But I hate the revisionist attitude of some, who were still in school when all this went down.

ripdog• 12 years ago

Why? IE11 is a really good browser when you need something small, light, and incredibly fast. I can slap adblock and lastpass on it, too.

junto• 12 years ago

Any competition is good competition, no matter what the quality is. Or do you want a single monopolistic choice of Chrome to rule the world? Sorry, bit we've been there before. Embrace the variety.

gldalmaso• 12 years ago

Variety is good but Microsoft has an ugly history with standards and that is very hurtful to the ecosystem.

They promised that they have changed in regards to that, but those are just words in the wind, time will tell on that. Also, they were lagging behind HTML5 standards for a long time, then they sort of caught up, now they are lagging behind on ECMAScript 6 features.

Every time I check, it is Microsoft's fault that I still can't use an otherwise widely implemented feature.

Quality implementation and standards adoption is the name of the game in the browser market. After 10+ years in that market, my opinion is that they have neither. The only reason they are still playing is end-user and corporate inertia.

venomsnake2• 12 years ago

Does anyone have idea if the idiocy of integrating the IE browser so deep inside the os is finally solved, that version updates are possible? And will spartan be stand alone binary, like IE should have been at launch?

lostlogin• 12 years ago

I don't have a good understanding of the history of IE but thought it was embedded as a way of breaking Netscape - if that was ever true the time has obviously passed for it to remain deeply embedded. However if this was the reason, isn't that a good argument for the way MS constructed IE (which isn't to say I agree with the strategy)?

berkut• 12 years ago

"Breaking" Netscape? A stand-alone application? Really?

Anticompetitive maybe, but Microsoft embedding IE into Windows didn't break Netscape or other browsers in any functional way from my recollection (and I was using NN 2/3/4, Opera, IE 3/4/5/6 on 28.8 and 56k modems at the time).

kalleboo3• 12 years ago

IE was deeply embedded because it was created in the bubble of "web all the things!" so they went so far as using IE the renderer for the desktop wallpapers and the file browser (IIRC you could even set a custom index.html for a folder on your harddisk)

venomsnake2• 12 years ago

It was the fact that it came with windows and free that broke netscape. That the rendering engine is so embedded in the OS that the question is "will we be able to bring IE X to platform windows Y at all" is just stupid.

contextfree2• 12 years ago

The root of it was that Microsoft thought of the web browser as a kind of competing alternate OS-on-top-of-the-OS (which, in many ways, it is - the OS and browser each feature their own arguably duplicative/redundant UI frameworks, launching/switching mechanisms, etc). They didn't think this situation could last - either the browser would be subsumed into the OS, or the OS would be subsumed into the browser, or they would merge somehow. This belief was shared by others at the time (e.g. Marc Andreessen's famous declaration that the web would reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers"). So everything they were trying to do with IE and Windows was based on the intention that the distinction between them would gradually disappear.

pjc50• 12 years ago

IE is to Windows as Webkit is to iOS; it's componentised HTML rendering.

The whole browser choice lawsuit business was strange; it was far from the worst bit of anti-competitive behaviour, and has been superceded by closed platforms on phones. The "halloween" documents and funding of SCO were more objectionable to me.

scholia• 12 years ago

There was a backstory. Janet Reno's DoJ forced Microsoft to sign a consent decree that forbade them from tieing products to Windows but allowed them to add functionality to Windows. Therefore, IE had to be a feature of Windows not a separate bundled product.

Otherwise, in the eventual anti-trust trial, Microsoft won the browser case 2-1 on appeal.

Havoc2• 12 years ago

Sounds good. Let's hope Spartan is the mindset the devs are operating with.

thomasfoster963• 12 years ago

One of the things I really want to see is both IE and Safari move to the six weekly update cycle that Firefox and Chrome are using.

IE still has a major slice of the browser market share and this probably ain't going to change soon. IE>9 have all been decent browsers for the time that they were released, although they do seem a bit out of date 6 months later. At the moment, if both Firefox and Chrome implement a new web platform feature, it's often available to ~60% of web users within three months because of the release cycle and auto updates. IE going to a 6-week major release cycle could probably push this up to 80%-90% of users getting a feature within three months, which would be awesome. (IE mobile is pretty small for market share, so I'll ignore it at the objection of my Windows Phone using friends.)

Safari pretty much now works on a yearly major release cycle - which is better than waiting two or three years, but it still sucks. Switching on Mac OS X to Chrome or Firefox (or Opera) is simple enough. iOS, however, is pretty much limited to whatever mobile Safari happened to have when WWDC rolled around (save for minor updates whenever iOS 8 becomes 8.1, for example). I sort of hope Apple uncouples core app versioning and updates from iOS and Mac OS X updates soon, because that's mean they could move Safari to a much shorter release cycle. iOS Safari is probably the most widely used mobile browser, and keeping it at the bleeding edge would do wonders for the mobile web.

cmiller1• 12 years ago

What about Safari's Webkit nightly releases?

thomasfoster963• 12 years ago

They're not exactly for Joe Bloke the Safari user.

Flow• 12 years ago

AFAIK, it has no iCloud integration.

madeofpalk• 12 years ago

Nightly WebKit release !== Safari release

Silhouette8• 12 years ago

One of the things I really want to see is both IE and Safari move to the six weekly update cycle that Firefox and Chrome are using.

Whereas I would really like IE not to do that, and ideally Firefox and Chrome to move to longer cycles (minimum 6 months, preferably annual) for their main public releases.

