[philip_roberts]

That's true, although many of the core backbone components have been significantly modified/basically completely rewritten, keeping a fair amount of similarity with the backbone APIs but extending them too, for example:

* Views have declarative data bindings for updating your html with model data automatically; out of the box, sensible render and remove methods just work; collection rendering is easy.

* Models have explicitly declared properties and types, as well as evented + cached derived/computed properties. You can access model properties without .get('name') and .set('name', value) and events and things just work.

[__david__]

> You can access model properties without .get('name') and .set('name', value) and events and things just work.

[when IE >= 9]

Honestly though I'm excited by getters and setters. I always disliked calling them explicitly in Backbone—it feels like a hack.

On the other hand, there's something nice to be said about explicit setters (you might not expect events to fire when it doesn't look like a function call).

Still, I'd rather have real looking code than a bunch of xxx.set('propA', yyy.get('propB')) nonsense.

[latentflip]

Yup, we are basically targeting ie9 as a minimum, though some pieces will be okay in lesser browsers.

Obviously that will mean some people can't use it, but hey, trade offs right :)