Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/03/17/microsoft-is-killing-off-the-internet-explorer-brand/

by nsp • 11 years ago

269 209 11 years ago

americasmarkets.usatoday.com

I would be curious to see how well browser brand names have associated/resonated with the average computer users over time. I know my mom uses chrome because I made it her default web browser and hid explorer. However she doesn't refer to it as chrome, just "the web".

whoopdedo2• 11 years ago

I've lost count of the number of times I asked someone what browser they used and was told "Yahoo."

TallGuyShort• 11 years ago

Maybe Yahoo Axis really is that popular.

gagege• 11 years ago

About 4 years ago (note: not 14 years ago) my boss at the time told me "AOL" when I asked him that question. Immediately I thought he was joking, then I thought he must be mistaken and was telling me what his homepage was by accident. But then, to my horror, he showed it to me, and I realized he was completely correct. He was using some ugly purple "modern" version of an AOL browser that I didn't even know existed.

userbinator• 11 years ago

I'd say that Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and many of the other browser names are nowhere near as descriptive as Internet Explorer.

I know people who refer to IE as "the internet", and it's not very hard to make that association since "internet" is in its name.

serve_yay3• 11 years ago

I guess it's not just us nerds in our bubble who dislike it.

qnaal• 11 years ago

still?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%2...

serve_yay3• 11 years ago

I have verified that this is indeed a Wikipedia page. Thank you.

OliverJones• 11 years ago

They killed that brand ages ago. Now they're going to stop mentioning its name.

angularly• 11 years ago

Heh, exactly my thought when I saw the headline. As a webdeveloper since 1995, I can only say "phew, finally" - that browser probably cost me 2-3 years of my life, spent hacking various webprojects to make them work in IE.

aikah2• 11 years ago

You forget the fact that IE used to be the best browser out there.Netscape ended up being total shit.

xxxyy• 11 years ago

Isn't this just a marketing stunt? The article contains no engineering facts, just the branding thing. I mean: I expect the "new IE" to inherit code and practices from the "old IE". Unless I'm proven otherwise.

Florin_Andrei• 11 years ago

webdeveloper since 1995

Those were terrible, terrible times. Mostly due to IE.

nostromo2• 11 years ago

"We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan"

Oh joy, another browser from Microsoft to test. :\

mariusmg• 11 years ago

Yes, let's all use Webkit. Much better.......

Later edit : Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.

integraton7• 11 years ago

Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.

I agree, as long as they are by companies, organizations, and teams other than Microsoft. And that's what we indeed have already: Gecko, WebKit, Blink (and Blink is new, which is great). I very much look forward to additional open engines (and POSIX-compliant operating systems, for that matter) by companies, organizations, and even unofficial teams of dedicated individuals that are not Microsoft, of which there are many.

aikah2• 11 years ago

Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.

Except that is hardly the case.Competition is good,that's what forced IE to evolve as it was losing marketshares. But let's not kid ourself thinking all the players are in it for web standards.

Yes, let's all use Webkit. Much better.......

Because IE supremacy used to be better...

OmarIsmail• 11 years ago

Why is that a good thing?

For a developer's perspective being able to write once and have it work everywhere is pretty darn big "pro". What are the practical "cons" that outweigh this?

wantab10• 11 years ago

Apparently you think Chrome still uses WebKit

cssmoo3• 11 years ago

I don't know why you were down voted.

We have to support Ie7,8,9,10,11 and 11 for metro in and out of compatibility mode across three fucking platforms due to control styling differences. Now we have Spartan and whatever shtcrock will ship as legacy.

We'll lose IE7 when vista is dead. We'll be left with enterprise IE11 well into 2028!

Why? In financial services all our clients are cheap, dumb and incompetent. Unpatched win7 from "managed service providers" is the reality. If yore lucky they're not some hideous terminal services shit crock.

This is why we go "oh joy".

Its also why everyone who works at the places goes home to Apple and Android kit.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 11 years ago

Legacy will be IE11.

gsnedders3• 11 years ago

As of Jan 2016, only IE9 (on Vista), IE11 (on 7/8), and Spartan will be receiving security fixes. See <http://support.microsoft.com/gp/Microsoft-Internet-Explorer>.

freehunter• 11 years ago

Is that really any different than if enterprise clients were demanding support for Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Firefox 4, etc? I've actually been in that situation, a place I worked in 2011 had a web app that only worked properly in Firefox 2.something.

