I dont understand, is this a new internet explorer or a successor to it ?
It will run in parallel to IE, which is here to stay for enterprise customers.
There's always new standards, so of course there is new standard support, just as IE is getting new standard support.
Effectively it is a redesign and rebranding of IE. Nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.
IE will still be around as a separate browser that can be used in environments it's needed but Spartan/Edge is completely new and the way forward for the mainstream users.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2015/03/24/updates-from-t...
So we set about to create a new engine using IE11’s standards support as a baseline. I watched Justin Rogers, one of our engineers, press “Enter” on the commit that forked the engine—it took almost 45 minutes just to process it (just committing the changes, not building!).
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
>> In the coming months, swathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine. Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit). What remained was a clean slate.
At this point, they kept basic stuff any rendering engine would do but it's as clean a start as you can get.
Do they have to write every single line from scratch again? That would be an enormous waste of time. Even if they started with a completely new repo, they would just copy/paste that stuff anyway. The important bits are all new and that's what matters.
[1]. http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8515771/microsofts-edge-br...