In less than a week, Microsoft will only offer support for Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge. As of Tuesday 12 January, Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 will die. The aging browsers will receive one more update, and then will be consigned to the trash.
Tuesday is the day that older versions of IE reach the end of their support cycles, and Microsoft is keen for everyone to move to either Microsoft Edge or -- for the diehards -- Internet Explorer 11. If you have not already made the switch (or jumped to Chrome or Firefox), one more patch, KB3123303, will pester you into upgrading.
This is vaguely reminiscent of the Browser Choice screen that Microsoft was forced to introduce sever years ago, and it will be interesting to see how effective the nagging is at getting people to move towards the most recent versions of Microsoft's web browsers.
Since the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft has been pushing Edge hard, but Internet Explorer 11 remains available mainly for enterprise users who need more time to be able to fully prepare for the switch. Of course, it's entirely possible that the nagging will simply sour people's view of Microsoft and push them towards the browsers offered by the likes of Mozilla and Google.
Summary:Microsoft is preparing the way for a new Project
Spartan browser in Windows 10 by explaining where it's coming from and
what it aims to do.
Some members of the Project Spartan team at work....
Image credit: Microsoft
With Project Spartan, Microsoft is building a new, modern browser for
all Windows 10 devices: PCs, tablets and phones. Although the new
rendering engine (Edge) has been forked from the one in Internet
Explorer 11 (Trident), it has rapidly diverged from it, and now works
well if websites treat it as Google Chrome. However, what may be more
important is what Microsoft is leaving out, which is IE's historical
baggage.
The Spartan codename presumably refers to the Xbox One game, Halo: Spartan Assault,
which befits a new assault on the browser market. To those more
familiar with ancient Greece than Draetheus V, it has stronger
connotations of the city-state famous for the toughness and military
prowess of its people. Even today, "Spartan" connotes "sternly disciplined and rigorously simple, frugal, or austere".
If, as some are claiming, Google is thenewMicrosoft, then Project Spartan is the new Chrome.
Of course, Google must be aware that today's Chrome is becoming
increasing bloated, swallowing more memory and resources than its main
rival, Firefox (1). We assume this is one reason why Google forked
WebKit to create its own Blink, which is also dumping historical
baggage. (Not having to work with Apple is probably another.) But
Internet Explorer goes back 20 years, and Microsoft has a lot more
baggage to dump.
As Microsoft's Jacob Rossi told Smashing Magazine
last month: "swathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine.
Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for
emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like
attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new
engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more
diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit)."
Given that IE11 is, in most respects, already competitive with Chrome on
Windows 8.1, the improvements from Project Spartan could put it
significantly ahead.
The Project Spartan team is also fixing thousands of interoperability
bugs and adding support for dozens more web standards: see modern.IE for progress reports.
IE Dev Chat on Twitter
On Thursday, team members took some time out to explain what they were doing. Their efforts included a major blog post (A break from the past: the birth of Microsoft's new web rendering engine), a witty Ask Us Anything session on Reddit, and an @IEDevChat session on Twitter. If you have any specific queries about Project Spartan, you may well find the answers in one of those.
The most important question for businesses is "What happens to websites and intranets built for early versions of IE?"
Jacob Rossi's answer is that "Windows 10 will use EdgeHTML for the web
(so no more worrying about doc modes) and only load Trident for legacy
enterprise sites. This dual-engine approach enables businesses to update
to a modern engine for the web while running their mission critical
applications designed for IE of old, all within the same browser."
However, in "Windows 10 as a service," the new browser will be rapidly
and continuously updated, just as Chrome, Firefox and most web apps and
services are today.
From the comments, it's obvious that Microsoft will have to overcome a
major challenge to its credibility, but many of the objections are based
on ignorance. There's a whole generation of web developers who don't
appreciate that IE6 wasn't just dramatically better than Netscape when
it appeared in Windows XP in 2001, it was also more standards-compliant.
Some even seem to blame Microsoft for the fact that IE6 doesn't support
standards that weren't written until years after it came out, and that
many organizations used XP long after Microsoft tried to wean them off
it.
There are also comments from people who don't seem to be aware of
anything that's happened to Internet Explorer in the six years since
IE8, if not longer. However, this could be to Microsoft's advantage,
because the Spartan browser will look a lot better against IE6-8 than
against IE11. If they can be persuaded to give it a fair trial.