Blame companies for demanding an app specific to one version. Blame the developers for writing apps that only work on one version. Blame Microsoft for making breaking changes between versions. But only one of those things is Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing people hard to update their browser since IE7 was released.

njloof2• 11 years ago

When Vista is dead? My mother-in-law is still on XP.

ubernostrum• 11 years ago

Honestly, I am prepared to welcome a clean-start browser from Microsoft that rips out all the layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of legacy support and emulation layers it had accumulated. That, not the browser itself, has been the increasing problem with IE in this decade.

jordigh• 11 years ago

I wonder if they're gonna go with Webkit. There was some speculation that the "new" MSFT would be going that route.

legohead• 11 years ago

From a couple months ago: "Technically, the browser will use Microsoft’s Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), according to Foley." [1]

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2863878/microsofts-reported-s...

aquilaFiera• 11 years ago

It will not use Webkit. They internally forked Trident and tore out all the legacy code. From what I've heard the two code bases don't much resemble each other anymore.

Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...

megaman821• 11 years ago

I forgot where I saw it, but the claim is that the new Trident engine has diverged more from the old than Blink has from Webkit.

stuart78• 11 years ago

I fear that the browser itself will live forever. At least in my parent's basement where the PCs are like Mr. Burns' indestructibility: https://vimeo.com/96581518

So IE6 it is.

bdcravens• 11 years ago

"Not that Internet Explorer branding will vanish entirely. It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet."

If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.

300bps• 11 years ago

If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.

If Microsoft wants to "win the browser war", in my opinion the best thing they could do would be to create their own WebKit (or even Chromium) distribution and have it installed in Windows by default.

Someone12343• 11 years ago

That may work, but it would be bad for the market overall. The more browser engines we have the better, least of all we wind up in another IE6-like situation where one browser/engine rules the world and dictates web-features.

PS - Yes, I know Google broke away from Apple's WebKit branch. But a lot of browsers are still very WebKit-like.

wantab10• 11 years ago

You remember the last time they installed their own browser by default, don't you?

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

The same way users were going to flock to Netscape instead of IE?

Spartan will be pre-installed and "good enough" for a lot of people. IT departments will de facto have to support it because it comes on the Windows image. Joe User read a lot things about Chrome spying on him or blocking his favorite ad blocker and might want to try it out.

If IE was an issue for users

IE as legacy browser tied to active x junk and old school enterprise sites was the problem. Spartan dumps all of that. Oh some $crappy_site_coded_for_ie6 doesnt work in Spartan? Too bad. IE is there for legacy stuff, Spartan is for modern stuff.

If MS doesn't screw it up, Spartan may be a big deal and could cut into Chrome's marketshare. I wouldn't write it off.

Someone12343• 11 years ago

I think part of Spartan's success will live and die on how well it supports addons/extensions. I imagine it won't be backwards compatible with IE's old COM extension nonsense, so it will be interesting to see what they do there...

jeorgun• 11 years ago

Is their new project architecturally different, or just a rebranding? I've thought for years that they should rename the thing, to get rid of the stigma, but it'd be kind of a shame to completely abandon the browser just as it was catching up.

untog• 11 years ago

Architecturally stripped down to remove the old compatibility modes. Which is fine by me - IE11 actually isn't bad.

rverghes• 11 years ago

I wonder if this is a way to get around backwards compatibility issues. If it's a new brand with a new name, maybe there won't be expectations that it will work like previous versions of IE.

Walkman• 11 years ago

    It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be 
    the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet.

No, it will be Chrome or Firefox :D

robbrown451• 11 years ago

They'll probably just call it "The Internet."

brockers• 11 years ago

...and the congregation said AMEN!

azinman2• 11 years ago

“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing.”

Ummm that's confusing. If you're going to kill it, kill it dead.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 11 years ago

Well, they can't, because enterprise/legacy sites. They need to keep it kicking around.

But the non-awful modern browser, that won't be called IE.

O____________O• 11 years ago

Is there some proof of this outside of this USA Today article?

I came here with the exact same concern as the GP comment.

“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan..."

It just reeks of marketing double-speak that gets engineers excited, only to find out that they're stuck maintaining code for N + 1 browsers now.

Incidentally, Microsoft rebranding exercises infuriate me. Arguably, Spartan is a "new" product, but by that measure any product rewrite should get a completely new, unrelated name rather than a version number. I remember COM + DispInterfaces ==> ActiveX, Outlook Express ==> MSN Messenger, MSN ==> Bing. It's just irritating and confusing to both developers and consumers.

