Microsoft’s plan to fork Internet Explorer into two different web browsers, each with its own rendering engine, is somewhat controversial. But a source is telling me that my initial concerns about that second browser, codenamed Spartan, may be misplaced.

 

If you listen to the Windows Weekly podcast, you may recall that I wondered aloud about Microsoft’s decision to create this second browser, Spartan, which will come with a new rendering engine forked from the Trident rendering engine used by IE. Why didn’t Microsoft just use this opportunity to adopt the WebKit rendering engine, I asked, and try to innovate with the user experience?

 

Before we continue, a quick recap: WebKit is a web rendering engine used by Apple’s Safari (on iOS and Mac) and “sort of” used by Google’s Chrome, so between them that’s most of the Internet. In reality, Google has itself forked WebKit into its own web rendering engine called Blink. And while I tend to generalize these things into a single entity (“WebKit”) they are in fact different.

 

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