There are, of course, many things we still don't know about the Spartan
browser. One is how much RAM and resources it will devour, because this
must be the key competitive advantage against Chrome. (It's one that the
"back to Firefox" bandwagon is already exploiting.) Another is the final name.
It's possible that the project name will become the brand name - as
happened with the Xbox and the Halo-related Cortana - but this seems
unlikely with Project Spartan. Maybe something snappy with One in it? I
just hope it's not called Internet Explorer. As IE11 is demonstrating,
that has enough negative connotations to drown out real advances in
quality and performance. (1) Bloatware is what happens when you build your own operating
environment - user IDs, accounts, apps, notifications, security sandbox
etc - inside somebody else's operating environment. Just try comparing a
blank Google Doc in Chrome with a blank document in a recent copy of
Microsoft Word. ~ Jack Schofield
Microsoft is cognizant of the fact that not everyone is ready for the
touch-based environment that Windows 8 / 8.1 affords which is evident by
recent browser market share statistics. Redmond isn’t leaving those on Windows 7 to be forgotten about just yet as they have made Internet Explorer 11 available for download starting today.
It’s not a huge surprise to see Microsoft drop a version of IE11 for
Windows 7. A developer preview of the software for Win 7 was pushed out
in late July followed by a more solid consumer preview in mid-September.
It’s been available for Windows 8.1 users for the past few weeks now.
Roger Capriotti, Microsoft's senior director of marketing for Internet Explorer, said
the engineering team has worked to make every subsequent version of IE
faster than its predecessor. This includes things like tapping into
hardware acceleration by using the GPU to speed up the browser and
boosting the performance of the Javascript engine.
Microsoft claims real-world websites will load up to nine percent faster
than they did on IE10 and up to 30 percent faster than on competing
browsers.
But it’s not all about performance with IE11 as security has been
fortified as well. A recent study from NSS Labs found that IE blocked 92
percent of phishing and malware attacks compared to just 71 percent
from Chrome. Safari and Firefox scored poorly at 37 percent and 35
percent, respectively.
You can download a copy of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 by clicking here. ~ Shawn Knight
Internet Explorer 11 was only available for Windows 8.1 until
yesterday, but as of today anyone with Windows 7 can download and
install the browser too. Although it's not the finished code, this
Preview for Developers includes many of the features that will be
included in the final release and are currently available on Windows 8.
Among the new features
is native decoding of JPG images using the GPU in real time, which
allows faster page loads and less stress on other computer components.
There is also support for HTML5 link pre-fetching and pre-rendering.
These two features allow developers to anticipate where you're going and
have those pages ready.
Aside from a few new features there's
been a lot of overhauling under the hood to improve general performance. According to Microsoft, IE11's "Chakra" JavaScript engine is 4%
faster compared to IE10 in Windows 7. As expected, there is also
support for hardware accelerated 3D web graphics and professional
quality video experiences on the web through standards like MSE (Media
Source Extensions) and EME (Encrypted Media Extensions).
If you're interested and have Windows 7 installed in your computer, you
don't have to wait any longer to give Internet Explorer 11 a try. Just click here to download, either the 32 or 64-bit variant. ~ Erik Orejuela
Much has been said about Windows 8.1 in the media since it was publically revealed and subsequently made available for download in the form of a preview version released at Microsoft’s Build conference last month. Through it all, one of the major improvements – Internet Explorer 11 – hasn’t received much attention.
Microsoft recently published a blog post
on this very subject designed to highlight some of the browser's key
features. Chief among them is the ability to open up to 100 tabs per
window, overcoming the previous limitation of 10 tabs at once.
One might expect some slowdown from having so many tabs open at once, but Microsoft says that isn’t the case. Tabs that haven’t been recently used will essentially be unloaded, thus freeing up valuable system resources for other tasks. This also means that with a mobile device, multiple tabs won’t drain your battery as quickly as they might with another browser.
Another new addition to Internet Explorer 11 is the ability to anticipate where you might want to go next on the web. When a user demonstrates intent to navigate, like tapping on the address bar or creating a new tab, IE11 will instantly present a list of frequently visited sites. Typing in a few characters in the address bar will result in relevant, rich suggestions and auto-completion to speed up navigation.
These are just a couple of the features that Microsoft decided to highlight in IE11. I haven’t had the opportunity to try Windows 8.1 just yet but I must admit the browsing experience does look much improved. Have you had the chance to try IE11 yet, and if so, what do you think? ~ Shawn Knight
