The cost of modernity. The web landscape is a fickle space, with standards coming and going. Microsoft wants its Spartan browser to make a mark in the modern web, even if it means some unusual workarounds.
Redmond releases build 9926 to Windows Insiders on Friday, and just like in the previous test versions of the operating system, there is a possibility to enable the new Trident engine.
Yes, the one that both Spartan and IE share on Windows 10.
David Storey, part of the Internet Explore team shared some interesting bits in this build, including how to enable the Experimental Web Platform features. Rather unexpectedly, doing this the browser no longer reports its normal User Agent string.
Which is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko”.
Instead, Internet Explorer masks itself as Google Chrome, which David confirmed is done on purpose to work around some really peculiar web development behaviors.
Fact is that a lot of websites are not displayed well in IE, and usually serve a page that looks like it is designed for old browsers. Withstanding the fact that Internet Explorer 11 now supports several new web standards. Result being, some pages display incorrectly in Microsoft’s current browser.
Even though they work fine in other modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Scrolling issues also pop up on Internet Explorer, just because a website identifies a browser as IE. And it is this very stigma that Microsoft aims to wash away with Spartan.
From the look of things, development of Spartan is coming along really well, with benchmarks revealing a fast and breezy browsing experience. And the best part of this all? Everything is still in the early stage, and things can only go up from here.
source:windows10update
