Welcome to Spartan, Microsoft's persuasive argument for... Chrome Two years after its last browser strategy policy change in Windows 8, Microsoft is shifting the pieces around the board again. Microsoft last week unveiled Spartan, project codename of the browser for use with anything and everything running Windows 10. Spartan is for any Windows 10 device, no matter if its input mechanism be …
For Chrome in the enterprise, there's probably still some trust issues to get round, I think. The Chrome download page, talking about how Google copies your bookmarks etc to all devices, says "It’s your web. Take it with you". I read that as "It’s our web. Tell us everything you do".
A lot of corporate applications aren't terribly well designed, and do things like put account numbers in URLs and so on. That's not so much of a problem if nothing leaves the network perimeter. It's more of a problem when someone in Payroll bookmarks their page in the in-house accounting application, and it's stored in the Googleplex, which is then synced to their phone, and that phone is then left behind on the underground one day...
It's more of a problem when someone in Payroll bookmarks their page in the in-house accounting application, and it's stored in the Googleplex, which is then synced to their phone, and that phone is then left behind on the underground one day...
To be fair, how is that specific to Google?
And why is it the fault of whatever syncing service you use that your company uses systems that are so insecure?
To be fair, how is that specific to Google?
Start Chrome, you are asked to "sign in to Google". Start IE, you are not asked to "sign in to Microsoft". Google is the only browser publisher that wants to know who you are from the outset.
It's not the fault of a syncing service if an internal system is insecure (and I never said it was) - but the fact that a syncing service is built in to the product makes a breach more likely in that case.
No, you just sign in to Microsoft when you start the computer
I don't - I just log into the corporate domain, which I do trust, since it pays my salary!
Must be one of those people that just clicks OK or Next without reading that it is possible not to use a MS account to set up a PC just as it always has been.
"Start Chrome, you are asked to "sign in to Google"."
No, you aren't. Samsung S5 Mini. Just turned it on. Started Chrome. It's reloading the page I last looked at with it a few days ago (I usually use the stock browser).
No asking to log in. There might be an option somewhere to log in to sync favourites and such from another version (like the Windows version?) but I only have Chrome on the phone so no need to that. And as no need for that, no need to sign in.
"Google is the only browser publisher that wants to know who you are from the outset."
Except for when Opera wanted you to (optionally) log in to do more or less the exact same thing - sharing content from one browser session to another... I think Firefox can (optionally) do that as well these days.
I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't jumped on the bandwagon here. Then we could have all sorts of fun, like "looking at porno sites at home before bed? well, okay, let's just sync all of that onto your work computer..." ;)
"Start Chrome, you are asked to "sign in to Google". Start IE, you are not asked to "sign in to Microsoft". Google is the only browser publisher that wants to know who you are from the outset."
Microsoft asks you to sign in to their public cloud based authentication system to get in to the goddamned operating system. And they've started tying core system functions to that public cloud identity, too! Not to mention they stream every search you make on your local computer/local network to Bing.
Sorry mate, but Microsoft is far more insidious and in to tracking your every move than Google.
Edit: yes, you don't have to sign in to Microsoft's public cloud account to use the OS...but you certainly don't have to sign into chrome to use it either. Both, however, require you to hand over your privacy in order to make all the features work as intended, not just a subset. The difference is that Google wants you to sign into specific services (such as a browser, or IM client) whereas Microsoft wants your privacy just for the OS itself.
Yes very true on most accounts, and they should not be the default on any service IMO.
But saying Microsoft is more insidious is a bit far they are as bad as each other. Microsoft just have more users on their OS, I bet Chrome OS needs this too. I've never tried Chrome OS so would need verification.
ChromeOS, yes. Android...no. But ChromeOS *IS* just Google's web services wrapped in a bundle. So it makes perfect sense you'd have to log in. Android doesn't require me to have a Google account attached unless I want to use Google services...but I can gleefully use non-Google services. Cyanogenmod, Kindle Fire, etc...lots of Android stuff that doesn't require Google.
And both of those are different again from a full-bore Windows OS, which is designed not for mobile, not for cloud services, but for workstation services. To be an enterprise OS. For fixed or semi-mobile (notebook) systems.
