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Internet Explorer Microsoft

Microsoft Is Killing Off the Internet Explorer Brand 317

Posted by Soulskill from the unpoisoning-the-well dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The Verge reports that Internet Explorer as we know it will be taking a back seat to Microsoft's new browser, Project Spartan, in Windows 10 and future projects. IE will still exist, and stick around for compatibility issues, but Project Spartan will be the default way users interact with the internet. Microsoft wants to distance itself with the negative connotations Internet Explorer has acquired through the years. They still haven't decided on an official name for Project Spartan, but it will probably have the company name in it.
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Microsoft Is Killing Off the Internet Explorer Brand More

Microsoft Is Killing Off the Internet Explorer Brand

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  • A turd by any other name (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:07PM (#49277729)
    is still a turd.

    • Re:A turd by any other name (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:34PM (#49278001)

      Project Microsoft Spartan, anyone?
      Great name and shows Microsoft ownership.
      PMS for short.
      Works!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by FatdogHaiku ( 978357 )

      is still a turd.

      But look, it's all shiny now!

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by kheldan ( 1460303 )
      Pretty much, yeah.
      I don't see why they even need to bother with any sort of extensive internet browser. Why not just provide a minimal browser, just enough to get you to where you can download Firefox, or Chrome, or whatever other browser you want? Or maybe just partner with one of them instead? It would cost them less money in the long run due to reduced development costs, and most people will get what they want anyway, just quicker.

      For what it's worth, a the Major Microprocessor Manufacturer I work for j

      • Re:A turd by any other name (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @06:54PM (#49279805) Homepage

        It is all about advertising dollars. They simply want to build the browser into the operating system, so that not matter what you do it will create an internet hit to Bing, so that, 'Bing' another cent can be claimed for advertising, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So losing the internet 'browser, search, portal' war, no problem, fake it via the operating system. Of course when the fake claims about customer eyeballs reflects in very bad advertising outcomes, the customers will then just avoid M$ because it simply doesn't work, regardless of the internet hit numbers, at least as far as M$ is concerned. So no matter what they do in the future, no matter what, everyone will just avoid them.

        Much like the crazy bullshit idea of sticking a phone GUI on a desktop because people will get used to it and like idiot sheep automagically buy the phones with the same system. Of course in reality, what really happened is that touch screen phone GUI wont really work well on that desktop and that is of course what the customer will remember. A lesson reinforced each and every time they touch the desktop and are frustrated by the experience. (OH FUCK, might need to do a free upgrade to stop the damage being done ;D ). M$ is just totally infested with crazy bean counter logic and magic numbers in spread sheets and pays no attention at all to more realistic customer empathic logical outcomes.

    • Re:A turd by any other name (Score:5, Informative)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:38PM (#49278531)

      What do you expect when they renamed Spyglass Mosaic to IE? :-)

      In typical MS fashion it didn't get good until 3 versions later, IE4, before getting proprietary vendor lockin with that piece of shit IE6.

      Their stupidity of not being able to down-grade IE or simultaneously install different versions so web developers could test ALL the various versions, forcing people to rely on hacks like SandBoxie, was absolutely retarded.

      IE was so bad at security that at one point that us geeks called it "Internet Exploder"

      Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

      * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • IE4 wasn't all that good, actually. From what I remember it was notorious for crashing, especially if you enabled Active Desktop.

        Not that contemporary Netscape was known for /not/ crashing.

      • Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

        No, not really. If this causes a further decline in the usage of buggy versions of IE then yes, do that. I doubt the new software will be completely bug-free, but hopefully it actually is from scratch (including the general design) and they don't carry over some of the same bugs.

        • It was already said that the engine is not from scratch. But rebranding it allows the team to throw out crapload of legacy code (ActiveX, VBScript, all the various quirks rendering modes etc), and generally change things to behave according to the standards even where it breaks someone relying on old behavior, since, as a distinct product, this has no obligation to be backwards compatible with IE.

      • It's not too little, too late if you consider that the alternative is to rely on either Apple for WebKit, Mozilla for Gecko, or Google for Blink, etc.

        If this new browser's point is to have a browser that you can use when you turn the machine on and have everywhere no matter what machine you're using, then it's not too little, too late.

        Too little, too late would be Mac, Linux and Android ports of IE10.

        This isn't Ballmer or Gates' Microsoft. It's Satya Nadella's and I think he gets it more than they did.

