Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Escape Its Reputation 426
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer engineering team told a Reddit gathering that discussions about a name change have taken place and could happen again. From the article: "Microsoft has had "passionate" discussions about renaming Internet Explorer to distance the browser from its tarnished image, according to answers from members of the developer team given in a reddit Ask Me Anything session today. In spite of significant investment in the browser—with the result that Internet Explorer 11 is really quite good—many still regard the browser with contempt, soured on it by the lengthy period of neglect that came after the release of the once-dominant version 6. Microsoft has been working to court developers and get them to give the browser a second look, but the company still faces an uphill challenge."
American car companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
...feel Microsoft's pain.
After you push a substandard product for so long, nobody will buy your stuff even when it is improved to the point of being superior to the competition. The stink just will not wash off.
Re:American car companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
In that time every category of safety, performance, features, and mileage received a huge improvement with no significant increase in cost. Across the board, across manufacturer and country borders. The gap has closed but foreign makers raised the bar again. Frankly I won't be surprised (or morn) if Chevy goes out of business completely. US manufacturers still have some innovation to do. They should start with expiring patents from Japan.
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Re:American car companies... (Score:5, Informative)
I started a post with the aim to thoroughly rebuke you and refute your claim. The first place I looked was a Google search for standard warranties [cars.com] which gives US manufacturers' warranties as about the same lengths as foreign warranties. Next I looked for how well manufcaturers actually stand by [forbes.com] their warranties. The number of hate articles and lawsuits over various [google.com] foreign and domestic manufacturers' warranties seems about the same. Cars still on the road [usatoday.com] is another way to look at reliability. After some research I have come to the conclusion that the oldest cars longevity isn't related to quality of manufacture but rather dedication of the owners, older common cars are foreign -- but that doesn't count toward my point since the increase in US manufacturers' quality is relatively recent -- and common cars aging on the road today are about the same across country of manufacture.*
The late 1980's and early 1990's saw Honda et al. Eating Ford's lunch and US manufacturers' advertising [slashdot.org] focused on brand recognition. Later [slashdot.org] ads [slashdot.org] focused on features. Since this is a case of competing against quality with features (and because Tesla) I'm not even going to contest that US manufacturers ever fell behind on features.
Foreign cars still dominate [kbb.com] in the mileage [kbb.com] category but that alone is insufficient to state in the grand sweeping way I did that US made cars are inferior.
In short I stand corrected. US manufacturers have fully caught up with foreign makers in most categories of vehicle quality.
*excluding outliers.
Re:American car companies... (Score:5, Informative)
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That's not easy to do if you're rounding a curve though.
To be clear, I agree that the "pound of flesh" crowd is out in full force, but this is a pretty major screw up. When the engine suddenly shuts off, most people are not going to know what to do in a split second.
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I still look over parking lots to find cars with rust, peeling paint, etc as when I buy a car, I don't want it to look like a 10 year old junker in 5 years. I don't like the trend but some forigen cars are haveing American car paint jobs with peeling clear coat and badly oxidized paint. My 12 year old Toyota has better paint and is not garrage parked.
Re:American car companies... (Score:4, Funny)
Audi, BMW, Porche, Volkswagen, Honda, Ford, Mazda, Mitssubishi, Nissan, Subaru, and Toyota weren't sitting on their thumbs in the 15 years it took GM, Ford, and Chevrolet to get their cars up to snuff.
I agree, every time someone tries to sell me a Ford, I always tell them it's horrible and I'd prefer Ford instead.
Re:American car companies... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:American car companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
...feel Microsoft's pain.
After you push a substandard product for so long, nobody will buy your stuff even when it is improved to the point of being superior to the competition. The stink just will not wash off.
Completely agree. The stink will take [at least] a generation to wash off. In the 90's I owned a Honda and the company cars were Fords. The Honda never gave us any trouble; the Fords had constant issues directly related to poor manufacturing control (side panels that would pop-off when the door was closed---on a two day old car).
I no long work for the company that provided Fords. Since then I've bought 3 Hondas (all made in Kentucky), 1 Nissan, 1 Toyota (used), and 1 BMW (used; built in North Carolina). While I read the stats that say the American Big Three have their act together, I'm not about to bet $30K or more that they do.
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Especially since the browser isn't even compatible with the other services Microsoft offers like the Outlook Webmail.
