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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Pretty surprising that it's coming with a new rendering engine given the good progress Microsoft has been making in bringing Trident in line with the competition.

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Insiders have reported on this previously. Basically the "new" rendering engine is a fork of Trident which removes backwards compatibility and legacy code. They might call it something else, but the new engine is basically Trident, refactored, and without the legacy cruft.

Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-explorer-12-big-changes-...

Validated by a few other insiders, including Paul Thurrott, Tom Warren (The Verge), and Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet).

So in this case fork = rename.

My understanding is fork = fork + rename. An actual fork did take place, the older branch will continue to be maintained for a separate browser process used by enterprises for compatibility.

Webkit was called called a fork of khtml, if that was a fork then so is this.

Is "new rendering engine" marketing-speak for "Trident with backwards compatibility ripped out"?

I can't be the only person that was really hoping they'd just use Web-kit and help "standardize" how websites render...

really tired of having:

Now instead we'll have:

Instead? Surely you mean, as well. You'll have to support both IE and SPARTAN. It is just another browser we have to deal with.

Every person with SPARTAN will have IE installed too. A site can say "works only in SPARTAN/Chrome/Firefox/Safari" or "Works only in IE" (for different markets).

Conditional comments were removed since IE10. Not that they've been necessary since IE9... Modern IE is a very decent browser.

I don't see how this is any different from calling io.js a "new server-side javascript platform" even though its forked from node. Ripping out the backwards compatibility will do a ton for maintainability and regression testing.

Yes.

That's by far the most interesting thing about this, where are the details on that?

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