      • Re:A turd by any other name (Score:5, Insightful)

        by theArtificial ( 613980 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @06:11PM (#49279565)

        In typical MS fashion it didn't get good until 3 versions later, IE4, before getting proprietary vendor lockin with that piece of shit IE6.

        If IE6 was such a piece of shit, as you put it, that implies that the other browsers at the time were much worse than that. You've inadvertently made a profound statement about the browser landscape of the day. IE6 rightfully earned infamy in its unnaturally long life even more repugnant is rampant revisionism. IE introduced a feature that is the foundation of today's web, some of you might be aware of the XMLHttpRequest [wikipedia.org] object, for the non-developers it's like the force now, all around us. JavaScript support [ejohn.org] and performance, CSS support [quirksmode.org]. Unfortunately this period had to occur, and it will occur again once these lessons are forgotten; Without the stranglehold IE6 eventually obtained, and more importantly stagnated the web with, the choices we have today wouldn't exist.

        Their stupidity of not being able to down-grade IE or simultaneously install different versions so web developers could test ALL the various versions, forcing people to rely on hacks like SandBoxie, was absolutely retarded.

        As much as it pains me to say Microsoft wasn't unique in this regard, as an aside, try installing multiple versions of Safari. Even the easy mode package managers don't support multiple versions of browsers out of the box (not to say it's difficult [ubuntuforums.org]). Internet Explorer 6 released in 2001 [wikipedia.org] following the launch of Windows XP. For those unfamiliar with their history, Web Development of that era revolved around IE and Netscape. With IE being the Chrome of its day (as in "works here, onward!") since the browser market was 90%+ IE [flossmanuals.net] and IE6 was supported on Windows 98, NT, and 2k. Low usage for potential targets results in a chicken and the egg problem. Low single digits just aren't a priority for many shops, see Opera.

        Sandboxie came out in 2004ish and has its uses, especially on 32bit machines. However, for web development involving IE it's much easier to use MultiIE [tredosoft.com] which has been around since 2006. IETester [my-debugbar.com] is worth another mention. Not to mention there are alternatives due to the ever growing number of devices and variants released year after year, requiring a different approach such as farms that show screenshots from targeted browsers. Regarding the hassle of Sandboxie, limiting yourself to one tool is pretty silly.

        This is a little off topic. Since this criticism is being framed as a Microsoft issue you might be shocked to discover how apps and to a lesser extent websites, are developed and tested in 2015 on devices manufactured and supported by multiple vendors. This process requires physical devices, in many cases multiple to support the popular OS [android.com] versions [apple.com] on them (there are other OS, but they're less than 8%). Think it's a hack to wrangle Sandboxes or multiple installations, try wrangling devices that let you only upgrade! But what about device simulators, one might ask? Oh yes, they do exist and they're improving but there isn't a substitute for deploying and testing on device. IE variants are a dwindling piece of the very large fragmentation pie [opensignal.com].

        Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

        Too late for whom? W

        • > If IE6 was such a piece of shit, as you put it, that implies that the other browsers at the time were much worse than that.

          No, that doesn't follow at all. Firefox was a significantly better browser at the time, before they jumped the shark after version 4.

          > Regarding the hassle of Sandboxie, limiting yourself to one tool is pretty silly.

          I never claimed there was only _one_ tool. You sure love to jump to conclusions about things I never said. There was another utility I used to use back in the da

          • No, that doesn't follow at all. Firefox was a significantly better browser at the time, before they jumped the shark after version 4.

            Your disagreement seems to be looking from now backwards instead of from the beginning. Since Firefox was named specifically, it's a browser that wasn't released until 3 years after [wikipedia.org] (4 excluding the technology previews) the competition.

            Better is such a subjective word, better how? Stability? That eliminates technology previews bumping the "better" browser back another year. I sincerely hope something developed years after its competition was released would improve upon established norms. Out of the gate [wikipedia.org] i

  • If history is any guide, it will be a terrible name. It might even be a recycle of a previous terrible name. I'm going with Kin.

  • Microsoft Spartan? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MikeTheGreat ( 34142 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:10PM (#49277771)

    Isn't this how the XBox became the XBox? They released the code name of their internal project, people kept using the name, and then they just stuck with it?

    On the one hand "Microsoft Spartan" doesn't seem corporate enough. On the other hand it'll fit right in with Firefox & Chrome, which also have non-descriptive names that are pan-inoffensive yet interesting...