IE11 works perfectly with current versions of Outlook Web Access. What you probably are referring to is that with IE10 and later MS stopped supporting some old non-standard IE-quirks, which is a good thing (!) but affected old versions of OWA that targeted old IE versions - unless you put IE in compatibility mode, then also the old OWA works with IE10+.
Which any admin with a minimum of competency very easily could and should have set up automatically for the users if they insist on using an outdated version
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The sys-admin should know that if the company is running an old OWA version but have deployed new browser versions, then he need to set his users browsers to compatibility mode and they will have no problems.
What?!? You actually expect sys-admins to test before deployment?!? This is a Microsoft shop we're talking about.
question: does IE support adblock and noscript? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm perfectly willing to believe that the core IE engine is much improved from its terrible days of the past when it was intentionally non-standards-compliant, slow, and insecure.
However, I ask this as someone who hasn't touched it in many years: does it support adblock, noscript, ghostery, and httpseverywhere? If not, then I would not call it "quite good" no matter how much the core has improved. Those features are essential for using the modern web.
Re:question: does IE support adblock and noscript? (Score:5, Insightful)
on thing slashdotters have never learned to pick up on is PR.
This whole article is PR by Microsoft to spread the message that "IE is much improved". By encapsulating the message in a seeming criticism, people are lulled into joining the discussion.
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The message that indicates that MS hasn't learned anything and IE is worth ignoring is that they're trying to get DEVELOPERS to give the browser another look. That whole "design for me, lock out the competition" mentality that sensible people ignore. If IE11 is that good, people should willingly use it, not be coerced...
Re: question: does IE support adblock and noscript (Score:2)
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on thing slashdotters have never learned to pick up on is PR.
This whole article is PR by Microsoft to spread the message that "IE is much improved". By encapsulating the message in a seeming criticism, people are lulled into joining the discussion.
On the contrary, PR postings are usually quickly noticed as such.
But this one is so blatant that I went along with the premise so that I cold give my opinions....
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Oddly enough, with all the disable this and that options IE has (Java, ActiveX), JS isn't one of them. I generally do system-wide adblocking via hosts file in addition to using ABP. Noscipt is a giant pain in reality, and is a little on the paranoid side to be honest. So is always using HTTPS.
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I think noscript is arguably THE most important extension. It's not that much of a pain. All the sites I regularly visit have their essential scripts whitelisted, and no further action was needed by me after my first visit. The first time I visit a new site, I want all scripts disabled, for security and privacy. I'll look and if it seems sensible and the site seems vaguely trustworthy, I'll whitelist its domain and its CDN if it has one. No "ad tracker" scripts though, no "analytics", nothing like that
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Considering how often I deal with malware on my own computer, I don't really see the need to deal with NoScript. Antivirus, IPS, and staying up to date take care of *most* threats (and not pirating software, etc). The last time I had an actual infection get through, I took the easy route of just restoring to last Sunday's backup (actually, Windows Restore takes care of a lot of things too...), which took a whole 20 minutes to pull off.
Like I said, I've blocked most tracking and analytics in my hosts file
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Malware infections are not limited to just the browser as the source. It is *a* source, and a popular one at that.
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And that, I am going to have to agree with. You and I have different ideas on security and usability, and you are encouraged to do and use what you feel is best for your requirements. That, is freedom.
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No it doesn't which is one reason DHS has issued at least a dozen "do not use Internet Explorer" alerts over the years.
Oddly enough though, employees of DHS can't use any other browser so to make those alerts without following it themselves rings hollow to me. And yes, I used to be a DHS employee. Now I'm with my state. You know, you grow...
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If those features are truly "essential", I wonder why Mozilla, Apple and Google haven't picked them up, and added them to their respective browsers.
What you consider "essential" obviously isn't that essential for a large part of the web-surfing public.
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Polishing Turds (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isnt with the name Internet Explorer, the problem is the with the name Microsoft.
Microsoft is the one with the tarnished image.
They are trying to polish the wrong turd.
