QuoteMicrosoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand (http://americasmarkets.usatoday.com/2015/03/17/microsoft-is-killing-off-the-internet-explorer-brand/)
SAN FRANCISCO — Cue the dirge for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's much maligned browser.
Soon the brand will be (mostly) no more.
Microsoft has hinted that Internet Explorer brand was going to be scrapped. Now it's official.
Chris Capossela, Microsoft's head of marketing, made the announcement Monday at the Microsoft Convergence conference.
Microsoft is placing its bets on its new and speedier flagship browser codenamed Project Spartan.
Project Spartan will not be associated with the Internet Explorer brand, Capossela said. Microsoft is working on a new name and a new brand for Project Spartan, he said.
"We're now researching what the new brand or the new name for our browser should be in Windows 10," Capossela said, according to The Verge. "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."
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.
"Microsoft is making compelling software right now, software as good as Google and Apple. But they still have a perception of lagging and they are trying to break that perception and that includes retiring brands," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.
It's the end of an era for Internet Explorer which launched nearly two decades ago.
Over the years, the browser became the bane of some office workers' daily lives. A series of security flaws also damaged the brand.
Microsoft has struggled to revive the Internet Explorer brand as competition heated up from Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers.
Dean Hachamovitch, the manager of the Internet Explorer team, left the company in December.
"At one point Internet Explorer commanded north of 80% share of the browser market, but with the explosion in mobility, that market share has dwindled to 30%," said S&P Capital analyst Angelo Zino. "The platform isn't cutting it on mobile devices and that's where the focus is today."
Project Spartan will run on phones, tablets and personal computers but was expressly made for the mobile experience, Microsoft says. It will also have the personal voice assistant Cortana built into it.
"Project Spartan is Microsoft's next generation browser, built just for Windows 10," Microsoft said in an emailed statement. "We will continue to make Internet Explorer available with Windows 10 for enterprises and other customers who require legacy browser support."
Can Microsoft regain ground it has lost? It will have to deliver a better search experience, greater speed and new bells and whistles for mobile devices such as voice commands, basically borrowing a page from Google's Chrome, analysts say.
Even then, "it's really going to be difficult for them," Zino said.
But he added: "This was definitely a must for them."
Poor mono.
:weep:
I'll just use whatever that comes with the next version of Windows.
Ugh, many Navy sites work better with IE, some only work with IE.
Quote from: Monoriu on March 17, 2015, 07:03:21 PM
:weep:
I'll just use whatever that comes with the next version of Windows.
You should adopt Chrome, accept the rule of your Google overlords.
Quote from: Peter Wiggin on March 17, 2015, 09:15:22 PM
Quote from: Monoriu on March 17, 2015, 07:03:21 PM
:weep:
I'll just use whatever that comes with the next version of Windows.
You should adopt Chrome, accept the rule of your Google overlords.
I still use Yahoo search. Yahoo is my homepage.
Chrome rocks.
I liked some of these that were posted on Buzzfeed.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/internet-explorer-is-finally-being-killed-after-years-of-mer#.tokp4yE5G
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2F2015-03%2F17%2F11%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr03%2Fenhanced-buzz-14766-1426605624-22.jpg&hash=8a93b32bf08057c65fa6877670e2c4eef9da31f4)
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2F2015-03%2F17%2F11%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr02%2Fenhanced-buzz-1751-1426606027-21.jpg&hash=f65ccb05ceb09d840fb7a5bd5b2084e87954f3c2)
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2F2015-03%2F17%2F11%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr05%2Fenhanced-28862-1426606196-2.png&hash=bc9e925ee0bf24c50dee6ec9766c1b10dce9378f)
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs3-ec.buzzfed.com%2Fstatic%2F2015-03%2F17%2F11%2Fenhanced%2Fwebdr01%2Fenhanced-buzz-12425-1426606643-25.jpg&hash=a601e63ec81dae9d0d82278813187661ee85f780)
I really don't know what you mean. IE is blazing fast to me.
Quote from: Monoriu on March 18, 2015, 09:35:49 AM
I really don't know what you mean. IE is blazing fast to me.
Have you used any other to compare?
Quote from: lustindarkness on March 18, 2015, 10:15:29 AM
Quote from: Monoriu on March 18, 2015, 09:35:49 AM
I really don't know what you mean. IE is blazing fast to me.
Have you used any other to compare?
No. I am: loyal :bowler:
But really, the browser can't go faster. There is basically no loading time.
Quote from: lustindarkness on March 17, 2015, 08:43:27 PM
Ugh, many Navy sites work better with IE, some only work with IE.
Don't remind me. The fucking government needs to get their web design standards out of the 90s.
Killing IE can only make web design and development faster and more productive. IE's problems fall into three main categories.
1) IE's low speed. It's not just bogging down the browser, it's bogging down man-hours of development time. IE performs so poorly, but still has so much corporate market share, that hours are being wasted just on figuring out and implementing prefetching techniques to lower loading times. When your browser is so slow that there's a separate set of scripts and hacks just to deal with it, it's a failure.
2) Little to no standards compliance. When Internet Explorer finally gets around to drawing the page, it's probably not going to look the way the designer intended- unless even more man-hours are being wasted on IE-specific hacks (especially margins and padding- IE's got a nasty habit of spacing out things that aren't supposed to be apart and collapsing things that are supposed to be together). Once again, wasted production time and the browser is a complete failure- they're called standards for a reason.
3) ActiveX controls. Internet Explorer is *not* the only browser that still uses ActiveX- sort of. Opera can be configured to allow ActiveX usage, but guess what? It runs more slowly and with more glitches when ActiveX controls are enabled. For almost any public site, ActiveX controls should be considered a no-no, since the programmer has no way of knowing whether the client has ActiveX support or not, meaning lots of code redundancy doing the same thing in a more universal way, like PHP and Javascript.
The problem is the bigger the company, the more it's invested into the software it's using (and will have to invest in upgrading), so the slower it will be to accept change in the software world. My PC repair teacher had horror stories (in 2010) about some companies that had invested so heavily in software for their companies that they were still stuck using Windows 3.1. The same is true of IE6-IE8; a lot of really large companies spent a lot of money using those to heavily tailor their company intranets, and the way they build relationships and contracts with vendors has prevented them from exploring better, cheaper options using more generally-accepted current technology. For example, it's relatively expensive to maintain a repository of QuickTime-format training videos on an IE8-compatible legacy website, while the videos could be converted to MPEGs and played in a browser running purely HTML5 code for a weekend's worth of work... except that the ERP vendors have nice cushy contracts that haven't expired, so they don't really have any incentive to put any development work into the site.
It started going away when Microsoft finally announced they're no longer supporting Windows XP (the last Windows OS that could run IE6 without heavy modification), but change will still be slow, because Vista gained almost no market share and Windows 7 is a much younger platform.
Seems to me a lot of the problems listed are on the developer/IT side of things rather than the retail, consumer, user side.
Quote from: Monoriu on March 18, 2015, 10:21:43 AM
But really, the browser can't go faster. There is basically no loading time.
That's probably because of your 350 Mbps connection.
Though even with a twentieth of that, it's rare I'll notice a difference between page loading times on different browsers. I use Chrome because the AdBlock plugin works so well.
Quote from: Baron von Schtinkenbutt on March 18, 2015, 10:56:14 AM
Quote from: lustindarkness on March 17, 2015, 08:43:27 PM
Ugh, many Navy sites work better with IE, some only work with IE.
Don't remind me. The fucking government needs to get their web design standards out of the 90s.
it's the same with Quebec & Canada's government, most sites asks for IE 7.0 or something. Most still work anyway, though.