    • pan-inoffensive

      Persia? I could see it going either way...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Isn't this how the XBox became the XBox? They released the code name of their internal project, people kept using the name, and then they just stuck with it?

      On the one hand "Microsoft Spartan" doesn't seem corporate enough. On the other hand it'll fit right in with Firefox & Chrome, which also have non-descriptive names that are pan-inoffensive yet interesting...

      Well, the Xbox was really internally called the DirectX Box...

      Though, you'd have to wonder if maybe Nadella is secretly a Halo fan or something

      • OMFG have you seen the new Microsoft web browser demo it's like slow and it's telling you all the stuff you did in the first one then the music kicks in and and clippy comes out and gets a gun the earf is on fire and clippy is like fuck this im jumping and HE JUMPS PUT OF TEH INTERWEB with angels singing and he lands on the bad guys and that annoying ai lady is like GO GET EM TIGER! WILDCAT IS ON TEH SPOKE!!!~`1 and theres less polys but rawkin bumb mappings you can view this on a special MICROSOFT xbox dis

  • They're killing the wrong brand (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ks9208661 ( 1862000 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:11PM (#49277783)
    They should kill the Microsoft brand instead.

    • They've been trying for years but they need to re-org the company at least twice before delivering anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwv ( 1636355 )

      I'd have to agree that the "Internet Explorer" in "Microsoft Internet Explorer" isn't the part the causes me not to trust it.

      On the plus side, Microsoft still can't figure out how to compete with the big boys in the Mobile platform environment so they are successfully relegates to backend server infrastructure, offices, and home environments for people who aren't compelled to care to much about running competing software (i.e. Mac, Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, or Google). I do admit to dealing with Micros

    • They should rename themselves ComputerWare. Think about it.

  • "Microsoft C'mon! Seriously, it's not IE. We promise."

  • A shame, in a way... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:15PM (#49277813) Journal

    ...because this video [youtube.com] will become less funny.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:15PM (#49277825)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • A thorn by any other name hurts just as bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Art3x ( 973401 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:16PM (#49277833)

    In other news, Microsoft is also renaming Windows to something else, although they're not sure what. The version number will start at at least 20, though, to further distance itself from Windows 10.

    Microsoft is also seeking to ditch the names Bing and Microsoft.

  • That's impossible (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:16PM (#49277835)

    The previous CEO of Microsoft assured European regulators that IE was so deeply embedded in Windows architecture that it could not be replaced.

    • Re:That's impossible (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daltorak ( 122403 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @04:26PM (#49278917)

      The previous CEO of Microsoft assured European regulators that IE was so deeply embedded in Windows architecture that it could not be replaced.

      It's not impossible at all -- Spartan is a copy of the IE engine code, repackaged as a Metro app and will be updated on an ongoing basis through the Windows App Store model. Anything that doesn't work in that space like ActiveX/COM, Browser Helper Objects, etc. are all stripped out.

      IE11 will also remain in Windows 10, with good ole' MSHTML.DLL and all that other cruft that developers (and parts of Windows itself) have been taking hard dependencies on for 15+ years. It will receive security updates, performance improvements and so on, but it will not be updated at the pace of Spartan.

      Maybe shipping two browsers with the OS will upset some people, but this should actually work out pretty nicely.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why is this modded as informative? It's as if you and the people who modded you didn't even read the TFS:

      ".. IE will still exist, and stick around for compatibility issues.."

      Aside from the minor fact that the TFS is about "Windows 10" which presumably wasn't around at the time the "previous CEO" assured those European regulators, because you know.. an entire new OS might involve significant architectural changes?

      I know it's /. and hating on Microsoft is one of the great pastimes here.. but really..

  • Why does Microsoft even need a browser? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:18PM (#49277853)

    I don't understand why Microsoft wants to make a browser so badly. The consumer world has moved on to Firefox and Chrome and Safari and this is propogating through the enterprise world now.

    What is the business case for having your own browser? So that bing can be the default search engine?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by robinsonne ( 952701 )
      A very large part of Microsoft's business is the enterprise and business world. That's where it matters a lot more than what ordinary people are using to go to facebook and pintrest.

    • Re:Why does Microsoft even need a browser? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pr0nbot ( 313417 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:22PM (#49277893)

      I would guess it's because Google and Apple make the other browsers (apart from Firefox) and will begin to integrate their cloud services into the browser, which could potentially lock Microsoft out.