Mozilla should consider doing the same for Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't a bad idea. It's one that Mozilla should consider for Firefox, too. Firefox has gotten a bad reputation for being a slow and bloated browser with a shitty UI that just imitates Chrome. Users are discarding it left and right, causing it to now have an approximately 10% share of the browser market. What Mozilla could do is rename the browser to something else, and then proceed down the proper path of innovation and good UI design. Instead of working on stupidity like Australis, which pretty much all Firefox users hate, they could fix the memory leaks and improve the performance. A restoration of the old UI, which was really efficient and easy to use, could very well make this new browser a winner again. Basically Mozilla should repeat what Firefox did to Internet Explorer a decade ago, but this time it's their new browser Firefoxing Firefox and the total stupidity that Firefox has become lately. When a browser goes from a 35% share of the market down to 10% in only a few years, the path it's on is obviously wrong, and the people making these decisions are obviously foolish. Instead of waiting for it to get to 0% market share, at which point salvaging it will not be an option, Mozilla needs to take action now to correct the situation and get back on the correct path. This means undoing some of the obviously stupid changes that have been made lately, fixing the long-standing performance and memory consumption issues, and probably discarding those contributors who have been responsible for harming Firefox so badly these past few years.
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Brendan Eich has a CEO could have fixed this.
Remember what happened to him?
Re: Mozilla should consider doing the same for Fir (Score:2)
Have it your way [mozilla.org]
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First off, the market share hasn't dwindled nearly as much as you claim. Second, if all you can offer is empty negative criticism, your opinion isn't worth much. Third, renaming Firefox won't help because people like you will just badmouth the newly-named version too.
I know we're all supposed to hate the loss of trivial UI features and the new UI, and the alleged "Chromeification", yet that's all people like you seem to have noticed since Firefox 3. Has there been nothing good since then? At all? Apparently
Re:Mozilla should consider doing the same for Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be honest, Firefox was never that great. It was just far, far better than the competition, which was mainly IE6 at the time.
The add-on architecture is antiquated and a security nightmare. Security issues in add-ons can be easily exploited. Firefox had some major memory and performance issues for the first few years, and now it has been surpassed by Webkit/Blink based browsers. The rendering engine is average, but doesn't get as much development effort as Webkit/Blink.
The UI was always just adequate. Nothing special, and outright bad in a few places like the history view (which was incredibly slow and lacked a search box) or the preferences window. Tab handling was awkward for years too, until they copied Chrome.
I switched to Chrome years ago, mostly because of the rapid release schedule and constant breaking of the UI every time I got used to it. In hindsight though, I wouldn't say Firefox was ever a really good bit of software. It just sucked less than everything else, except maybe Opera that never gets any love.
All white meat (Score:5, Funny)
McDonald's is happy to introduce the all-white-meat chicken McNugget!
Wait ... what the fuck was in it before?
Re:All white meat (Score:4, Funny)
Wait ... what the fuck was in it before?
Only the finest, !00% natural, meat-bearing animals.
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Dark meat?
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I.e. pigeon meat, not chicken meat.
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i.e. thigh meat, not breast meat
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Simulated meat. Now it is simulated all-white meat. They've cracked down on their McNugget farms. Now the McNuggets are only fed white corn.
Re:All white meat (Score:4, Funny)
Change "Microsoft" too? (Score:2, Funny)
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I vote they change Winders to Mundungus Fletcher, from the Harry Potter books. He's a thief and has the handy nickname of Dung.
Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember using ie4 on a sun Solaris box a long time ago. I was thrilled, because it was light years ahead of mosaic and Netscape.
Now? I don't care how good it is. I will never use it again. Microsoft's long established contempt for its users, laws, and even international standards bodies have guaranteed that I will never put anything even resembling trust in them ever again.
They made their bed (Score:5, Insightful)
And they should lie in it. Microsoft's monopoly in IE was one of the principal causes of stagnation in the industry during the mid 2000s.
Then again, that stagnation arguably led to some great innovations by others in the industry, which is why we've witnessed the mobile revolution and downfall of IE since.
Re:They made their bed (Score:5, Interesting)
And they should lie in it. Microsoft's monopoly in IE was one of the principal causes of stagnation in the industry during the mid 2000s.
Then again, that stagnation arguably led to some great innovations by others in the industry, which is why we've witnessed the mobile revolution and downfall of IE since.
Microsoft was always playing the "short game" - after all, it was always about announcing the latest vapour-ware, future plans to pre-emptively ward off competitors, etc. to keep the stock price up, We saw how that played out in both the phone and tablet markets, which is where both current and future growth is.