Sorry mate, but Microsoft is more insidious. If only because they are "as bad as Google", but put billions of dollars into smearing Google and telling the world "love us because we're not creepy like them." Except they are. Especially if you happen to be a French journalist using Hotmail...
Every day. And it's a damned annoyance that every time I setup a new user or migrate an existing user that I have to hover over them to make sure they click on "Skip" the first time they open Chrome. Even more of a PITA when an update somehow resets it and they inadvertently log into the data slurp.
You put your left arm in,
Your left arm out:
In, out, in, out.
You shake it all about.
You do the hokey cokey,
And you turn around.
That's what it's all about!
Whoa, hokey cokey, cokey
Whoa, hokey cokey, cokey
Whoa, hokey cokey, cokey
Knees bent arms stretch,
Ra! ra! ra!
Jesus, I actually cannot believe that these articles are somehow getting worse - clearly when you hit bottom, you keep on digging.
Okay.
1. "modern" browser. Nice try at making it look like it only works with Metro/Modern. Well done. Nobody bought it because they all call themselves modern browsers. These days "modern" means "supports (some of) HTML5".
2. Web Devs have to develop for two browsers ZOMG WORLD ENDS except, er... no they don't. Given that Spartan runs Trident and Chakra (the IE rendering and JavaScript engines) it is Internet Explorer as far as development goes. Except for plug-in development which old IE didn't support at all so you'd hardly be testing it, would you?
3. Chrome is a piece of shit. It has built-in spyware, it renders text and graphics incredibly badly, it is slow and it's a big fat memory hog. I could load down FireFox with plugins and it'd still be quicker and more usable than Chrome.
I am a Firefox user. I will not be switching to Spartan. This non-story should have a "SPONSORED BY GOOGLE" label on it.
I'm not sure Chrome is so fast any more. It seems to be suffering the same bloat as all the others. It was only fast when it was new and unencumbered with legacy code. According to task manager, each of my current Chrome tabs is taking anywhere between 67-230Mb. I have 14 instances and 6 of them are well north of 100Mb. These days, chrome uses the vast majority of my resources and chugs along as slowly as Firefox or IE ever did.
All versions of Chrome have some sort of memory leak. I leave my laptop on and Chrome up for weeks on end. Slowly all the Chrome tabs start growing. I used to order them by memory in task managed and kill them in descending order - it was interesting to see which sites were the biggest hoggers.
Restart Chome, and all tabs drop back to <50Mb
Firefox is no angel when it comes to memory usage, Firefox for years was well known for it's memory leaks.
But to be fair, it is slowly getting better now. It's still a resource hog however, always has been, but even so, it's a great browser in my personal opinion.
To be clear: I'm not bashing Firefox, I have used it for a while now since version 1.5, I'm just saying it how it is. Firefox was and is known for high memory usage.
If you're running a Windows 8.1 tablet (especially a 1Gb RAM one), your choice is IE or nothing unless you want to squint at a 7-inch desktop.
Firefox doesn't work in Metro at all, Chrome fakes it by turning the tablet into a ChromeTab. You then hit the 'no extensions in Metro IE' rule so AdBlock is out, so in my case the choice was a Kindle Fire HDX.
I think the whole point is, that is will be a Microsoft browser that you don't have to hack around.
It is supposed to be standards compliant and should therefore not need any hacking to get it to render correctly... Although on mobile it will probably mean de-hacking all of those non-standard, Chrome-only extensions to HTML and CSS to get the page working properly.
that is will be a Microsoft browser that you don't have to hack around.
I've been hearing that oxymoron on every release.
I enjoy the fact that there are competing browsers, as it encourages innovation and we don't get the IE6 stagnation, but it's just a shame that ~15% of viewers use a browser that doesn't support technologies from the past two years.
>It is supposed to be standards compliant and should therefore not need any hacking to get it to render correctly
So it won't work with office365 then?
So now I have chrome for web browsing.
New IE for office365 and sharepoint
Old IE for all the legacy stuff form when IE integration was the once and future way.
