We got the Gecko family of browsers, the Trident family of browsers, and the WebKit family of browsers. Sure, there are varying JS engines, and Blink and Servo are on the way, but WebKit is the 900lbs gorilla. It is a monoculture in a lot of ways. I use and promote Firefox because I want to check the other vendors.
Microsoft makes, hm, how can I be positive here ... patchy software. There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up. But, very often you'll see these weird, beautiful bits just sticking out all over the place in Microsoft code. The weirdo geniuses at MSFT are allowed to do their thang and leave their mark. And the seminal releases of their software are always the best. Like, there are parts of IE6 that make me go, "how the HELL did Microsoft pull this tech off in 2000?" IE6 was this crumbly tower of awesome. If IE6 were a game, I won that game.
Anyhow, if development on Spartan goes RIGHT, then this browser will be the 2015 version of IE6. It will be the completest vision of kickassitude. There will be weird, crazy bits, and it'll take Microsoft and the rest of us a decade to untangle the proprietary parts. I can feel my blood pressure rising already!! The rage and the triumph and the glory!
IE6 was pretty damned awesome at release... IE5.x was a bit of a mess in that transition, but 6 was pretty damned awesome (proprietary bits included)... That said, it got stale pretty fast (by the time Phoenix was renamed Firefox) and slid even faster as others worked to make a better browser experience. The sad thing is, we're just now shedding IE8, and IE9 is still holding on... I'll be happy once I can get to an IE10+ only position...
For me, one thing I've been wanting to do is a compute heavy challenge-response for API requests.. meaning web workers, and that's only IE10+ ... will probably do a proof of concept with node (server) with scrype (client/server) against a pool of computed hashes... which could be very interesting in terms of reducing a DDOS against an API.
Microsoft makes, hm, how can I be positive here ... patchy software. There are always lots of rough patches reflecting pointy-haired boss decision making process, and there's cruft that builds up. But, very often you'll see these weird, beautiful bits just sticking out all over the place in Microsoft code. The weirdo geniuses at MSFT are allowed to do their thang and leave their mark. And the seminal releases of their software are always the best. Like, there are parts of IE6 that make me go, "how the HELL did Microsoft pull this tech off in 2000?" IE6 was this crumbly tower of awesome. If IE6 were a game, I won that game.
Anyhow, if development on Spartan goes RIGHT, then this browser will be the 2015 version of IE6. It will be the completest vision of kickassitude. There will be weird, crazy bits, and it'll take Microsoft and the rest of us a decade to untangle the proprietary parts. I can feel my blood pressure rising already!! The rage and the triumph and the glory!