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Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

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Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#191

Post by amorphid »

ninkendo wrote: post #148
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'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 o…

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#192

Post by lylejohnson »

mryan wrote: post #166
Agathos wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can survive on milliseconds of sleep every night. Preferably 27 to 28 million milliseconds, if you have to be so picky.

Exactly, that's the point minitech was making. Your statement is accurate. Saying you survive on a single millisecond of sleep each night would be clearly impossible - as is noticing single-millisecond differences in page rendering times. You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".

Whoosh.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#193

Post by puranjay »

Stoo wrote: post #185

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.

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

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#194

Post by MLR »

Someone1234 wrote: post #45
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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...

The rumour at the moment is that they're going to use an extremely Chrome like extension system, either native support for Chrome extensions or an extremely minimal conversion process required.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#195

Post by madaxe_again »

wantab wrote: post #94
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…

>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.

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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#196

Post by wlesieutre »

wantab wrote: post #100
wlesieutre wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is in much less of a position to screw with standards than they were back when IE was a problem. I'd be more worried about Apple and Google running the browser show if I were you.

I was more concerned when Microsoft did. I have no issue with Apple or Google. In fact, if it weren't for Google and Mozilla, we'd all be using IE6 right now.

I don't have any concerns with Google, but Apple's "No browsers allowed except for new UIs tacked on the iOS WebKit framework" is not my favorite thing ever.

Firefox on Android is pretty great.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#197

Post by reustle »

ryandvm wrote: post #154
badsock wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

"Inventing Ajax" does not excuse the behavior though. Plus, I'm sure someone else would have come up with a similar idea not long after.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#198

Post by mcwidget »

creshal wrote: post #186
wantab wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> 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…)

As an Opera 12 fan, have you tried https://vivaldi.net ? You're the target audience.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#199

Post by hunyeti »

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'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.

Re: Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand

#200

Post by WorldWideWayne »

badsock wrote: post #129
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, you can decide to just spectate, but like it or not we all have to share this tech ecosystem. If there's no consequence for companies or people that behave in ways that harm the whole industry, we're all going to suffer.

What gives you the idea that am I spectating? I'm a developer who votes with my choices and I've been in this industry for over 20 years. I just don't have a problem with Microsoft's tactics because I'm not an idealogue like you.

You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices?

So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!

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