Being a born cynic, I have a long-held belief that the only reason Chrome's usage is increasing is Google's persistence in drive-by downloads in conjunction with Adobe's evil empire, amongst others. I frequently find members of my family or friends using Chrome who were entirely unaware that they were, they clicked on a link in an email and the default browser opened
The last thing a company sysadmin likes is a browser like Chrome designed from ground up to exfiltrate informations running on all his or her systems. Mozilla is a far better alternative - just I can't understand why Mozilla refuses to play better with Windows (i.e., using its certificate store).
IE can be somewhat locked down and configured using group policies. Chrome support this as well, but Mozilla requires add-ons.
As far as I know, Spartan is a new engine designed to get rid of some old IE legacy stuff, and this is good news. Getting rid of ActiveX and BHO makes it a far more secure engine - but there's a lot of old stuff out there that wouldn't work without. Take Dell iDRAC - to run the remote console you can choose between ActiveX or having Java enabled in the browser - and you really don't know what is worst.
Anyway if Spartan and IE are compatible enough but for some specific support (ActiveX on one side, some rarely used newer web technologies on the other), I guess they will overlap enough most user won't mind what engine is being running at a given time - nor most web developers.
Take Dell iDRAC - to run the remote console you can choose between ActiveX or having Java enabled in the browser - and you really don't know what is worst.
You should try Cisco's servers. They need both Flash and Java.
I switched to Chrome from IE because I needed a quick browser but as others have mentioned it has become slower and slower. Google also seems intent on morping it into a Google portal so that all your activities take place within the Google Chrome environment. I find this creepy given their reputation for monitoring and moniterizing.
It might be time for something new.
At least Chrome uses IE's proxy settings. Firefox on the other hand is a total pain to support in an enterprise, having to edit files encrypt them and copy them over to the client. Saying that we pretty much insist on IE unless you have a good reason to need Chrome.
"At least Chrome uses IE's proxy settings. Firefox on the other hand is a total pain to support in an enterprise, having to edit files encrypt them and copy them over to the client."
You are in desperate need of Proxy Auto Config. http://bit.ly/1yJlLX6
Chrome generally seems to work better with sites "designed for IE" (i.e. company internal) than firefox.
I normally stick them all on and use FF for internet, Chrome for internal corporate. I hate the single search/url box, but sometime it just renders drop-down menus and so forth more clearly. I'm guessing it was designed to tolerate IE incompatibilities.
And I find it reassuring that FF will not use system certs. Really no reason to compromise good browser (and if I wanted to I can do this myself). The only trusted browser on the work PC (though I can see some admins having problem with this).
Where I work, we have a directive to be generally browser agnostic from the IT Support Services side of things. In practice it means we're installing IE10, current Firefox, and current Chrome. IE is locked down by Group policies. Neither Firefox nor Chrome are. Sometimes this has been a good thing. For example someone recently decreed we needed to fix the Poodle vulnerability by disabling SSL 3.0 in IE. At which point nearly all of our https connections fell over, including email. Chrome and Firefox provided a workaround for email, the business application sites that used SSL and IE, not so much. This persisted for the better part of the day until they decided to change course and disable another part of the SSL stack that was vulnerable. At which point a whole other set of needed sites fell over. But eventually sanity prevailed and were now back to all sites working but being vulnerable to all currently open MS SSL vulnerabilities.
A couple of years ago when we were still standardized on IE7, Chrome was effectively required. You see, when the project to migrate the hideously old email system (I believe some Oracle/Sun program, but they're another group and I don't know the actual details) to Exchange fell over, the powers that be decided our new mail system would be a purchased Gmail option. And they were pushing then Google Docs program. Which might read documents in IE7, but there was no way in hell to edit them and Firefox was an 80/20 shot at things working properly on that day. So Chrome is now standard.
Yeah, I know. You started with "sensible". But I live in the real world and have never visited this mythical place of which you speak.
There will always be rendering differences between different engines though. HTML 5 and CSS are extremely complicated, and providing a totally complete specification of how pages should be rendered is impossible. Completely specifying any software system is impossible - there will always be grey areas and those are ultimately implementation decisions made by the developers, who may well genuinely believe they are coding to specification but different developers will make different decisions.
Those implementation differences and good old fashioned bugs in each engine mean that in reality, complex pages are going to be different in different browsers.