Theodores• 11 years ago

They should just tie it into Bing! and call it the Bing! Browser!

Rather than it be offered by the operating-system division, they should have the product engineered and marketed by the search engine division. The integration to Bing! should be uncompromising and a genuine step change in usability. This does not have to appeal to the 'power users', however, if it has a few usability tricks that make it more useful for most people in most circumstances then they could do fine with it.

With an integrated approach of browser plus services such as search this browser could be great. As a mere browser it has no USP so I will stick with Chrome (on a Chromebook).

Ezhik• 11 years ago

I hope they name Spartan after their magical browser girl mascot, Inori. She's cute.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 11 years ago

See: https://www.facebook.com/internetexplorertan

grandalf4• 11 years ago

Absurdly, users have to install Windows 10 to use this new browser. Why not write it in .net and have it work on all versions of Windows typically found in the wild?

joshuapants5• 11 years ago

Their goal is to have as many people running the current OS as possible. Every exception like that they make is an exception that keeps people using the old versions and keeps them scrambling to maintain them.

throwawaymsft3• 11 years ago

Some people are going to stick on the old OS no matter what. Their computer still works, why buy another?

We can stamp our feet or work with that reality. We have 70% of China on Windows XP with no hope of a modern browser from MS (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484761/microsoft-windo...). At least Chrome will work on those old systems. At least web devs can use modern features on those systems.

If the browser is the primary carrot to get someone to upgrade your OS, the OS value prop sucks.

hackmiester• 11 years ago

Or even other OSes! If it really doesn't suck, I'll want to test it out on non-Windows things.

JohnBooty• 11 years ago

I wish it worked on other versions of Windows as well (just like Firefox and Chrome do) but a .NET version would likely be vastly inferior to a C/C++ browser in performance.

.NET is great but this isn't really what it's meant for.

badloginagain3• 11 years ago

I'm willing to give Spartan a chance, honestly. The ModernIE initiative taken by Microsoft the past few years feels like Microsoft gave IE to a team of competent engineers and told to run with it. They dropped support for older versions of IE and upgraded the technology behind it.

Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products.

I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]

morninj• 11 years ago

What browser do you use now? I agree with your points, but I've stuck with Chrome because of the range of extensions.

badloginagain3• 11 years ago

I don't use much extensions, so that's never been too big of a deal for me. I'm using Opera although currently trying Vivaldi[0]

Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox]

[0]https://vivaldi.com

joshuapants5• 11 years ago

I agree. Have you fired up the Windows 10 preview and enabled the new rendering engine in IE? It's a pretty good step forward so far, and I'd imagine the next build will be even better. AFAIK, Spartan itself should be in the next build.

bhauer• 11 years ago

I too will give Spartan a chance, and in likelihood will use it predominantly on my tablets and laptop (since I use IE 11 in those contexts today).

On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D.

I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.

badloginagain3• 11 years ago

That's actually a really good insight. I've always owned mid-high range computers, but browsing has always been much slower than my computers relative processing power. It's odd how I've come to accept that slow browsing is acceptable just because no one has "figured it out" yet.

wantab10• 11 years ago

You haven't seen Spartan yet so I wouldn't make any promises on what you will do with it.

lsdafjklsd• 11 years ago

What's the word with Firefox performance? My company's app is critically slow in JUST Firefox. It's an Ember app, but we use D3 and Immutable.js. We aren't doing anything weird AFAIK

girvo• 11 years ago

What has profiling turned up? Because in my experience, Firefox is faster on the apps I work on for Javascript performance, so I'm really curious what sort of performance profile your app has.

elpool2• 11 years ago

My company's app is slowest in Firefox too. Most noticeably its the CSS3 transitions that are slow and chunky compared to all the other main browsers. It doesn't really affect the usability too much, but it still annoys me that I can't get the transitions to be nice and smooth like they are in Chrome or IE.

wantab10• 11 years ago

Firefox is too slow.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary?

As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times.

No you don't. As a web developer, I personally can attest that's not true.

piyush_soni3• 11 years ago

Oh you can easily figure out render performance differences in milliseconds with your eyes. Try that. For example, a difference of 300 milliseconds is noticeable by me. I don't know what are you 'attesting' there. I'm not a web-developer, but just 'a developer'.

Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)

creshal2• 11 years ago

Despite all the evidence to the contrary?

It's fast in benchmarks… but it's either single-threaded or has horrible locking. One slow script somewhere will not just block the tab, but the entire browser. Good luck hunting it down with 40+ open tabs.

