First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft's take on the modern browser

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/first-look-at-project-spartan-microsofts-take-on-the-modern-browser/

by shawndumas • 11 years ago

60 60 11 years ago

arstechnica.com

Zikes• 11 years ago

Is there any word on intent to support extensions, or implement tab sandboxing?

frik3• 11 years ago

IE has already sandboxing since IE8 (on Vista onwards). Spartan is forked of the (former) IE12's "Edge" trident code. It's basically a new WinRuntime based GUI app that uses the refactored trident engine (with old legacy compatibility code removed).

MLR2• 11 years ago

They've stated that they will have extension support, and the rumour is that porting Chrome extensions will be incredibly easy.

As for sandboxing, I just had a quick look at task manager and it seems to spawn a new process per tab.

jakejake• 11 years ago

It'll be interesting to see if MS can stand strong on no backwards-compatibility. It seems like every time they release something new, by the time it's out of beta it's got tons of compatibility baggage added.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

I know what you mean. But in this specific case they are continuing to offer the "legacy" IE engine for those jobs, so they may be able to keep this one unencumbered just by pointing people to that.

slayed0• 11 years ago

They sure chose a distracting snapshot of their website to showcase the minimalist UI of this new browser. all I notice at first glance is the alarming "Top Post" and all of the images. I guess this is a good thing?

leeoniya2• 11 years ago

as a web dev, the main thing i'm looking forward to is its "evergreen-ness" for all the web's consumers not on Chrome or FF.

now only Safari left to make a similar commitment and shorten the release cycles...

Encosia10• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, recent versions of IE are already evergreen and auto-update by default.

The real culprit behind us still having to support IE8 for some clients is your average enterprise IT department. They'll find ways to lock down updates on any browser. Just as some IT departments have auto updates locked down on Chrome/Firefox already, they'll probably demand a way to do that with Microsoft's browsers too (or find a way to block the updates without Microsoft's support).

Spearchucker• 11 years ago

I ask every enterprise I walk into what the patch management strategy is. There's always herds of testing, that often takes months. Recommendation? Patch first, deal with compatibility later. In most cases (note, not all) being hacked is more expensive than a temporary, self-imposed denial of service.

Edit: Thing I forgot to add is that an aggressive patch management strategy just so happens to do great things for technical debt.

palsecam• 11 years ago

Side question: what is the difference between “evengreen” and “auto-updating”? Does the former mean something else or more than the latter?

nailer• 11 years ago

My money's on the annotation thing being moved into an extension.

wantab2• 11 years ago

On another board, people are all excited about this but I said they need to take a wait and see and "I'm from Missouri, show me" attitude. Microsoft has not shown they can produce a standards compliant browser on par with the others and, so far, the article points out it isn't even level with IE11. And it is this same hype for every version of IE for the past 10 years that we've all been told the same thing, "This one will be the best!".

leeoniya2• 11 years ago

if it will truly be evergreen as they promise, then it doesnt need to roll out completely bug-free, because things will hopefully get fixed/patched continuously.

i'll take that over the inter-windows-release stagnation and long tail legacy support we have to deal with today.

MLR2• 11 years ago

It's way beyond IE11, what the article was referring to is the score of the IE11 version running with all the optional flags of the Edge rendering engine, which you can't configure in Spartan yet.

Honestly I think it'll have surpassed Firefox before the beta of Windows 10 finishes.

wantab2• 11 years ago

Nowhere in the article does it say that. It DOES say Spartan couldn't match IE11's score.

sytelus• 11 years ago

Annotations are a actually great idea if they are all in cloud by default and attached with my social IDs. Then I can follow friends, family and people and view their annotations on web pages as I surf the web. For example, I'm visiting a restaurant website and my friend already annotated with menu recommendation or better direction. The feature can turn every web page in to a wiki. That would be a killer feature that can get viral.

jules• 11 years ago

_why made something like that years ago, with an intentionally high barrier to entry because it required changing your HOSTS file.

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

MS actually did this already like 15 years ago. It may have been an Intranet-oriented thing. The end result was that users could add notes to pages. I think it died off with the rest of the Office-web thingies.

Edit: It was Office 2000 that enabled this, called "Web Discussions". You had a "Discussion" button in IE[1]. Here's a paper talking about how useful it was: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/coet/a...

1: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751423.aspx

frik3• 11 years ago

Intranet-oriented thing

It used the discussion feature of Microsoft Office Server aka SharePoint Portal Server. The history of SharePoint is very complex but interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120419073951/http://blogs.msdn... , https://web.archive.org/web/20080303180618/http://blogs.msdn... , https://web.archive.org/web/20120409232321/http://www.joinin..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint , https://web.archive.org/web/20120519235139/http://www.seocon... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage

I remember an SP2003 installation with thousands of sub portal sites, hundreds of GB (blobs) stored in SQL server. What I really don't understand is the almost non-existing upgrade paths (between versions '01, '03, '07, '10, '13) and the URL-hell (IIS URL alias would solve that).