One good reason for this is that there is no point in having browsers support new features within moments of someone conceiving them unless developers are also keeping up with new developments at the same pace. Take three major browsers on a six-weekly cycle and you literally need to be updating your skill set every two weeks and have projects to work on where those new skills are actually useful. Unless all you do is write trendy web development blogs for a living, you are not likely to be in this category.

Another good reason is that both Firefox and Chrome have horrible records for quality since going to six-weekly release cycles, both in terms of bugs/regressions and because they frequently implement new features that tick boxes but have such poor quality of implementation that they aren't actually useful for production work anyway. For example, right now, both Firefox and Chrome have numerous glitches and performance problems in popular HTML/CSS features like animations, web fonts, multimedia elements, and SVG, to the extent that you can't reliably assume even relatively simple applications will work without extensive and ongoing testing.

Recent versions of IE stand in sharp contrast to that pattern, and as such I think IE now provides both a valuable brake on the industry and a demonstration that having a solid, fast implementation of some features is far more useful in practice than having unreliable and/or slow implementations of more features.

(Edit: It's disappointing to see multiple downvotes yet no responses. This happens all too often when I express the unpopular-but-based-on-hard-data view that Firefox and Chrome are often slow and/or buggy when it comes to new features, even though numerous articles and blog posts giving specific examples in the areas I mentioned are yours to read for the price of a Google search.)

DougWebb3• 12 years ago

I'll give you an upvote because I hear what you're saying; keeping up with new browser features is tough if you've got other things to do as well. But, you don't need to incorporate every new feature into your own web projects, and you don't need to follow the same rapid release cycle as the browsers.

If my project has an annual update cycle, I want to be certain that any new browser features I'd like to use are widely supported and have been tested in-the-wild for as long as possible before I commit to them. The rapid release cycles of the browsers gives me that, and also ensures that there will be blogs and StackOverflow questions providing useful documentation on the best ways to use the new features by the time I'm ready to learn about them.

altcognito• 12 years ago

Since you asked:

Most Chrome and Firefox releases (in my experience) have been relatively minor, and focused on security and bugs. Lets take a look at the last 4 releases of Chrome:

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/11/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/10/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/09/stable-chan... http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/08/stable-chan...

What argument could be made that longer release cycles would mean less bugs? Is there going to be better QA? More stringent testing? Why would shorter release cycles mean less testing?

No, longer release cycles would mean similar number of bugs, and security holes would just sit out there longer. Chrome and Firefox is an example of doing it right.

nickhalfasleep• 12 years ago

I think it shows the difference between Browsers that support Operating Systems and Browsers that have their own internet agendas.

thomasfoster963• 12 years ago

Chrome and Firefox don't support features within moments of someone conceiving them. I've seen discussions about what features will be coming to Chrome in the future - rarely does a feature take less than six months to go from idea to stable implementation in Chrome. Firefox is a little different because Mozilla is pumping APIs into Firefox OS and then moving them to the main Firefox browser.

IE has issues with implementations even with their slow release cycle, as does Safari. While in theory a quicker release cycle probably should result in less stability and more bugs, there doesn't really seem to be this correlation in practice. A good way to check this out is to have a look at caniuse.com and see which browsers have issues with feature implementations (although caniuse is lagging behind a bit of recent). IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari will all have issues. To Apple's credit, Safari is the only browser which seems to be willing to regularly remove buggy features.

billyhoffman• 12 years ago

I firmly believe that Chrome's day one feature of in-place auto updates was one of the most important milestones in web browser development. The accelerated pace of fractional improvement and implementation of new standards (even in draft form) has been enormously powerful for the web as a whole.

IE is like the hare. It sprints ahead with each massive update, but then sleeps for a year or more, only pushing security fixes via Windows update. Chrome is the Tortoise, forever moving, always making progress.

http://zoompf.com/blog/2012/09/internet-explorer-is-the-hare...

mrbig45452• 12 years ago

lets hope they make it windows version agnostic, that way we can all start supporting ie12, instead of being shackled to ie9

ben336• 12 years ago

Eh? IE9 isn't the latest version available for any version of Windows.

8 is the latest for XP/Vista

11 is the latest for 7/8/8.1

9 is still popular because not everybody upgrades browsers, but giving users who don't upgrade browsers a new option is unlikely to be helpful.

Communicating to them that IE is going away and that they should upgrade to a modern browser, "Spartan" or otherwise, would possibly help this situation, as the author suggests.

mrbig45452• 12 years ago

ie9 is available for vista. although in practice, ie8 is the minimum we have to support

nercury• 12 years ago

For some reason, I immediately pictured a product rewrite gone wrong and causing two versions of the same product appear, because the new one can never catch up to the legacy quirks of first.

sunasra• 12 years ago

It would be really great if they do more work on compatibility and memory management(Currently chrome kills the system)

spdustin• 12 years ago

They should go full-circle with FrontPage (which inspired many folks to get into web apps back in the day) and call it Vermeer.

(From Vermeer Technologies, Inc., the original FrontPage server extensions folks - fun random fact: it's why SharePoint service URLs have "_vti_bin" in their path)

ourmandave• 12 years ago

My initial thought was it will be a stand alone version that you can download and run next to IE6+ instead of Chrome, FF, et. al.

So instead of replacing IE6 with the competition, replace it with Spartan and MS gets to keep their browser market share and Corp IT can keep running IE6 apps.

A new Microsoft browser?

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