You may know that the history of internet browsers is a very interesting one. To say it in summary: there was no Microsoft Edge in the beginning, only Internet Explorer. But by the end of the decade, the web development community had basically boycotted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser by not supporting it in their web applications.
With the rise of web apps like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, web developers simply lost the battle with browsers over supporting basic application features like rendering and animation. Microsoft was in charge of the web programming community, and they made it clear that they weren’t going to cooperate and provide a version of IE that was fast and well supported. So everyone ran with Firefox or Google’s Chrome as the competitors, and web developers had to provide a full web development experience to these browsers instead.
Fast forward to the present, and the time has come for Microsoft to allow web developers back into IE to create their web applications. Recently, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 and introduced the new browser with basic support for Web Sockets and some basic application features. Microsoft had previously stated that IE 10 was essentially web applications in a browser, but instead, web developers and web app developers have been working with the browser to see what capabilities they would have if they were allowed to build web apps with IE. Web developers worked with Microsoft to create a specification called Project Comet, and in 2013, web developers began creating a library of web components in order to allow web applications to run with IE 10 and benefit from some basic application features.
After initially planning to only implement support for web components in IE 10, Microsoft made the decision to expand the capability of Project Comet to other browsers. All web developers need to do is build a web component library, and Microsoft would provide software developers with an API to allow web developers to build web apps for all browsers. Eventually, developers would write software that would run in any browser, and would not only benefit from browser features like user interfaces, animations, the navigation bar and other basic application features, but would also benefit from a full web development experience with web browsers like IE, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Developers would be able to change the design of their website with a web application without the need for a different browser.
There is an advantage for web developers because web applications will be able to run in any browser, which is not only easier to do for application developers, but web developers will be able to make a web application that runs in IE 10 and other browsers. With web applications, web developers will have the ability to create applications that will use everything from Adobe’s Flash Player to HTML5 APIs for web apps. These will be able to run anything from social media sites to the top 20 online casino UK websites. The advantage for software developers is that they will be able to create a web application that will run in any browser. The ability to create applications in any web browser would essentially create a universal web application platform, and would create a much wider audience for application developers.