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Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

americasmarkets.usatoday.com

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Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#101

Post by grandalf »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #75
joshuapants wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 brows…

Exactly. At least it may not be worth $200. Apple's $25 or free updates are much more reasonable and get people to actually stay current. The older hardware slows down gradually and people warm up to the idea of faster/newer hardware gradually, rather than thinking that the new OS broke their working computer.

Please, Microsoft, switch to an evergreen OS model like Apple has.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#102

Post by SixSigma »

dredmorbius wrote: post #81
aikah wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MSIE was never the "best" browser. It may have been better than Netscape, but there were numerous alternatives -- Opera, Galeon, Konqueror, and more. Eventually Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox picked up the mantel. Then (somewhat) Chrome, though it's getting really effing annoying these days.

Some of us remember times before Opera, Galeon et al. (and I am one of those people who actually paid for Internet Explorer when it only shipped with the Windows 95 Plus Pack).

I remember the day IE introduced Javascript (v.3 I think it was) & going round chatrooms that let you post HTML and griefing with inline images.

IE was very forgiving with its HTML engine. There was a time when missing a /td or /tr would leave you with a blank page in Netscape but IE rendered the page just fine. This led to hundreds of websites that only rendered in IE because that's what people checked them with.

So in this way it was the "best" browser because you needed it to browse half of the web!

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#103

Post by wantab »

300bps wrote: post #29
bdcravens wrote: post #15

> "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.

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.

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

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#104

Post by ams6110 »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#105

Post by badsock »

badloginagain wrote: post #53

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 wh…

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#106

Post by integraton »

mattmanser wrote: post #87
dredmorbius wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSIE was never the "best" browser. It may have been better than Netscape, but there were numerous alternatives -- Opera, Galeon, Konqueror, and more. Eventually Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox picked up the mantel. Then (somewhat) Chrome, though it's getting really effing annoying these days.

They invented ajax, at that time it was the best.

Sort of. IE was actually a big part of the reason developing Ajax applications was an expensive pain for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

The original idea came from ActiveX, but it didn't take off until it was implemented across browsers via JavaScript as XMLHttpRequest over the next 6 years, and didn't become "Ajax" until the Adaptive Path blog post about Google's innovations with Maps and Gmail in 2005. Microsoft then added support for XMLHttpRequest a year and a half later in late 2006 with IE7, which of course had very little adoption, particular among businesses, because of IE6 (see IE6 @ 49.8% and IE7 @ 17.1% IE market share at beginning, March 2007, of this graph: http://www.w3counter.com/trends).

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#107

Post by dmfdmf »

ploxiln wrote: post #77
badloginagain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everything gets faster: computers have 4x the memory and processing power of 10 years ago, browsers are easily 10x faster than they were 10 years ago. However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".) People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.

The big problem that I see, and it applies to any browser, is that every page is loading tons of crap from ad or tracking sites including twitter or facebook. When one of these sites stalls the whole page stalls and it is a chronic problem. As an interim fix I block these domains using my host file pointing to localhost 127.0.0.1 but sometimes that stalls the loading because it doesn't get a reply so it waits for the timeout. I am thinking of setting up a web server on my LAN that replies 404 or 204 to all queries and pointing the worst ad/tracking/social domains there so I can load the content not the dross.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#108

Post by O____________O »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #47
azinman2 wrote: post #43

“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.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#109

Post by zemoo »

grandalf wrote: post #101
throwawaymsft wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 brows…

Exactly. At least it may not be worth $200. Apple's $25 or free updates are much more reasonable and get people to actually stay current. The older hardware slows down gradually and people warm up to the idea of faster/newer hardware gradually, rather than thinking that the new OS broke their working computer. Please, Microsoft, switch to an evergreen OS model like Apple has.

Windows has moved to an evergreen OS model: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/01/21/the-next...

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#110

Post by joshuapants »

throwawaymsft wrote: post #75
joshuapants wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 brows…

First, you don't have to buy a new computer to get a newer version of Windows (especially since 10 seems to run just as well as 7/8 on the same hardware, if not better). Second, since MS is apparently offering free upgrades to 10 for consumers on 7/8 it doesn't seem like cost is really a factor. The China case is interesting, but I'd like to see some more recent figures on usage, since that article is about 2 years old. I did some quick searching, but everything I could find seemed to be from around that timeframe.

I don't know that the browser is a primary carrot, but it's part of the deal. If you can get enough of their new software to run on, say, Windows 7 to duplicate major functionality of 10, what's the point in upgrading at all? It doesn't make sense to have (people who will stick with the old OS no matter what) + (people who might upgrade, but don't because they can keep the old one and still get the cool new features of the new one) using older versions of Windows, thus increasing maintenance on old software.

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