The upcoming Spartan browser will be a new beginning for Microsoft’s internet-focused efforts and a chance for the company to finally walk away from Internet Explorer’s legacy. A lot will be riding on the browser’s success, so Microsoft is opening up and partnering with others to ensure a positive outcome.
In a blog post on the official Internet Explorer Blog, Spartan program manager, Bogdan Brinza, talked about the company’s new willingness to open up and collaborate with partners. Microsoft has traditionally been a closed shop when it comes to developing IE, while its competitors collaborated on open source engines like WebKit, Gecko and Blink. This put the Windows-maker at a disadvantage and so Microsoft is trying to learn from its mistakes with this new Spartan browser.
One of the partnerships that’s being publicly discussed is between Microsoft and Adobe. The latter is a big contributor to WebKit and other engines, so getting them onboard to help develop Spartan is a win for Microsoft. One of the contributions that Adobe is bringing to Spartan can be seen in this CodePen demo if you’re running IE on Windows 10. It highlights how the browser can natively support the blending of graphics.
While this isn’t a huge deal it itself, Microsoft’s newfound open nature is. Being more open and collaborative with other players in this field may prove to be a winning strategy for the company and for Spartan. We’ve very curious to see who else has Microsoft been partnering with and what new features come out of it.
Source: IE Blog