As just one example, look at W3 Box model, section 8.5.1. The official specification, when discussing border widths, says
The interpretation of the first three values depends on the user agent.
The chances of the developers at Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all having the same definitions of what constitutes a thin, medium or thick border is very slim - and that's just drawing a line around a box, which most people would not consider to be complex rendering.
The whole HTML/CSS thing is an ass-backwards train wreck. Hundreds of attributes which interact in strange ways and can be overridden or defaulted from the enclosing element or from the CSS by id or by class, with a bunch of rules for which wins in different circumstances, or perhaps not overridden but derived from the outer values (e.g. font-size: 120%). Then there is inline, block, inline-block, floating and clearing...
So you want to put some text at the top right? Just float right, yes? No. It won't align with your text at the left. So you float that to the left, and then find that the text below doesn't line up any more. So you end up having to turn every damn box into floats. And don't get me started on how sizes are inherited from parents, and what "width: 80%" and "height: 80%" actually mean in practice. Essentially you just keep fiddling with attributes until you get something that looks about right, or keep googling until you find someone else's layout which works and steal it.
In the old days of GUI programming you used to just draw a box - if necessary calculating its position based on the enclosing screen.
Could we not just have some simple Javascript drawing primitives and be done already?
> it drops all the legacy cruft that is IE non standardness
So it won't support activeX?
That's nice and all, but it still means you'll need two MS browsers. Any time a website detects an MS browser, its going to spew out MS-specific HTML and extensions. It could go with a completely new user-agent, in which case you'll be asked to upgrade to IE, FF or Chrome, or it could pretend to be FF, in which case... it will need to be an intrinsically better browser. I don't mean, "5% faster" but obviously far superior from a user perspective so that they are willing to run two MS browsers.
You shouldn't have to build for anyone's browser. That's what standards are for.
I've been faithfully beating this drum for the past decade or so... but in the real world, if a browser doesn't adhere to the standards, what can you do?
"You shouldn't have to build for anyone's browser. That's what standards are for."
True. You shouldn't. And you should especially avoid proprietary stuff, such as Active X (which, from a security point of view, is bastard anyway), but what if you are having to maintain a legacy system that uses some of the proprietary stuff in a given browser (usually IE)? You may need to rewrite at least the interface of the system just to bring it up a snuff standards wise. This may not be feasible.
Don't get me wrong. I prefer standards compliant browsers (both developing for and using), but I also know that there is going to be some techy somewhere trying to get an ancient enterprise system that no one has done any serious coding on since the 90s working on Spartan because someone higher up has read it is a new browser, thought new browser = secure, and secure = good and decided to update the workforce. I've worked for bosses like that and spent many a sleepless night at work trying to get their latest idea working.
"but in the real world, if a browser doesn't adhere to the standards, what can you do?"
I run a small unimportant website that doesn't make me money, so I was free to decide that I'd had enough of IE8's quirks, and with later versions not being backwardly compatible to older systems for a somewhat tenuous reason, I decided - that's it. No more testing on IE. I replaced IE with iOS Safari so if something on my site looks weird with IE, rest assured that it looks as intended on all of the other browsers that I test with. And no, I won't fix it. I have far better things to do with my time...
Good on you!
Testing each IE version requires its own virtual machine and they all act differently... but if you put each one on a graph they're all less than 'other' so why are we still supporting these pieces of shit when Microsoft can't even be bothered?
I hope spartan delivers as promised so us developers never have to bother with it.
Didn't Nicholas Zakas make the point that browser content should follow progressive enhancement, from plain vanilla HTML, adding CSS and Javascript as desired for a richer UX, but still working if the browser isn't "modern"?
And I want to drag the corners of my browser screen and adjust the size on my screen, or hit Ctrl + late in the day to accommodate tired eyes, isn't it more important that the content refresh instantly according to concepts of liquid flow that to have every pixel exactly where it looked good on your browser with your settings preference? Say goodbye to the days of consistent 1280x1024 and say hello to the era of NxM.
I don't care if a things look different due to interpretation of standards. I am not going to shim anything to make it look exactly the same on all browsers, or use a bloated framework for that purpose.
