Never change, intranet sites —

Project Spartan and IE will now use entirely separate rendering engines

Edge engine is now Spartan-only, while IE 11 will work as it does in Windows 8.1.

Project Spartan and IE will now use entirely separate rendering engines

We haven't even gotten a public build of Microsoft's new Project Spartan browser yet, but the company is already tweaking its browser strategy.

Windows 10 was always going to support both Spartan and Internet Explorer, and they were always going to be separate browsers. As originally conceived, both of them would be able to switch between the legacy Trident rendering engine and the new Edge rendering engine. Internet Explorer would remain more focused on legacy sites, though—it would retain compatibility with ActiveX plugins and third-party toolbars, features that Spartan is stripping out.

Now, an MSDN blog post says that Microsoft is making the Spartan and Internet Explorer split even more pronounced. Spartan will still get the Edge engine, but it will drop the legacy Trident rendering engine completely. Internet Explorer keeps Trident—and, crucially, its compatibility with sites designed for IE 5.5 or later—but it will no longer be able to use the new Edge engine. Microsoft says that including the new Edge engine in IE would introduce compatibility problems even without removing Trident. Now, if a site works in Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, it's guaranteed to work exactly the same way in Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10.

In Microsoft's words, IE in Windows 10 "will remain fundamentally unchanged from Windows 8.1."

Microsoft is also making this change to reduce confusion—developer feedback indicated that the separation between Spartan and IE wasn't clear enough, and this change addresses that problem. Internet Explorer is for old stuff and is primarily being kept around for compatibility-challenged Intranet sites. Spartan is for new stuff and will be where the majority of new features are introduced from this point forward.

It's still not clear which Windows 10 installations will include Internet Explorer 11 by default, but ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has heard that anything running the non-mobile version of Windows 10 will include IE 11. Microsoft says that businesses that want to make IE 11 their systems' default browser can do so using Group Policy, which implies that Spartan will be the default otherwise.

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Channel Ars Technica