Instead of Cairo-OS, WinFS, an improved Explorer shell & improved file server, nowadays SharePoint fulfill various enterprise needs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

minthd• 11 years ago

But in order for annotation to become a thing, don't they need to be integrated into most browsers ? And the annotation extension that supports all browsers will win once this becomes popular ?

jsprogrammer3• 11 years ago

I tried creating 'Peanut Gallery' about a decade ago. The main issues then were trying to figure out the best interface that could work across browsers.

I also didn't know how to scale the solution up to allow it to work on every web page for every users.

Also, I anticipated that there would be lots of privacy concerns as you'd basically be collecting every web page a user went to.

Retra• 11 years ago

If it's done right, it could be useful. Done wrong, it'd just be a massive store for cartoon penises.

It also sounds like the kind of thing some would want to use to overlay their own advertisements onto other people's websites...

lallysingh• 11 years ago

What happens when the page changes?

pinaceae• 11 years ago

relies on friends and family sharing similar interests, etc. also same geo space.

hereby super limited in reality.

and if it's people then you just invented comments. which are toxic most of the time. also invented (rap)genius. congrats, millions of funding for you.

fiatjaf• 11 years ago

Google Sidewiki? http://getpoint.co? http://hypothes.is/

dejv_cz1• 11 years ago

I just hope that times when freezing of IE meant that whole OS got frozen too are over. Anyway the design is very clear. They had to redisign it this way because whole Modern UI (metro) is based on minimalism, simple shapes and typography and MS will for sure try to include this browser in Win 10 mobile version. But I'm afraid of plugins which can totally ruin the fresh look and also other things like bookmarks... Anyway if in MS they want to get back on the top then they have to do their best and I guess they know that and attractive design can't solve everything. Mozilla and Chrome are really tough competitors.

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

I just got updated to the new Win10 build and tried Spartan. I like the UI; it's not as ugly as before.

But the font rendering being all blurry is still a showstopper. As is the apparent lack of addons, for blocking (and vim nav).

It's also very unfinished. Alt-D doesn't go to the address bar, which is a pretty big thing to forget... I'm guessing internal users aren't using it.

jpeg_hero• 11 years ago

I always thought Ctrl-L was address bar!!

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

Well that one doesn't work in the Sparta preview either.

joosters2• 11 years ago

Does it let you disable 3rd party cookies, or are Microsoft throwing us to the advertising / tracking companies?

MichaelGG4• 11 years ago

Yes, disabling 3rd party cookies is one of the few options in the settings flyout. (There's under 20 settings, total.) The cookies setting is as prominent as Do Not Track and Block pop-ups.

Also, don't think that somehow just disabling third party cookies is going to make you untrackable or prevent you from being thrown to advertisers.

joosters2• 11 years ago

Good to see the option is there. I know it's nothing like a perfect safety net against tracking, but when the option is missing, it's a great sign that the company doesn't care at all about user privacy.

Also, 3rd party cookie disabling is very difficult to do elsewhere - you can set up a proxy server to filter requests & responses but it has no easy way to determine 1st/3rd party requests.

nikanj• 11 years ago

IE11 is going to be the new IE6.

Mahn• 11 years ago

If only.

babby• 11 years ago

It already is for me. I had to spend ~2-3 days recently debugging IE11's utterly abysmal dom performance and stylesheet performance. Smooth as butter on chrome, 4 FPS on IE. The only way to fix it was to display: none everything I could, and we're only talking about a few hundred dom elements.

kenshaw9• 11 years ago

Microsoft's biggest issue here is that there is no such thing as a "modern" browser that runs only on one unreleased platform (Windows), that is closed source, and that cannot also run on mobile devices with significant market share (iOS, Android). Regardless of how polished, fast, and great Microsoft makes this, without the above it will never be a "modern" browser, nor gain any significant market share, simply because developers won't support it.

One of the primary reasons why Microsoft needs to immediately halt, backpedal and release a version that can run on Linux/OSX (beyond the obvious need to port to Android/iOS) is that so many high quality sites are tested using automated testing suites (through Selenium, or otherwise), and those testing instances typically run through bash shells / scripts. While I'm sure you could jury-rig Windows 10 to do that (I've used bash on Windows previously, via Git Bash), you would need to rewrite extensive build and testing tool chains to use non-Unix-y commands --- and even then, you'll likely find many of the open source libraries you rely on are broken, unmaintained, or otherwise unusable on Windows.

