Microsoft unveil Project Spartan

I remember when Microsoft released the first version of Internet Explorer back in 1995, after acquiring Spyglass Mosaic and doing what large technology companies do best: putting a new label on something and marching confidently into battle.

For the next decade, Internet Explorer seemed unstoppable. It crushed the competition, conquered desktops and eventually became so deeply embedded in everyday computing that for millions of people, the little blue “e” was the internet. You clicked it and the internet came out. Simple times.

For web developers, the relationship was somewhat more complicated to put it mildly. But all good things must come to an end. Fortunately, bad things do too.

Microsoft is now working on a new browser, code-named Project Spartan. It began life as a fork of the venerable Trident engine, which is the machinery that has been lurking beneath Internet Explorer for years, faithfully rendering web pages in its own occasionally imaginative interpretation of reality.

Spartan introduces a new rendering engine, although Microsoft isn’t quite ready to drag Trident behind the barn just yet. Legacy websites will still be rendered using the IE11 engine when necessary. According to Rey Bango, the old IE11 legacy engine (mshtml.dll) remains aboard for emergencies, while the shiny new engine (edgehtml.dll) becomes the default.

A new engine for a new era, with the old one kept downstairs in the basement in case somebody desperately needs to run an intranet application written last century. But the web has moved on. Developers increasingly build for WebKit and Blink (the engines behind Safari and Chrome) while Internet Explorer compatibility has slipped considerably further down the list of things worth losing sleep over. Microsoft’s once terrifying dominance of the desktop browser market has steadily eroded.

Perhaps that is the real reason for creating Spartan in the first place. Technology can be rewritten. Rendering engines can be replaced. APIs can be deprecated, renamed and quietly buried in documentation where nobody will ever find them again. But reputations are harder to mend. After two decades of Internet Explorer, Microsoft may have concluded that fixing the browser is actually easier than fixing the name. Somewhere, a web developer quietly deletes an IE-specific stylesheet and pours himself a drink to celebrate.

Update: On April 29, Microsoft announced the browser’s final name to be Microsoft Edge.