Rumor is rife…MS abandoning the venerable IE? Untinkable? Not so much.
Mary Jo Foley…a very well respected author and reporter reported yesterday in her blog at zdnet that “big changes” are coming for IE. In fact, it appears that while the search engine itself will remain, it will be lighter, faster (as in ‘dekluged’) and be far more like Chrome and Firefox.
In fact, MS is building a new browser…called “Spartan” (good choice of name!). The brand name of IE is being ditched because of all the negatives tied to its past (IE6-8). It will still use the Chakra JavaScript engine (so there will be vulnerabilities) and MS’s Trident rendering and not WebKit.
“How it works, per our internal sources, is that if a page calls for IE to render in a compatibility mode, this will cause the older, more resource intensive Trident engine to display the page. But, if the webpage does not call for compatibility mode, then the updated IE12 Trident engine will handle all of the lifting…because of the fork, the modern component of the IE12 should be lightweight compared to what we have now in IE11, at least, that's the hope because all of the legacy base has been removed.” – Neowin
Also, there will be two varieties, apparently: One for desktops and another for mobile devices.
It’s entirely possible that W10 Technical Preview (new version to be presented 1/21/15) will come with IE11 and Spartan, according to Foley. It’s also possible that it will only be shown at the 1/21 presentation.
It’s also very possible that Spartan will be ported to Android and iOS down the line since much of MS’s software has been ported to these OSs.
Source:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-building-a-new-browser-as-part-of-its-windows-10-push/
http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-explorer-12-big-changes-are-coming-to-trident