Unfortunately that is what you get with proprietary sometimes.
Every browser pretty much presents webpages correctly according to modern CSS standards.
Every browser is fast enough that the difference is negligible
Not many people use any major add-on features of browsers, except like adblocker and stuff like that.
I really don't understand why this is an area that's worth competing in anymore, except providing an browser for your mobile ecosystem (chrome for android, spartan for windows phone, safari for apple, whatever). Webpages are still needed but apps are sweeping the field and providing better UX for the webpages that people use the most.
And downvote me as you might but firefox days are sadly counted
The tables might have turned, but Microsoft keeping competition up is necessary to maintain a healthy ecosystem.
#1 Spartan gets rid of all the legacy back-compatibility code that was holding them back.
#2 They added very interesting features that I haven't seen in other browsers (i.e colaboration)
They probably looked at the thousands of special cases in the old spaghetti code, maybe took a gander at the Blink/Webkit sources ;-), and then decided, "Hang it, we can do this ourselves, and do it right." Likely a pretty fun project, betting against the "never start from scratch" common wisdom of the crowd.
[1]: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/470/maybe-window...
Because of its popularity as a rendering engine, being used by Safari, Chrome and Opera, both on the desktop and on mobile phones, it is quickly becoming a monoculture. Even if we are talking about an open-source project, to me it smells too much like the lock-in that IExplorer once had on the market and people might not remember, but IExplorer was at some point very innovative and the best browser available. And many people also don't remember what happened after that.
So even though I'm very grateful about WebKit/Blink, we really must avoid repeating mistakes of the past. Multiple implementations of a standard are very healthy, monocultures are not.
However, I also think that given this overhaul, Microsoft should open-source this rendering engine. I really hope they do it and it would be in their interest to do so.
'Twould be delightful to know just how they treated the existing Trident sources...
It's still unclear if it will support WebGL 2, WebRTC, CSS 3D transformations.
Google, Mozilla and Opera - "WebRTC":
http://caniuse.com/#search=WebRTC and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC
Microsoft proposed another draft "CU-RTC-WEB" based on Skype details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-RTC-WEB and later "ORTC": http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/08/ortc-webrtc
Hangout vs. Skype vs. iOS messages is the deal breaker why WebRTC isn't suppored in Safari and IE. That's sad as it already works in ~1.7B devices.
That alone is enough to keep me from giving Spartan a real chance.
Great new design.
Trident without the legacy bits.
And free upgrades to get people onto the latest software as quickly as possible.
I'm liking this new Microsoft.