(I really miss Opera 12, it's still the only browser to decouple the UI to its own thread so a long-running script doesn't lock up the page. Or the whole browser…)

madaxe_again2• 11 years ago

You may not consciously notice, but you sure as shit do. I've got some lovely scatter plots sampled across billions of user sessions that show that average page load time in a session has a direct inverse correlation with conversion rate.

Humans are impatient to the core.

shmerl3• 11 years ago

Firefox is too slow.

Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.

tkubacki• 11 years ago

I think "firefox is slow" partialy comes from people using css3 animations eg. this http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js/#/bored works smooth on my MBP as well as on my Ubuntu desktop whereas seems sluggish on FF (on both platforms)

andreypopp• 11 years ago

Also try using apps which use flexbox intensively — FF triggers exponential slowdown when handling deeply nested flexbox layouts[0]...

[0] https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs/issues/8

badsock3• 11 years ago

I think you're being too mild in your side note.

The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed.

It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.

WorldWideWayne3• 11 years ago

I don't care who does it or why - I just want higher quality software platforms. I'm glad that Microsoft didn't immediately give into the "open web" because it's a horrible mess of designed-by-committee compromises.

I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.

FireBeyond• 11 years ago

Leaving aside the greater Windows thing, let's be honest - all the major browsers in that era basically said FU to the standards and raced ahead deploying their own stuff. There was greater interplay between the non-IE browsers, but that was because of marketshare and grim realities. Every browser was guilty of releasing features and functions that were "Best viewed in Browser X"

ryandvm• 11 years ago

It certainly wasn't an act of altruism, but the entire modern web can trace it's AJAXy roots back to Microsoft's decision to eschew web standards. Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest to Internet Explorer so that they could develop Outlook Web Access.

IE may have had utterly stank HTML compatibility, but adding XMLHttpRequest and inventing AJAX was probably the single most profound changeset in the history of the web.

squiggy22• 11 years ago

I agree with much of what you are saying, personally the slew of bugs are the unforgivable bit as they are the parts that continue to persist. Legacy features tend to die

MichaelGG5• 11 years ago

I'll give it a chance as soon as I can add simple extensions (like ublock, vim bindings, etc). And when they make the UI not look unfinished. Maybe it's silly, but those ugly square tab things look like a prototype before the design team had their turn. Petty as that is, I really find it annoying. Also not a fan of sharing the address bar with tabs, but that's minor in comparison. (I used IE for a long time, until well after Chrome was shipped, so I'm not inherently biased.)

e12e• 11 years ago

As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times.

No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so.

One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.

hunyeti• 11 years ago

I'm willing to give Spartana a chance, as long as they release it as open source and i will be able to run on linux without wine.

PopsiclePete• 11 years ago

With this new CEO, Microsoft is a different company. Cloud & Mobile all the way. .NET/CLR is open-source. First class support for Linux and OS X. Commitment to standards.

At the risk of sounding like a complete lunatic, here's my prediction for the next 10 years:

* Microsoft abandon traditional Windows development. * They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple. Unix and Unix-like OS's become the only game in town. "Traditional" apps are emulated. New Apps are written in a CLR-compatible language only for the modern runtime. * IIS, IE, Sivelight - all are left to stagnate. * Office becomes HTTP/JS, hosted only.

snorkel• 11 years ago

As long as Microsoft has big customers all-in on Windows, and there are many, so too will Microsoft remain Windows. You can compete with free for as long as free is not what the big players want in their IT operation.

TheCondor• 11 years ago

Ms would stop being ms in that scenario, I can't see it happening. I could see them drop the "windows" brand though.

This new browser, is it married to Windows? Ibm went through this, they were maybe the most dominant corporation the world has ever seen, then the government scared them and the micro revolution happened. IBM switched from trying to own every deal (well they still wanted that) to being satisfied to get a slice of the action, it became all about open. Ms seems to be switching from "windows everywhere" to "helping you be the best you" or some other theme. I'll be impressed when they support a browser and office on linux.

ams61102• 11 years ago

I think they would keep the NT kernel. The engineering that went into that was pretty top notch. The rest of the Windows legacy yeah, that gets dumped.

