Microsoft building a completely new browser for Windows 10

[peterb]

"Capable of ..."? Sure.



There has (IMHO, of course) long been a mindset at MS that there's two ways of doing things, the MS way, or the wrong way, and MS philosophy has always tried to ignore any way that isn't the MS way, anything that doesn't live wholly on Planet Microsoft. This has gone, fairly often, as far as trying to use MS market power to undermine and destabilise anything that doesn't live in MS-World. I'm not convinced they've shaken that mindset yet.

This - in spades - and one of the (many) reasons I go out of my way to avoid using Word. And was shown to great effect in the way the killed Wordperfect (although WP didn't help themselves)

[Joshyy]

They are going to have a hard time drawing the crowd back from Chrome & Firefox, they're doing what Microsoft is extremely good at, which is arriving late to the party. Will have to see how it turns out in the coming future.

[DarkflameZM]

The irony is that IE 11 is actually ahead of Chrome in some ways in regards to standards compliance, Google are really dropping the ball on Chrome lately.

I hope MS's new browser will follow the World Wide Web Consortium standards more closely.

[shaithis]

The irony is that IE 11 is actually ahead of Chrome in some ways in regards to standards compliance, Google are really dropping the ball on Chrome lately.

Most people don't care too much about standards compliance though......at least until it starts causing them trouble and Chrome isn't really causing too many troubles right now.

The big joke when talking about browser standards and Microsoft is that the download button is missing for me on multiple machines when using Internet Explorer on the Microsoft site......switching to Chrome allows me to download

[Kovoet]

I have not used a Microsoft browser for years. Wonder if this will be any better

[wasabi]

I have not used a Microsoft browser for years. Wonder if this will be any better

I'm forced to use it sometimes at work. Truly horrific. But then so is any browser without extensions.

[risapylsa]

Hopefully this will provide us with an alternate, functioning browser that doesn't hog RAM *cough*Chrome*cough*

[AlexKitch]

Hopefully this will provide us with an alternate, functioning browser that doesn't hog RAM *cough*Chrome*cough*

Stuff that hogs ram is *good*. RAM is there to be used, and isn't a particularly expensive commodity any more.

[crossy]

Stuff that hogs ram is *good*. RAM is there to be used, and isn't a particularly expensive commodity any more.

Pendant time...
Apps that make good use of available RAM definitely ARE to be welcomed, (so I'm agreeing with you). On the other hand bloated monstrosities that "need" 4GB+ merely because "it's what PC's have these days" are not so welcome chez crossy.

Interesting general point though - it's old school coders (like myself) who seem to be concerned about resource usage. On the other hand, most of the fresh-faced just-got-a-degree-and-now-I-know-it-all "newbies" seem to be more comfortable with throwing hardware at a problem. Just my personal experience and if there's Hexus readers out there that are new programmers but still value efficiency then consider yourself honorary members of the "old school" club!

[AlexKitch]

Pendant time...
Apps that make good use of available RAM definitely ARE to be welcomed, (so I'm agreeing with you). On the other hand bloated monstrosities that "need" 4GB+ merely because "it's what PC's have these days" are not so welcome chez crossy.

Interesting general point though - it's old school coders (like myself) who seem to be concerned about resource usage. On the other hand, most of the fresh-faced just-got-a-degree-and-now-I-know-it-all "newbies" seem to be more comfortable with throwing hardware at a problem. Just my personal experience and if there's Hexus readers out there that are new programmers but still value efficiency then consider yourself honorary members of the "old school" club!

Define 'new'. . I'm probably a fairly new programmer in the grand scheme of things (15 years?).

Resource usage is very important to me, since I'm typically dealing with systems that don't have a lot of it to spare (such as the 360 and PS3).

On PC I'm still careful that my usage isn't sloppy, but if I need 32mb to make a particular piece of intensive code work 100x faster than it would otherwise, I won't hesitate to reach for malloc. This is what I really meant when I said that memory is there to be used

[crossy]

Resource usage is very important to me, since I'm typically dealing with systems that don't have a lot of it to spare (such as the 360 and PS3).

On PC I'm still careful that my usage isn't sloppy, but if I need 32mb to make a particular piece of intensive code work 100x faster than it would otherwise, I won't hesitate to reach for malloc. This is what I really meant when I said that memory is there to be used

Sounds like you're the kind of guy I'd call a "professional programmer" - someone who not only wants to get the code "out of the door" but also do something that works well. Just wish there were more like you. I'd especially like to find the 'colleague' who programmed the app client I was using the other day - all it does is present a GUI yet somehow absolutely needs 4GB RAM, and still runs like it's working out Pi and your session is just a background job. I'd like to shake that guy warmly by the throat...

Actually there's a thing that kind of worries me a bit. With these "modern" languages doing so much in the background it's becoming more and more difficult to keep a rein on the resource usage, and in a lot of cases I'm finding that I'm having to just hope that whoever programmed that stuff "behind the scenes" did a good job. Old style stuff like C (tips hat to your malloc reference) was perhaps better for being more primitive. Then you've got all those system libraries you've got to use (like WPF et al) - have those been made with a view to efficiency, or just "got out of the door" to please the Marketing and Sales departments? PS definitely agree with the "malloc to get 100x speedup" choice, like you, I'd do that in a heartbeat.

Colleague of mine made a good point the other day about this. He was saying that in the days of Netscape all a browser had to do was read some pretty straight forward markup and turn it into something on the screen. So a browser could be pretty small and tightly coded. On the other hand, these days a browser is more of an "application client", (especially with all the hinkey stuff that came in with HTML5), and all those "smarts" need resources, so perhaps I'm being very unfair in expecting Netscape-style footprints from today's all-singing browser applications?

[Flash477]

The question is whether it is going to be more of a standalone app, of it is going to be horribly tied into the OS like IE is. I also hope that they force updates as well - don't want to end up with an equivalent to IE6 holding everything back....