Improvements in the Tasman rendering engine
The following is a list of improvements found in the MSN8 client for OS X, per a message from Jimmy Grewal, developper for the MacBU.
From: "Jimmy Grewal" Date: Sat May 17, 2003 4:10:20 AM Japan To: "Mac Internet Explorer Talk" Subject: RE: New Engine/Version? Now that it's out, here are some of the improvements we've made: - Full Unicode support. Probably the single most important investment we've made in Tasman since IE 5.0. - CSS 3 Selectors - CSS TV Profile - @media - DOM 1 Core - DOM 2 Core, Style, and Events (mostly, with a few exceptions) - Improved Windows IE DOM compatibility, including all offset properties. We also have support for XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 in our core code, but it's not turned on in the MSN client. We've also made other architectural investments: - All drawing is done via CoreGraphics (Quartz) - All text drawing is done via ATSUI, Apple's Unicode text layout engine. We now have support for ligatures and lots of other goodies that other browsers don't. - Networking is now handled by a new library that's built on top of Apple's Sockets implementation rather than Open Transport. Besides greater functionality (better certificate parsing, gzip, etc.), it's also about an order of magnitude faster than our old code. Lastly, the target audience for this MSN client is at home Mac users who want a simple, protected Internet experience. Our focus on this release was parental controls, not trying compete with Safari or Mail. Those apps target a different set of users than those we are focusing on. We do not consider the MSN client a replacement for IE 5.x or Entourage. For many users, Safari or IE 5.x will continue to offer features they won't see in our MSN offerings...but there will be a lot of effort put into things like parental controls, junk mail protection, communications, and ease of use. -Jimmy