Fool's errand, like User-Agent detection.
I see. You liked those problems in physics class where you got to assume the horses were perfectly round, frictionless spheres.
Sorry, my first experience with "standards" was as a tech writer documenting RS-232 connections. I've had a dim view of such things ever since. Of course, it didn't help matters that my second job was with a company that was writing standards for a smart house, and I got to see the sausage being made. One of the unpublished standards I did the DTP work on was even a programming language for the house of cards which eventually collapsed.
--
That's a real insecure spartan browser!
Fixed.
--
<sigh> telnet www.pingu.com 8080 </sigh>
and then just generate the correct SSL code, it can't be that difficult, only the other day I managed to factor the number 15, it took YEARS for quantum computing to beat that, and all that I required was a felt-tip pen, a few bits of paper and a few hours of my time!
Honestly, kids today ;-)
There is of course one "modern" browser that does run on on Windows 7 and that is already becoming many companies' second browser of choice: that is Chrome.
Spartan might be the future of Microsoft's browser strategy, but it sure makes a convincing case for IT pros to go with Chrome instead. ®
Except it doesn't make convincing case at all. And there are lot more choices out there than Chrome. Much better choices. In my humble opinion of course.
The article reads like Gavin is angling for a job at Googpleplex or something.
Here's how you stop caring if IE uses Spartan / Trident or both - STOP CODING WEB PAGES TO BROWSERS.
For 99% of content it shouldn't matter a damn if the browser is IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera or any thing else. Code to the standards and only write special cases if there is a rendering issue in a very specific browser you want to support. Make sure the special case is isolated and narrow as possible.
Coding to a specific browser is extremely short sighted no matter who makes it or what the requirements might say.
Someone give this man a cigar!
Write standards compliant code for VERSIONED STANDARDS (none of this "Living standard" bullshit). Run in through a validator for that standard, and you'll find it works for every browser that supports said standard.
As a web developer, I can honestly say I hate browsers made by Microsoft.
Anyone who remembers spending hours developing a perfectly working website that works in all browsers flawlessly, then completely breaks as soon as it goes into Internet Explorer 6 will most likely agree with me.
IE 7 was supposed to be better.. it wasn't, IE8 was supposed to be better, it really wasn't as everyone else was moving to HTML5 and IE8s HTML5 and CSS3 support was basically not there.
IE9 through 10 seem a little better, IE11 seems to play nice with our code base now however without any major modifications, I think there is just one or two CSS changes for it.
But wow, I still hate Microsoft browsers, I often wondered if they did it on purpose, in an attempt to get developers to make it work on IE, but break it on others?
If they do make a browser which does not require any 'fixes' at all to work within it, I would be genuinely surprised.
Glad to have dropped support for IE6 and 7 now though :-). They became simply unmaintainable and was holding major enhancements and developments back.
Although, IE8 is my current most hated browser.. why? Because I have to support it, yet can only do so for Windows Vista/7 and above version, XPs version won't even connect to the web server as it does not support SSL TLS 1.0 or better, or SNI and Forward Secrecy.
Which is curious to say the least as Vista/7's version connects without issues...
That and it requires a LOT of fixes to make it work with our current HTML5/CSS3 code base..
But I highly doubt MS will release a web browser which requires no workaround(s), no fixes, no changes etc and just works out of the box in my lifetime!
On the good side, I do most development using Firefox Nightly, and when it comes to compatibility testing it is rare for it not to work in Chrome Beta the same way it worked in Firefox, it usually just works the same :-).
> IE9 through 10 seem a little better, IE11 seems to play nice with our code base now however without any major modifications, I think there is just one or two CSS changes for it.
>But wow, I still hate Microsoft browsers
So just to clarify, IE11 is fine but you hate it anyway.
Okay.
So just to clarify, IE11 is fine but you hate it anyway.
No, it's not fine. You still need to do extra work for it, even ASP.NET needs tweaking for it.
As a developer, I can't stand IE. It's the bane of any web developer's life - even if you love Microsoft. I actually use it as my main browser since IE11 (formerly Firefox).
I welcome Spartan with open arms if it can deliver it's promises, and break away from IE which has only (purposefully) hindered the web.