    • I don't understand why Microsoft wants to make a browser so badly. The consumer world has moved on to Firefox and Chrome and Safari and this is propogating through the enterprise world now.

      What is the business case for having your own browser? So that bing can be the default search engine?

      Well Duh. In Windows, the browser must be (squeaky Ballmer voice) "an Integral part of the Windows Operating System".

      Because that works so much better than OS's like Linux and MacOS where the browser is a mere application program.

      • Re:Why does Microsoft even need a browser? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bondsbw ( 888959 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:29PM (#49278475)

        Exactly! I mean, just imagine what might happen if say Google decided to make an OS that was pretty much just a web browser. Like that would sell!

      • Well Duh. In Windows, the browser must be (squeaky Ballmer voice) "an Integral part of the Windows Operating System".

        The problem is that the "web browser" has become more than that. It's now a convenient, handy GUI for everything. The last GUI application I programed (last two, actually) were supposed to be in Perl/Tk but I realized from early on that a web-browser/javascript solution would be easier -- despite the issues of "security" that makes reading local files hard and writing them worse.

        What do you do when you've created lots of GUI interfaces for novice users based on your web browser and that web browser isn't

    • What is the business case for having your own browser?

      If you make an OS, then making a browser that only works on that OS, gives you customer lock-in. This strategy is most effective if you are the market leader. So MSIE only runs on Windows, but Safari runs on both OSX and Windows.

      So that bing can be the default search engine?

      That too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by imp7 ( 714746 )
      How else will you be able visit https://www.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org] without a browser?

      • In PowerShell:


                        $source = "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-36.0.1-SSL"
                        $dest = Join-Path -Path $env:TEMP -ChildPath "firefox.zip"
                        $wc = New-Object system.net.webclient
                        $wc.downloadFile($source,$dest)

    • Note that Chrome and Safari are made by two of Microsoft's arch rivals. Evidently they both thought there was a business case for that. I assume that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are generally interested in optimizing the browser experience on their platforms and being a participant in creating future browser standards. And Microsoft wouldn't want to leave its competition in charge of the latter with just a little help from Mozilla, et. al.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      IE (across versions) has a larger share than Firefox now, right?

      Firefox lost 1/3rd of its customer base in the (almost-) year following the ousting of Eich for being conservative, and is still losing share fast. It's almost like half of America is more conservative than average, or something.

    • Because operating systems come with web browsers these days. If you don't have one, your OS is crippled by design and the users will rebel.

      They could bundle someone else's browser, but by now that's pointless.

    • I don't understand why Microsoft wants to make a browser so badly.

      Every modern OS needs browser-like functionality for its own purposes, e.g. displaying help. So you might as well have a browser. They're obviously not going to put Chrome in there, nor at this point, Firefox. So they're going to have to have their own browser.

      I, for one, am glad they are not throwing in the towel. They help motivate the other browsers towards standards compliance.

  • New name (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:18PM (#49277855)
    Microsoft Zilla. MSzilla if you like to abbreviate.

  • I hope it's fast (Score:4, Funny)

    by Atrox666 ( 957601 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:21PM (#49277885)

    I can't wait to install Chrome faster than I ever have on a new machine.

    • Re:I hope it's fast (Score:5, Funny)

      by SIGBUS ( 8236 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:27PM (#49278445) Homepage

      I think they should just call it "Firefox Downloader."

  • I have a name! (Score:3)

    by gadget junkie ( 618542 ) <gbponz@libero.it> on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:21PM (#49277887) Journal
    How about "Completely Researched Archiving Program"? it would make for an interesting Acronym.

  • Rename Microsoft (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:23PM (#49277915)
    Getting rid of the name "Microsoft" may help in the long run.

  • The reason for the new browser... (Score:3)

    by VAXcat ( 674775 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:35PM (#49278023)
    IE's replacement will provide a more Windows Phone like Internet browsing experience to desktop users. We're all gonna love it.

  • Why wouldn't they? (Score:3)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:39PM (#49278059)

    At this point the IE brand is so tainted that it's basically an albatross around MS' neck.

    Because Spartan is a long-overdue pruning of the Trident codebase (which has been gathering ugly cruft for 17 years) rather than a clean sheet rewrite, it'll still carry a slight IE odor no matter how much they cut out. Even the name Spartan is ripe for jokes about it's feature implementation.

    • it'll still carry a slight IE odor no matter how much they cut out.