MichaelGG5• 11 years ago

Can you elaborate on what MS would gain by tossing their rather fine kernel and using Linux/BSD? Particularly since that'd lose the massive amount of hardware support from current drivers.

fuzzythinker• 11 years ago

One strong reason is to lure back developer love. One reason why most startups use Macs or linux machines is because open source libraries runs on linux and most of the time on OSX without much modifications. Windows is always an afterthought and is lucky if Windows support is available in a few months. MS knows this and knows that if the trend is not reversed soon, Windows market share will decline.

ninkendo• 11 years ago

I've thought about this a lot too and I mostly agree, but I think they'd keep the Windows branding and NT kernel and just start making the POSIX/Unix layer installed by default and supported as first-class.

I'd love a Windows machine to work the same way I use my OSX machine: using Terminal.app and HomeBrew to develop and use unixey apps, but with a nice GUI and hardware support that's better than the Linux distros out there. I can confidently develop say, rails applications, test them locally, and just push them to production on Linux servers and I've never once thought "hey, I wonder if this will break due to differences in OSX to Linux." It just never has made a difference. I want windows to be like this too.

I can get there with Windows now with Cygwin or SFU, but I want it all to ship with Windows, and binaries I create are unlikely to work anywhere except other people who have installed the whole stack. Plus there's no good terminal emulator for windows I'm aware of.

amorphid• 11 years ago

I became a Mac user when I started to become a developer with a preference for the command line. The default Windows terminal sucks for development. I think bmy biggest beef is jltrying to do something as simple as cutting/pasting text.

zvrba• 11 years ago

They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple.

No. NT is a far more advanced kernel than any of the free unixes. If anything, they'll make it the other way around; a decent "linux" subsystem which can seamlessly run ELF binaries. Like FreeBSD's linux binary support. Or like coLinux, but without the overhead of virtualizing another kernel.

wantab10• 11 years ago

No, NT is not far more advanced.

X-combinator• 11 years ago

Here's the main source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9217296

mhomde• 11 years ago

You know the world is going crazy when Google is evil, Apple is doing tacky devices and Microsoft makes the best browser

archagon• 11 years ago

Honestly, that's true enough to be pretty funny.

serve_yay3• 11 years ago

And yet, Apple is still doomed!

ChikkaChiChi• 11 years ago

Spartan is still Trident, right? So then it's still Microsoft using Microsoft stuff, but eliminating a ton of cruft that builds up over the years due to backwards compatibility.

Historically, Apple (at least under Jobs) were the ones to declare an old standard dead while dragging us kicking and screaming into the future. Microsoft always proudly stood by and told you that your crappy program from 1992 would still be able to run on each version of Windos that came out, no matter how big and bloated the beast became.

Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come? Could the next version of Windows (Not 10, obviously) finally declare the end of backwards compatibility and force obsolete software into a virtualization ghetto?

Sammi• 11 years ago

Yes, Spartan is a fork where they cut out old cruft.

ams61102• 11 years ago

Does it really matter? Do they need a browser at all? Browsers are all pretty much interoperable now. What strategic advantage is there in developing and maintaining their own browser? Nobody pays for browsers. They might pay for content or apps delivered in the browsers. That's what Microsoft should worry about. They've lost their browser monopoly, move on.

CHY8722• 11 years ago

You maintain your own browser so that you can influence the development of the web. For example, Apple used Safari's influence to push touch events, Microsoft tried to use its influence to standardise pointer events, Google's been pushing NaCL, Dart etc.

In order to consistently have weight with changing CSS, HTML rendering etc you basically need your own browser - and most of the changes we've seen in the last few years have come out of Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple.

brc2• 11 years ago

There is also the issue of your army of tech staff doing demos and presentations using your competitors tools, or shipping your operating system with somebody elses browser installed.

Microsoft need a browser and always will.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

With the browser so ubiquitous, it has become a huge part of your platform experience. Consider IE's big power consumption advantage. If people spend all their time in the browser, offering a browser that makes Windows work as well as possible, is good for Windows.

Mahn• 11 years ago

What strategic advantage is there in developing and maintaining their own browser?

You hold the keys to the default search engine for that particular browser, to name an example. Even with the Mozilla-Yahoo deal it's still in MS interest to own a browser so they can push Bing and their other cloud services there.

crag• 11 years ago

You'd be surprised how much development is centered around IE in the enterprise market. Many users are using IE and don't even know it.

And this is one area MS hasn't clarified yet, how long will they support IE. It's gonna take time for enterprise to switch to a new platform.