>So just to clarify, IE11 is fine but you hate it anyway.
> Okay.
Not exactly, it is not fine though is it? It STILL requires workarounds, no matter how small, in order to make standard code work on it where the exact same code works fine in any other browser.
That is a problem which should not exist at the end of the day.
I can understand brand new features which are not fully integrated into any browser yet not working for example CSS properties prefixed with -webkit or -mozilla, if IE doesn't support those, that's fine.
After all they are experimental.
But when it's a standard CSS property with no prefix which is fully implemented in every other browser, that is a problem.
Personally, I think Microsoft would be better off issuing backend bug-fixes to older IE versions to fix rendering issues with those browsers before making the next version. At least this way, older browsers would slowly require less fixes from web developers for Microsofts mistakes.
No browser, whether it's firefox, chrome, internet exploder, some other random browsers, should require fixes specifically for that one browser when all others work.
However IE has frequently required this, and this is what makes me hate that browser the most.
But wow, I still hate Microsoft browsers, I often wondered if they did it on purpose, in an attempt to get developers to make it work on IE, but break it on others?
Yes they did.
But they also went one better. Their systems browser sniffed and sent CSS/HTML that displayed wrong on other browsers to suggest that IE was the only browser that worked correctly. ( www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/11/hakon_on_ms_interroperability/ )
The fact that the "new" Spartan and Internet Ecplorer (IE) browsers still run on Windows OS base only puts them at a distinct disadvantage againct Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox which not only support latest Web/HTML standards and are substantially more reliable and secure, but are Multi-platform - supporting Apple iOS/OS X, Android, Windows, Linux and even Tizen and other Linux based mobile OS that are entering the marketplace. My Blackberry even supports Chromium.
Why on earth would any intelligent technology user want to retain the ultimate lock-in and unreliable/insecure Web tecnology from Microsoft? None!!
And what if you’re building for this so-called “modern” web while also working with legacy IT apps using Active X? Which browser should you use? And what if you bet on Spartan and Microsoft kills it for IE, or you pick IE and Microsoft kills IE for Spartan?
How about you simply build to, oh... I dunno...say, some W3C standard, and be done with it?
MS has always been stuck to all the cruft that has gone before. If they come up with something totally new, then nobody likes it because it doesn't work with anything. Spartan is another attempt to break free. If they had any arrogant people left they would immediate ditch IE and go for the new. But now they are getting twitchy, and are having both.
In order to keep the other two honest, I wish they would start a 'skunkworks', and throw out something new that would eat the old. Not going to happen. :(
>In order to keep the other two honest, I wish they would start a 'skunkworks', and throw out something new that would eat the old. Not going to happen. :(
That would actually be the best way forward for them. Their problem is that businesses need that legacy support and if they just ditched it, there would be cries of outrage - not from techies but from businesses who have to upgrade their OS to keep Outlook support, but then their browser-apps break. This is what happens when you tie your application stack to your OS and try to use the lock-in to force upgrades. IE6 may have crushed Netscape, but Netscape used to be a cost option - around $50 IIRC. At that time, I don't think anyone foresaw the rise of open-source in business and it made very good sense to code for the free browser that came with the OS everyone used. At that time, RFC's were for UNIX and UNIX was not the desktop with OSX barely out of beta, Linux 2.4 just released but hardware not up to running the Java-based Office suites.
Re-writing apps is very expensive and very annoying. Why re-write an app because the OS has changed? The OS should support the app, not the other way around. It comes back to tying the browser to the OS to force upgrades. Why could you not just set an environment variable to indicate the default browser? Then legacy application X can just have an environment variable set and can kick off the standalone browser app Y which it needs to run. There's no need for that browser to run for general browsing or by default from the command-line or GUI shell. Even if you want to go non-standard, pick a 3rd party which comes with all its own libraries. Then at least you are decoupled from other upgrades.
MS isn't going away as the standard business desktop environment any time soon, but IT directors need to seriously assess just how much Windows is costing them in support and change costs.