      That's OK. You can always get bottles of that 'New Browser smell" and spritz it around the office.

  • The name is not the problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:41PM (#49278081)

    It is sort of unfair to nail MS too much for IE. The big problem was javascript and really javascript is still a big problem.

    I use noscript myself with firefox and whenever I turn it off the absolute garbage that spews onto my pages is amazing. They are nesting one script inside of another inside of another. And it is mostly ads and social network crap.

    Look, I'm okay with ads. But the ads need to be DUMB ads. That is, no scripting. You want to put a banner ad with two chicks getting mounted by a water buffalo? I'm actually fine with that. I don't even see it. What kills me is the scripts. That includes the popups and all that crap.

    I also refuse to deal with Flash or any kind of non-gif animation unless I personally press PLAY on the video. If I don't press play... do not even begin to download that animation or movie or stream. Absolutely not.

    And because of crap like that, I have to micromanage the loading of every page using various tools to keep the various bits of shit from loading every time I go to those pages.

    Again, no problem with ads. Have ads. That's fine. But tracking cookies will be rejected, scripts will not be run, and flash animations of any kind will only be launched at my personal discretion.

    MS made no effort to control this shit and as a result people hate IE. That is mostly what happened.

    Every time you saw some poor bastard using IE he'd have 100 little programs in his tool bar eating up 90 percent of his screen along with endless pop up swatting. And MS really didn't do anything about it.

    THAT was the mistake. Fix THAT.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Threni ( 635302 )

      The problem was never javascript. Sure, IE was the posterboy in slow, buggy javascript. But it's hard to imagine anything other that static pages (and there's nothing wrong with that) being handled with anything better than javascript. Perhaps you're not very technical, but forget ads and gifs for a moment and explain how you'd provide the same functionality javascript (and ajax and all that goes along with it) would be handled without javascript? Uploading files to a site with a progress bar? Draggi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, there's nothing that stops people from doing this, other than that unlike you, they find javascript useless.

      And it is *perfectly* reasonable to blame MS for IE. If not MS, than who? First of all, Javascript isn't the only source of Internet security problems. But by being deliberately non-compatible IE javascript created or exacerbated security problems for the web as a whole. If other computers on your LAN have to run an old version of IE because of its quirks, that puts your machine at risk too e

    • Every browser uses javascript. Mozilla allows people to use plugins, some of which make it much easier to manage js. But bad javascript on a website, can only make that website suck. It's the ActiveX controls built into IE with the idea of breaking web compatibility and getting browser lock-in, along with Browser Helper Objects, which makes the whole browser suck. BHO's are responsible for those million toolbars.

      Using IE makes you more vulnerable to malware, because of poor design. There is no fix.

  • Isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:42PM (#49278089)

    It's going to be called "The browser formerly known as Internet Explorer".

  • Kill off IE if you must; but keep IE-tan around, and give her a new hair tie ...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Hmmm... (Score:3)

    by MitchDev ( 2526834 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:48PM (#49278129)

    Microsoft Shite 2.0?

  • You cannot change the name! This is madness!! (Score:3)

    by RevWaldo ( 1186281 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:52PM (#49278157)
    THIS. IS. SPARTAN!!

    // (prerequisite additional lowercase text to avoid the yelling error.)

    .

  • Name: Microsoft Style (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hoggoth ( 414195 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @02:52PM (#49278159) Journal

    I predict just before release they will name it "Microsoft Browser", keeping with their habit of trying to co-opt the generic term for a technology but only ending up making it impossible to do keyword searches for their software.

    You heard it here first.

  • The new name is obvious.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday March 17, 2015 @03:28PM (#49278457)

    Microsoft Bing Application.... OR MBA for short.

    How do I know? The whole thing has MBA all over it. It will be designed by a group of MBA's, marketed by a different group of MBA's and coded by 10 software engineers who are managed by 100 MBA's...

  • MSNIE - Microsoft's Not Internet Explorer Browser
  • While reading the article I misread "Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Capossela" as "Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Crapolla", opps my bad...

  • Here is what I think the IE history is:
    IE all the way to version 6 (inclusive) sucked because they didn't integrate W3 standards property but in their defense neither did any of the other browsers at the time. All browsers had problems rendering content because they all didn't integrate the standard properly either because it was loose or because they didn't fully understand it. This wasn't a problem except IE was integrated into the OS significantly slowing down it's dev cycle (don't ask me why their dev c

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