Microsoft abandoned IE and was determined to do 220,000 lines of code

According to foreign media reports, we all know,MicrosoftIn Windows 10, it has been "surviving" for 20 yearsIE, and instead pushed the Edge browser with a new rendering engine; But we don't know,MicrosoftHow long did you struggle between giving up and choosing, and how much courage did you finally give? Edge represents the new standard of the future Internet, and behind IE still stands countless "old imperial forces", Microsoft needs to abandon the latter that has become a burden, but the feelings of more than 20 years do not mean that you can let go.

Charles Morris and Jacob Rossi, who lead the Edge project team's development tasks, blogged on Wednesday that Microsoft chose to develop the Edge engine from scratch to prove its determination to embrace Internet standards. To this end, Microsoft abandoned 220,000 lines of original IE code and removed more than 300 IE-specific programming interfaces. In order to keep up with its competitors in terms of compatibility standards, Microsoft has patched Edge more than 4,200 times......

Of course, these trade-offs and changes are difficult for the average user to notice, after all, most of these features are only for web developers. However, with the gradual unification of standards, in the long run, end users will eventually experience the great changes brought by new technologies to the future Internet experience.

For a long time, Microsoft was a stumbling block to the contemporary Internet's inability to embrace new technologies. Because in the era when the Internet was not so popular, Microsoft relied on the monopoly position of Windows to establish its own set of standards for IE, which was "riddled with holes". However, with the gradual maturity of the Internet, the IE standard without standards is obviously no longer adaptable. However, did Microsoft really abandon the tens of millions of websites developed with "IE6 compatibility" back then?

Yes, even if it is difficult to let go, you must choose to give up.

Looking ahead, more and more new websites and mainstream websites have adopted the new Internet standard, and compared with competitors such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome, the poor performance of the old IE before the new standard has caused its once dominant market share to decline and eventually be overtaken by its opponents.

Obviously, "guaranteed compatibility" has become the biggest burden for IE. Many times it is not difficult for developers to add a new feature, but it is even more difficult to remove a feature, especially a widely used one. Because of this, Microsoft has retained many technologies from decades or even twenty years ago in IE, and the most typical example of this is the much-criticized ActiveX and VBscrip removing the two extensions.

Because IE standards are not standards, Microsoft has even spent effort to develop a "document mode" that allows web program developers to specify which version of IE is used to render website content.

Patch after patch makes memories painful. But if you have to give up tens of millions of "station friends" who once built an empire together, Microsoft will inevitably have to be entangled. Therefore, Windows 10 finally provides the IE browser for compatibility purposes, although it is no longer the default of the system, and there will be no further development.

On the bright side, although tens of millions of "IE standard" websites have been ruthlessly abandoned, Edge will contribute to the healthy development of the Internet in the future by showing a new face that is fully compatible with the new standard. And the new features of HTML5 that have been talked about for so many years, such as embedded 3D images, video and audio playback, will finally be able to spread quickly without worrying that there will always be a part of the world that cannot watch the entire content of the website normally. (Lu Xin)