17 Mar 2015 by Super Human

A Tough Life

Though not yet official, Chris Capossela (Microsoft’s Marketing Chief) spilled the beans that the brand Internet Explorer is going to be killed off in Windows 10 (Originally reported by Verge ), and the Primary Browser in Windows 10 would be named something else. Its not just a name change, its a brand new Browser (code named "Project Spartan")Internet Explorer had a difficult life. As compared to other Modern browsers, It had to support all the non-standard, ie-only, legacy applications written mindlessly by the enterprise world when IE was the king. The other modern browsers had it easy as they did not have this baggage to carry along. Some of these non-standard features that IE implemented, had no standard at the time, those were innovations that IE made. But along the way when standards came along, IE still was stuck with the now non-standard features.

Even when normal people moved to a more standard web, it was still difficult for IE to abandon the non-standard features as it would mean abandoning the enterprise, whose web applications would not work on any other browsers except IE.

A Change Long Overdue

With Spartan this will hopefully change. Powered by a new rendering engine, Spartan is designed for interoperability with the modern web. It will use the same markup as other modern browsers. Spartan’s new rendering engine is designed to work with the way the web is written today.

But what about the legacy enterprise applications? Microsoft still have to support those, but all Public Internet sites will be rendered with the new Edge mode platform (so legacy stuff doesn't get in the way). Only in the enterprise mode would the old engine be used.

What IE gave the Web

IE introduced XmlHttpRequest, which is the basis for Ajax and most modern web applications today. It introduced Dynamic HTML which allows the web pages to change dynamically using javascript. All the Wysiwyg editors we see on the web, they use special attributes like contentEditable OR designMode, both of which were Microsoft’s inventions (and now part of HTML5 standard). IE was also the first browser to implement CSS. Unfortunately it also introduced ActiveX.

But most of all it made us laugh countless times at its own expense.