"Never interfere with your opponent when he's making a mistake." Sure, the opponents often didn't have the resources to interfere significantly, but there's one resource Microsoft couldn't control - time. The accumulation of mistakes over time hurt them badly. Thank Ballmer. Also thank Gates for making sure Ballmer was CEO way past his best-before date. Just goes to show, we all bear the seeds of our own destruction.
Re:They made their bed (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I remember around the early to mid 2000s there was an article on Slashdot along the lines of "who will be the next Microsoft?" and the general consensus was nobody - because Microsoft wouldn't be stupid enough to be the next IBM. IBM's mistake in the 80s was to hand over control of DOS, and Microsoft understood this and wouldn't repeat it.
Now in 2014 it's easy to see that IE6's stagnation and Ballmer's laughing dismissal of the iPhone has put the company in a very similar place to where IBM was in the mid 90s.
Annoyances (Score:2)
My top Internet Explorer annoyances:
* secure browsing. Trying to download a file with that enabled is frustrating.
* startup delay. IE shows the UI and lets you start typing in the location bar but shortly after loads startup pages over top of what you may have just typed.
Re: Annoyances (Score:2)
Wow, someone's ulcer is flaring up.
FF never loaded my routers page because some stupid certificate bullshit at the time.
If you're using https, it's worthless without a trusted certificate. Blame who made your router. And psst... it can be bypassed with an exception, even permanently.
Opera, forced an update on me right in the middle of writing down stuff.
I don't use the Wonder from the North, but apparently the update can be postponed, and the whole auto-update mechanism can be disabled.
Why are developers so shit? You'd think they'd sit down and just think things out. PLAN THINGS YOU IDIOTS.
I know, right? So hard to find competent help these days. So fire them!
Re: Annoyances (Score:3)
Then add the bloody exception, because a man-in-the-middle attack is out of the question and that's precisely what it's for.
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Thats the standard MS procedure, the desktop after login reacts just the same. It fools the sheep into thinking its quick
Just make it fully standards compliant... (Score:5, Informative)
...and stop trying to take over the internet by adding proprietary extensions to said standards. Stop trying to push MS server or development products by tweaking the browser to work better with said products.
The browser wars are over. MS won the battle but is loosing the war. They need to drop the insurgency and learn to play nice if they want to play at all.
Re:Just make it fully standards compliant... (Score:5, Informative)
Why did mods mark it troll? He is perfectly accurate. Microsoft is *STILL* doing it these days. Right now, my favorite is the one where when your client sends a SYN, and the server responds with a RST, the client sends a couple more SYNs, you know, just in case the app wasn't really sure if it wanted to talk or not... There's even a kb article on it, and a registry setting. Which has a minimum setting of two - so no matter what you do, it will send out two extra spurious SYNs.
We really need a TCP/MS for all the crap they pull.
Re:Just make it fully standards compliant... (Score:4, Informative)
http://support.microsoft.com/k... [microsoft.com]
enjoy.
Microsoft naming practices (Score:4, Insightful)
Never could decide which one I liked better: Internet Exploder or Internet Exploiter.
Microsoft should still be considering changing the name: As one posters here suggests, sometimes the stink will just not wash off.
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They need to pick a name which is similar, to be identifiable, but less tarnished by past bad experiences. I propose Infernal Excrement: still "IE", but much less off-putting than the name they have soiled so badly with IE6 and other fiascoes.
To be fair ... it does suck much less now. I suppose it's rather like working for a surviving offshoot of Enron or Lehman Bros... Who, thinking about it, have probably done less economic damage globally than IE has.
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Easy - Internet Exploiter. It hasn't caused physical explosions for a very long time, but there's probably several exploits happening because of Internet Explorer just while I'm typing this.
Totally misread the title (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Netscape Its Reputation
A rose by any other name... (Score:2)
If it walks like MSIE,
...it's a duck.
talks like MSIE,
crashes head-first into a BSOD from malware-laden doom like MSIE,
Re:A rose by any other name... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that worked (Score:5, Insightful)
agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
Those 2 years of bug fixes made a big difference to the reliability of Vista. It also helped that the price of RAM fell by more than a half.
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Renaming never worked to improve reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 was better received by the market because it was BETTER than Vista. Windows 8 was crap and got he reception it deserved. Merely releasing 9 without removing the crapstatic TIFKAM interface will result in poor reputation.