As an anecdote, and fairly recently, I actually tried getting unit tests for a pre-existing, fairly sizable project with 10s of developers and many hundreds of thousands of lines of code to run on Windows, and realized it was cheaper to just hand all the developers Mac Books than to either train them on installing Unix tool chains on Windows, or on "properly" using Linux -- especially considering they were not responsible to write the unit tests, just run them. It's also much easier to cross-build for Windows from a Unix system, thus it was possible to completely eliminate Windows in the release process almost completely, other than for later manual testing/verification that can't be automated anyways.

jameshart2• 11 years ago

It's been clear for a while that 'modern browser' is basically defined as 'browser not made by Microsoft'. That you're willing to define 'modern browser' as basically "must run on iOS and be scriptable from bash" as a way to exclude their latest effort just implies Microsoft is doomed to forever fail your 'true scotsman' test. If they provided a Linux and android port, you'd find something else to exclude them on - modern browsers render their type using TypeKit, after all.

kenshaw9• 11 years ago

Actually, no. If they provide cross-platform support, open source it, and make it easily pluggable into existing scripting toolchains (ie, Selenium WebDriver or some such), then I'll call it a modern and open browser. Open source isn't actually necessary, so long as its easily installable using native package managers so that SysAdmins don't have to run/write custom installation scripts for CI support.

I honestly couldn't care much if they supported Android or iOS. I'm simply pointing out that the competition -- Chrome, Firefox, Opera -- all have these features, and are what people consider "modern." You can't go backwards on featureset and still be considered modern.

Encosia10• 11 years ago

realized it was cheaper to just hand all the developers Mac Books than to either train them on installing Unix tool chains on Windows, or on "properly" using Linux

Did you try Cmder? That gets you a pretty reasonable bash environment on Windows with a single install that's dead simple.

kenshaw9• 11 years ago

Unless it has changed, Cmder is just simply a VTTY for Windows, similar to/replacing cmd.exe from Microsoft. I don't believe it includes, out-of-the-box support for Unix tool chains. You would need to install Cygwin tools, or similar, to accomplish that. If you've ever tried to administer large groups of systems with Cygwin installed, then you've shared my pain.

The quickest, fastest way that I know to get the Unix shell commands/stuff up on Windows is to use the packaged Git installation (which I referenced in my previous post), but the issue then is that if you have ever dealt with semi-large code bases that involve one or two separate programming languages, then every developer has to track down all the various packages (if they exist), build them, or otherwise install / get them to work. This is often why in companies Windows devs are just given a shell account on a central Linux server to run their unit tests, or runs them inside a VM on Windows. Windows doesn't have any kind of central package manager akin to apt / yum / port for Unix systems that would allow for easy and quick installation of widely used open source software. While they are trying to push their own package manager on Windows, I don't see that as being successful anytime soon.

And, ultimately this approach (of installing Unix toolchains on Windows) is just a hackish workaround, and doesn't address the root issue that the most powerful automation toolsets in the world are all written / developed on / designed for Unix-like systems, and they simply do not run natively on Windows. If Microsoft genuinely wants to join the modern development ecosystem, they will provide cross platform versions of their browser and keep them synced and up to date across platforms, so that they can be plugged into the existing infrastructure (and thus investment) companies have made in their development environments, automated testing, and continuous integration/deployment.

Microsoft can not ignore (by virtue of exclusion) Linux / OSX (and other Unix-es) if they want wide-spread adoption of this new Spartan browser, simply because they want to push the Windows platform. That strategy may have worked in the late 90s, early 2000s when there was no other options for a readily usable, simple user experience desktop platform , but that's not the case any more.

frik3• 11 years ago

many high quality sites are tested using automated testing suites (through Selenium, or otherwise)

Big sites like Google* and Facebook* work less and less reliable in IE11 (UI glitches, JS errors, CSS position issues). As almost all of their developers use OSX or Linux and most of the tests run on Firefox and Chrome, it's hardly a surprise. I loved IE since version 3 because of its native UI and its responsiveness, but as there will be no IE12 I will move on as well. Well, Microsoft could open up their browser engine "trident-edge" like they do with dotNet vNext.

* Google.com frontpage shows a unformatted sentence on top left corner for ca. 1 seconds, it seems like a JS loading race-condition. Every other week on FB a few minor features like selecting posts privacy groups are broken for a day or two. The React based search is unstable/broken on Android 2.3 as well, before that the mobile web version stayed already completely unchanged from 2010 to 2014. I don't want to blame them, as I guess the majority of users uses their apps and Chrome/Firefox.

paraphrase• 11 years ago

Spartan needs to be on iOS, OS X, and Android to make it big. It has to go cross platform

First look at Project Spartan, Microsoft's take on the modern browser

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