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Today, the Trident Era Ends


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Today, the Trident Era Ends

 

When I was a child, I was always fascinated by stories about ancient civilizations. I devoured books about Atlantis, or the story of Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy, stories about the Greek, the Romans, the Inca Empire, or Ancient Egypt. And I was always fascinated by the extent of their capabilities in the fields of astronomy, math, and medicine, their incredible achievements, like building those vast monuments, or their highly functional social systems. What's even more incredible is that most of this already happened way before Jesus Christ first set foot on our Earth!

 

And yet, all these eras of highly developed civilizations one day came to an end. Some just died out quietly, some were outpaced by civilizations with better military capabilities. Most of the time when that happened, the capabilities of the defeated ones did not carry over to the now dominating group, thereby enriching their pool, but instead vanished. Which I find unfortunate.

The Era of the Trident Engine #

Starting now, Microsoft will roll out their new Chromium-based Edge browser to their millions of Windows 10 users. And this will also mark the end of an era. The era of the Trident-Engine.

 

But hadn't the Trident era already ended when Edge appeared? Not really.

 

When Microsoft created the Edge browser in 2015, what they really did was to fork Trident into EdgeHTML and to strip out plenty of legacy code paths like ActiveX (Microsoft's version of Java Applets) or emulation of older IE rendering engines. Both browsers sharing the same genes gets apparent when you read posts like these on the Edge Blog or when you see bug reports that similarly affect IE 11 as well as Edge 17. Most of the initial Edge improvements came from Chakra, the JavaScript engine, whereas only a moderate few could be attributed to the rendering engine itself. Renaming the browser could be considered more of a marketing move, though, as the removal of legacy features already started earlier, when the browser was still called Internet Explorer.

 

Rebooting Internet Explorer under a new name didn't win back the hearts of the web developers. Up until today Microsoft remained busy playing catch up. Therefore, when we get excited about the web platform nowadays, it is not because of a new Edge release but because of Google unveiling new ideas or APIs during Google I/O or the Chrome Dev Summit. A lot of these innovations are driven by other teams at Google working on Google frameworks like Angular and AMP, or on Google products like Gmail, Search, Drive, Maps, Google Docs, Analytics or in recent times: Lighthouse. In fact, a lot of what defines HTML5 can be rooted back to Google looking for a way to improve the web platform to better accommodate its ideas around web apps. Remember Google Gears? Or later Google Chrome Frame?

 

Funnily that same kind of process also drove innovation in Internet Explorer in the old days. ActiveX capability was added to Internet Explorer 3.0, together with the <object> tag, to offer one more "compile target" for Microsoft's own Java competitor. It was certainly not the IE team that came up with this idea. Or take what we know today as "AJAX": the idea of lazily fetching content in the background via JavaScript was born in the Exchange / Outlook Web Access team, a product that could be seen as a precursor to Gmail. After pulling a few tricks inside Microsoft they got it (silently) shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in 1999. It wasn't until 6 years later that the term AJAX was coined and its concepts became widely known.

we pretty quickly struck a deal to ship the thing as part of the MSXML library. Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from- the thing is mostly about HTTP and doesn't have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus- XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).

The same goes for document.designMode (apparently a wish coming from the Hotmail team) & contentEditable, the DOM the Drag-n-Drop API, iframes or Clipboard Access. Internet Explorer was also the first browser to have permission prompts:

 

Clipboard Access Permission Prompt

 

Back in the days, Microsoft was single-handedly pushing the web forward, with around 1.000(!) people working on Internet Explorer and with a 100 million dollar budget to burn per year, with almost no-one left to compete. This was massive!

[Scott] Isaac also invented the iframe HTML tag. It has been speculated that the tag name stands for the Isaacs Frame, although Scott has denied this.

The last time Internet Explorer introduced new features driven by other business units was in 2012. At that time Windows 8 introduced the Windows Store and corresponding Windows Store Apps. Those apps could be written once and could then be run on Windows, Xbox and Windows Phone. Since Microsoft was late to the app store game, they had to put the entry barrier for developing apps as low as possible, so they got the idea of allowing people to develop apps with web technologies. As a communication path to the underlying OS, they created a JavaScript library called "WinJS" and Internet Explorer 10 was meant to be the runtime environment for those apps.

 

Metro Design - Microsoft, Public Domain

 

But to be able to model the Windows UI with web technologies, Microsoft had to add plenty of new capabilities to IE: CSS Grid, CSS Flexbox, CSS Scroll Snap Points and the Pointer Events API for touch and stylus interactions (the latter one was required as Apple had filed a patent on the Touch API).

 

[...]

 

The entire (warning: long) article can be read at the:

 

Source

 

 

 

 

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