The reasons Internet Explorer got a bad reputation:
1. It was tied to the operating system, unnecessarily. The browser has exactly zilch to do with the operating system. ActiveX controls, tying versions of the browser with versions of the OS, varying behaviour of same browser version on different OS versions etc. If IE is renamed, it should be delinked from the OS like other browsers.
2. Intentional non-compatibility with standards, because of the arrogant assumption that with marketshare they can bully the World.
3. No sandboxing, no protection from ads, popups, malware downloads, sucking upto to the MAFIAA in proprietary standards and DRM.
Fix these issues in the browser FIRST, then call it Internet Shit-hole, but people will still buy it.
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It was tied to the operating system, unnecessarily. The browser has exactly zilch to do with the operating system. ActiveX controls, tying versions of the browser with versions of the OS, varying behaviour of same browser version on different OS versions etc. If IE is renamed, it should be delinked from the OS like other browsers.
I agree that tying versions of IE to specific versions of Windows was a really bad idea. Many web developers are still stuck with supporting IE8 because it is the latest version
And Metro! (Score:2)
And don't forget Metro. What a win that was. Now everybody calls it "that stupid Windows 8 touch UI that used to be called Metro".
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"I mean it worked for Windows Vista. (I'll always wonder if they didn't have to rename it would we have gotten what became Windows 7 as a service pack.)"
Indeed, I have Windows 7 64 bit home premium on my home PC and a spare copy of Vista 64 bit Ultimate on my MacBook Pro in VMWare so I use both relatively regularly. The main visible difference is the change to the task bar and honestly, I prefer the Vista version to what they did with Windows 7. Other than that, modern hardware zips along running Vista ju
Why compete with free? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without the market share needed to embrace and extend anything, is there actually a real reason for Microsoft bother having their own a browser at all?
Wouldn't bundling another browser with WIndows and laying off the IE division make more financial sense that carrying on with a product that cost money to make, generates no revenue and is so badly respected by customers that Microsoft literally can't give it away?
Re:Why compete with free? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never never never. (Score:2)
I don't care if they did have a change of heart on the name, and released a version for Linux.
I'm still not installing the fucking thing.
It's still terrible (Score:5, Informative)
After spending a week of cross browser fixing almost entirely focused on IE11 deficiencies i can tell you first hand that it still sucks in more ways to list here and changing it's name will only create a new image to hate.
There is only one thing MS could do to make me happy with it's browser: and that is to discontinue it, because they have proven time and time again that they cannot improve it sufficiently.
Really quite good (Score:2)
...In spite of significant investment in the browser—with the result that Internet Explorer 11 is really quite good...
While the quality of Internet Explorer has improved a lot in the past couple of versions, Internet Explorer still has a ways to go before it can be considered to be "quite good."
Mosaic (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia: "Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer."
Re:Mosaic (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget fucking over the original developers in the process. Microsoft negotiated the price down to $2 million by agreeing to pay royalties to Spyglass for each copy sold... Then turned around and gave the product away for free. Spyglass should have worked a better deal, sure, but it was a dick move by Microsoft.
Ca Ca (Score:2)
Will it be backward compatible? (Score:2)
We're stuck writing apps that support IE8 because companies have so much legacy investment in other applications that require it they can't afford to move up to IE11.
Now if Microsoft came up with a browser that was secure, and supported all the IE8 wierdness, and was industry stand otherwise , and...oh never mind. Just keep calling it Internet Explorer and deal with the reputation.
No features aimed at me (Score:2)
So maybe if they let engineers and developers steer the boat for a while instead of a bunch of MBA laden sales
"not my job" - It is *Microsoft's* job (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as Enterprise customers like to push the "it has to work on IE" crap (because they're usually working with lazy IT departments or legacy applications written by people with less interest in standards compliance than me), in reality that shouldn't be my job for writing a web application. I code to the standards or I use libraries and frameworks that code to the standards. These work in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome with minimal modification (assuming I'm not using a cutting-edge new feature like web audio, notifications, or O.o()) and impressive consistency.
They never work in IE without modification.
That's not my fault. That will never be my fault.
If you want to court developers, you go out there with IE, pick apps that have not gotten IE-fixing mods, and YOU (Micro$oft) fix the browser to the standards-compliant web applications already out there.
I'm sick of and done with working around your messes for the last 15 years.