I wonder if sparta!!!!!!!!!!!!! will support sync programming like ie. "normal" programming of full blown data/erp apps in other browsers can be a nightmare due to ff/webkit developers obsession with async programming ... which is itself down to their single threaded access to the ui. At least in ie there is the synchronous showmodaldialog (which firefox and chrome adopted from ie for some years) but now firefox and chrome have/are dumping this and we are using their rather bizarre "yield*" to do normal programming in those browsers and avoid the "async pyramid of doom" style.
Why would there be this worry about IE versus Spartan and worrying about having to make two different pages?
For "normal" web pages, there's simply no reason to use every HTML5 feature in existence just because it's there, these pages will probably then load even on a 10 or 15 year old browser.
For "fancy" pages... IE is probably the worst at following industry standards on the market, but is SO much better than a few years ago that probably the easiest thing to do is just avoid those features IE doesn't properly implement. Once that's done, you're done, your page will load on IE, Spartan, and all modern browsers.
Of course, if you have some cruft-tastic app with ActiveX plugins and junk, well, that's legacy, you were supposed to ditch that stuff like 10 years ago you're going to just have to deal with it. It's nice that Microsoft gives SOME clean(ish) solution to do it. And "I told you so", some of us (probably dismissed as Linux fanbois) said from the start that these ActiveX "web pages" were big problems (I hesitate to call it a web page when it's a frame with an ActiveX control stuck in it).
PC shows on screen
I am Spartacus
Voice over of the same.
Laptop appears, does the same/similar.
As do notebook, tablet, phablet, phone, ... All repeating
I am Spartucus
A really old Zune device appears and says
Oooo, luck you! I wish I was Spartacus love?
And wryly smiles
The author of this article does not seem to understand the problem with browsers underlying Microsoft's actions (or he's not letting on). This problem is that the 20-year old plugin technology (NPAPI) which supports things like Flash and Java Applets (and Microsoft's Active-X plugin equivalent) is on its last legs. This is mainly because of security problems, but also because of its impact on performance. The replacement for this is HTML5, but, of course not everyone has rewritten their software for that yet.
I am what I believe is called an 'Apple fanboy', and do not run a Windows machine and have no particular love for Microsoft. However it would seem to me that what Microsoft is doing is quite reasonable: providing Spartan as an HTML5-only browser for those businesses that are not dependent on legacy plugins/activeX, while retaining a version of IE which still supports the latter.
I don't see Microsoft loosing much browser share as a consequence as Chrome has stated publicly that it will withdraw all support for plugins in September 2015. The browsers on Apple and Android tablets do not support plugins (and Windows phone doesn't support Java or Flash) so plugins are clearly living on borrowed time. Those who depend on plugins will stick with IE for the time being. As the plugins get replacements (or are abandoned) those using Windows will be able to move from IE to an HTML5 browser - Spartan or Chrome as they see fit - or buy a Mac ;-) .
How about Microsoft just throws in the towel already builds off of WebKit like most of the rest of world. WebKit based browsers, of which Chrome is but one example, are the most widely in the world today. The only other major engine is FireFox Gecko and I think there may be way too much irony in going there after the browser wars :)
The article says "Or dump its browser engine for Chromium, the open-source engine of Google’s browser". This is incorrect.
Chromium is the open-source *browser* of which Chrome is a slight fork. The rendering engine which Chrome and Chromium both use is called "blink" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(layout_engine)) - this is the equivalent to Trident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)) in Internet Explorer.
"Alas for Microsoft, it can't simply dump IE and start over again because of the legacy of websites and apps now tied into IE."
They made their bed and now they have to lie in it. Fortunately they were unable to Embrace-Extend-Extinguish web standards (not for lack of trying) by using their O/S dominance as leverage, so Windows users can (still) choose a browser other than the MS browser. Watch out though, MS might do the inverse of what they did with Win 3.X on DRDOS, instead of making their own install fail with a meaningless error message, they could make a third parties install fail in the same manner.
Always mindful of their track record, I will not underestimate them.
if you want to run Google's web products properly, you have to use Chrome. If you use any other browser, you get warned about it.
Sound familiar? Its just what Microsoft used to do if you dared to use any other browser with their products.
In this respect, Google is as bad as old Microsoft, and for that reason I try to support Firefox as much as possible.
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