But that's why I love tech.. one day Silverlight (as an example) is flying high, the next it's dead.

bztzt• 11 years ago

the answer from "silverstorm" is correct. To elaborate a bit, if you add a feature or API to the underlying OS, but there's no corresponding browser feature that makes use of it, to someone who spends most of their time in a browser the OS feature may as well not exist. Microsoft's main reason for investing in IE has generally been to try to add to the perceived value of Windows by making new Windows features accessible through the browser and thereby more relevant to web-centric PC usage. Examples are taskbar integration in Win7, live tile support in Win8, the emphasis on hardware acceleration in IE9+ (which was designed to try to make the underlying Windows graphics system more relevant to web browsing), smooth touch panning/zooming in IE10+ (by being early adopters of the Windows DComp/DManip APIs), better font rendering on high-DPI displays via DWrite etc.

Note that if other browsers themselves adopt new Windows APIs in competitive response, that actually still benefits Microsoft because ultimately they don't care about the browser for its own sake, they care about increasing Windows API and feature usage across all browsers. But in practice competing browsers tend to be late adopters of new Windows stuff (e.g., even now nothing but IE supports DComp/DManip and Chrome is just very recently getting around to improving its Windows high-DPI and text rendering support), hence Microsoft funds IE.

mortdeus• 11 years ago

Man, their new CEO is a breath of fresh air. Im actually starting to respect the MS brand again.

pbhjpbhj2• 11 years ago

Will Spartan be only for Microsoft OS?

Gustomaximus• 11 years ago

My take on this while not a horrible decision, it is a weak one for MS. My rationale;

1. 70% of the world doesn't care about their browser and will use what’s is put in front of them. There was that classic video where people didn't even know the difference between the internet and a browser a few years back. For this 70% unless someone swaps then to another browser, which thankfully people love doing, they'll use IEX for the rest of their life. These people have been trained to click the blue 'e'. Why take that away from the masses and open the door for them to look for alternatives?

2. For the remaining people that do care about a browser, we're going to know if it’s a great browser or not. We understand IE6 is not IE11. In the same was FF was awesome a few years back, we know it’s fallen back, and would recognise it improving if it (hopefully) does.

3. Microsoft announcing they will create a new & awesome browser, and actually doing so, are not connected. It wouldn't surprise me if MS invest all this marketing money on spinning a product that is just as frustrating as IE, just for a new set of reasons. And now we have brand confusion + an annoying browser with a bad name. People prefer familiar bad, than unfamiliar bad.

4. Microsoft is a bloody big and wealthy company. They can afford developing 2 browsers for a while. Why not launch and release this Spartan browser 'for power users'. They can use it as an experimental ground to push boundaries whilst not risking the stability and working of their core product. As this team proves their metal, they can push components of Spartan into IE, or not if the browser fails to deliver. Spartan can be used to buy new street cred for MS. Mum uses IE but young me uses Spartan. And if spartan succeeds by default it will bring credibility to IE, risking much less if it fails to gain favour. As a marketing guy rather than building the conversation; Spartan vs Chrome I’d much prefer to have IE vs Spartan vs Chrome.

And if you bothered to read this far, you probably like browsers. So you might enjoy a video a buddy and I made while on holiday for some really serious (/s) browser speed testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaT7thTxyq8

blumkvist3• 11 years ago

4) Because spartan is as much (if not more) about removing features from IE than adding them. Also, IE will ship with win10 for legacy support.

3) and 4) Based on my experience with win10, MS are executing extremely well these days. I can't wait for Spartan and the new office.

alkonaut• 11 years ago

we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan

Recursively codenamed it, sneaky.

Stoo• 11 years ago

I always thought the Internet Explorer branding was the one thing they got right. If you're not a technical person and you've got a new computer and you're trying to get onto the internet for the first time do you use:

  Firefox  
  Chrome  
  Opera  
  Internet Explorer

The last one says exactly what you want to do.

NicoJuicy• 11 years ago

I'd think something in the line of "Microsoft Web" or "Windows Web" would be better.

The name "Internet Explorer" was right, but the feeling that web developers have with it, ain't. So that's why they have to change it..

If they use Microsoft Web for a cross platform application, the naming would identify Microsoft and "Web". With Windows Web it's solely targetting the Windows platform (and not crossplatform as their goals are changing)

puranjay• 11 years ago

The problem is that 'not a technical person' is a dying breed.

Take a long-term view of things - anyone born after 1985 will be the dominant demographic in 20 years. These people are more technically literate than the current dominant demo.

So yeah. My mom doesn't know IE from Chrome, but my 12 year old nephew does, as do all his friends. In 20 years, my mom will be 85, my nephew and his generation will be the dominant demo

Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

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