Re:"not my job" - It is *Microsoft's* job (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's ability to control de facto standards is long gone. When Netscape collapsed but Firefox was too immature, they had control. The Standards bodies worked to make html4 and Microsoft could happily ignore all of that, create their own broken implementation of CSS (this is worse than their jscript problems) and happily make everybody else play along.
Now what they want is that same control back, but as Disney once said, "That ship has sailed." This idea of pushing to developers to create specialized webapps that are IE compatible betrays the fact that they have not been in control for years now.
I am not going to code to IE compatibility; I'm not going to break my application by trying to get it passed IE's continually broken CSS. I code to the standards because the standards are the greatest likelihood that my application, if converted to a full-out mobile app via Cordova, or converted to a desktop-app via Adobe Air, will continue to function without change. My stuff mostly works in IE. It is up to IE to finish their job and fix their CSS and their event model and all of that stuff. I'll come part-way by using certain libraries that others are willing to address compatibility issues (jquery, for example) but no closer.
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Yes, CSS tends to be my biggest issue. Some aspects of IE events are still wrong. How IE decided that the "unresponsive script" dialog should come up was horrid, constantly causing issues in sproutcore/ember apps.
Some of these things are better. They are getting closer to the standards. My take remains: it is their job to finish that, not my job to meet them half way anymore. If my stuff works on IE, great, but I'm not and will never go out of my way to make it work anymore. I personally will never actuall
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Object.observe() - new built-in mechanism for getting change events when a plain javascript object changes (new property, deleted property, changed property, deleted). Chrome 36 is the first browser to get it, but it is an established part of the html5 standard.
Greatly simplifies a lot of the work the model layers have to do, and eventually means that many frameworks will over time get rid of their setter/getter mechanisms and all the weight they have.
Reboot when updated... (Score:2)
.
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and tied it closely into the heart of Windows in order to get around the anti-trust legalities that Microsoft was facing.
Now Microsoft is paying for the error of those trust-avoiding legal tactics because internet Explorer is tied so deeply inside Windows that I have to reboot my computer when the Internet Explorer application is updated.
So 1990's...
explorer is VERY useful (Score:2)
for downloading firefox on a new windows install
Why not just deprecate IE and save some serious $? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, one can argue that MSN made a lot of money because it was the default homepage on IE, but MSN would have made the same amount of money if Microsoft bundled Netscape with Windows & set MSN as the default page--and would have pushed off all the R&D and risks onto a 3rd party. But no--almost 20 years later, we're still dealing with the hangover of those decisions. Business students should be doing case studies on the MS-IE debacle...
So, Microsoft, please deprecate IE!!! Do the world, and especially your shareholders, a favor. Stop at IE11. You've proven that you can deprecate things and support them on newer OSes (e.g. Jet/ACE). And since you'll need an HTML engine in future OSes (e.g. HTML Help, etc.), throw some money at Firefox (or Google, Opera, etc.) and force all "newer" internally developed programs (e.g. Visual Studio) to call this engine--while "older" apps stick with the deprecated engine (which still receives security updates) and/or are moved to the newer one over time... IE and its engine becomes a legacy feature and be done with it.
But, alas, the inflated IE ego syndrome still permeates within Microsoft...
Special Hip Internet Tab? (Score:2)
May still be worded better, but SHIT clearly describes IE and any possible successor best.
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but they killed the hotmail name (Score:2)
Microsoft has never really cared about confusing their users with branding. MSN was several different things at different times. Windows Live became a similar catch-all for a few months before it was killed. I still meet people who don't know if they ran Outlook or Outlook Express on their old computer.
Renaming IE would have been confusing for lots of everyday users. Maybe not as confusing as the Start Screen or the Charms bar, but plenty confusing.
The biggest mistake they made was when they killed the H
Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this really what is going on at Microsoft? Their staff has so much free time that they can sit around sorting out whether or not to rename a browser?
Are we going to get an educational campaign to go along with it? After all they will have to explain to people that, "Internet Explorer is not really gone. It is now called..." What is the life span of a bad idea in the minds of computer users? We still make fun of Clippy after all....
What an epic waste of time.
They need to suck up the fact that their product was sub-par for years. Focus on the improvements. Continue moving forward.
The exact audience who cares about the differences between IE, Chrome, WebKit, Trident and all of the cross roads of the various technologies is not going to be "fooled" by a re-branding. Those are the people who matter. Those are the people who are developing web technologies. Give them the features that they want. At the same time, give the end users a stable, secure application.
