Win10 new browser Project Spartan details exposure: new rendering engine

Microsoft on Thursday revealed a new rendering engine specifically designed for the Project Spartan browser commonly used in all Windows 10 devices. Microsoft also confirmed that the IE browser in the Windows 10 operating system will also adopt this new rendering engine. The IE browser of the Windows 10 operating system is mainly for enterprise users who still need to use the browser.

Microsoft explained in detail on Thursday the motivation behind the development of this new rendering engine. Microsoft found that the company had previously paid too much attention to the "top of the network" (that is, 9,000 websites that accounted for about 88% of the global traffic), and did not pay much attention to "long tail" (ie all sites).

Microsoft explained four major issues that the new rendering engine addresses in compatibility:

· heritage and modernity. The file compatibility mode in the past Trident rendering engine has limitations and cannot be guaranteed. This provides a persistent barrier to long-standing IE-specific behavior. Fixing long-standing compatibility vulnerabilities through other advanced browsers is in fact equivalent to telling the site code to IE-specific behavior.

·List of compatibility views. Compatibility pass rates previously relied on the Compatibility View list, which allowed Microsoft to turn website code into an old document model that mimics traditional IE behavior. However, this practice requires a lot of testing and maintenance, and it is impossible to cover websites outside the top-level website.

·X-UA-Compatible. Through the previous document compatibility model X-UA-Compatible, some websites were forced to use the old document mode, but this is not a temporary expedient. With X-UA-Compatible, the site had to allow older versions of the site to run on future versions of IE, as well as developing appropriate versions for other advanced browsers.

· Focus on standards. While Microsoft used to focus on the new HTML5 format, the interoperability between browsers was isolated because of the variety of interpretations of standard documents. This also causes developers to fix more vulnerabilities and users cannot log in to more sites.

In view of this, Microsoft decided to "get rid of history", which is essentially abandoning IE's Trident rendering engine. Although many insiders have suggested that Microsoft adopt the open source rendering engine WebKit that has been adopted by Apple Safari and Google Chrome, but for two reasons, Microsoft decided not to follow Apple and Google:

First The network is based on unconstrained, Microsoft believes that the compatibility of network standards is very important, and helps to combat the problem of the unity of network standards.

Secondly, considering the needs of technical work, if Microsoft uses its own rendering engine to develop browsers from the beginning, the development speed is faster than developing a new browser around the open source engine.

Because Microsoft decided to separate the new rendering engine from Trident, this means that Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in the Windows platform while eliminating some of the document patterns and other old IE behaviors. This also means that the old rendering engine will remain the same in the enterprise market, but will continue to receive security and “other advanced priority” patches. Microsoft also fixed how to discover, track, and fix small site issues.