The truth is that the war is over. HTML5 is here. Everything that used to require ActiveX can now be done in HTML5. I am already seeing large vendors make the switch. One of our larger LOB application, a web app with hundreds of internal users, recently went HTML5. The vendor did a great job. The UI looks exactly the same. The only difference that the end users see is that the site now "magically works in Chrome".
A rose by any other name... (Score:3)
or dung pile.
A word to Microsoft:
You can run, but you can't hide.
Actually, it's the PERFECT name (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, "Internet Explorer" is just about the perfect name. FOSS developers fail so miserably at naming, and should take a lesson from this.
If I was a clueless user and wanted to browse the INTERNET, what would I first think to use? "Mozilla," "Firefox," "Opera," or something else that has "Internet" right in the name?
"Photoshop" versus "GIMP" is just one more example. "Winamp" isn't perfect, but pretty good, compared with "XMMS" or "Audacious", and "iTunes" and "Windows Media Center" both hit it out of the park.
Forget the clueless users, even, and look at how you find software... How many times have you discovered that there was some application for task-X that you didn't know about, despite it being in the yum/dpkg list of your system?
When looking for an IRC client, I'm hardly going to expect "BitchX" is what I want. When looking for a new file manager, "Nautilus", "Konq" and "Dolphin" doesn't mean a damn thing to me... etc.
Sure, you could go for multi-million dollar ad campaigns to get your product's name out there (Firefox), or you could just damn-well name it properly in the first place, so someone looking for it, will find it...
Re: Call it Web? (Score:5, Funny)
They can't name it after Steve Ballmer either, Chrome is already taken by google.
Re: Call it Web? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft Chair - makes the internet so fast, it flies.
Re: Call it Web? (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft Chair - makes the internet so fast, it flies.
How about "Stool" instead.
Re: Call it Web? (Score:5, Funny)
No, you see, they're trying to change how we perceive it, not reinforce the current perception...
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Naming contest entries (Score:5, Funny)
I nominate the name (acronym): UFIA or UFIA explorer
How about "Webbie" who would guide you like clippie ("It looks like you are searching for tentacle porn, today")?
Re: (Score:3)
Stupid Webbie, I'm searching for furry tentacle porn.
Re: (Score:3)
Motorola already names a cable modem that.
Re:Call it Web? (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked at Microsoft for a decade and a half, I can assure you that (a) the dev team can't just have a hallway conversation and decide to rename a product and (b) if the company did somehow decide a name change was in order, they'd pay a consultant millions of dollars to do research and come up with the new name. Marketing names like "PowerShell" and "Silverlight" cost about $100K a pop and basically have no input from "the development team".
If that's the case, I'd suggest that all the money MS paid those consultants for endless rebrandings has ultimately proved to be hugely counter-productive. As I commented on another site a couple of years back:-
This is the same company changed the name of its "passport" service a ludicrous amount of times:-
.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_account [wikipedia.org]
"Microsoft Account (previously Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,
I'd have said that MS's stupidly confusing naming is marketing-over-clarity, but *it's not even good marketing!!* I bet the man on the street doesn't have a clue what MS's constantly-changing brands-of-the-week are supposed to mean to him anyway, beyond being a confusing and counter-productive mish-mash of pseudo-terminology.
The quintessential ironic example of how MS just don't get it was their (then-)latest media-player compatibility scheme called "Plays for Sure" which obviously implied Apple-style "no brainer just works" straightforwardness. They proceeded to totally undermine this by renaming it to tie in with "Certified for Windows Vista" (which also encompassed other schemes) and launched a separate, incompatible DRM/compatibility scheme for their now-defunct Zune range. Does anyone know (or care) what MS's attention-deficit clusterf*** of overlapping brands are supposed to mean?!
I'm guessing that either:-
:-)
(i) MS were throwing money at consultants for repeated relaunches because they had no focus
(ii) The environment was conducive to consultants making money out of MS by constantly encouraging pricey rebrandings and relaunches
(iii) The constant rebranding was a reflection of the politics, internal power struggles and identity-stamping going in within MS, or
(iv) All of the above.
At any rate, I'd be interested to find out how on the money- if at all- this guesswork is, from someone like yourself who actually worked at MS.