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."
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.
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.
Mosaic (Score:5, Informative)
From Wikipedia: "Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer."
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:2, Informative)
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 of Outlook Web Access. So, if you have this problem you have a very incompetent IT department.
Re:A rose by any other name... (Score:5, Informative)
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:American car companies... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:American car companies... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Tough luck huh? I guess you don't spend much time in a place with a lot of salt. Try it in Canada some time, and you'll see 3 year old cars at times from companies like Toyota, Honda, and Kia already turning into rust buckets. Funny enough, the GM, Ford, Chrysler, and a few of the higher end brands like Audi, are still looking pretty good. Doesn't always hold true though, seems to rely heavily on just "how good" the steel was when the parts were made. And whether or not the person putting the final panels on(when the robots don't), nicked any edges.
Interestingly enough, if you've got a complaint about how the cars look, you're better of telling the automakers to build their cars using polymer panels like what Saturn did. My old '96 saturn looked nearly as good as the day it rolled off the lot in 2014.
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.
Re:Just make it fully standards compliant... (Score:4, Informative)
http://support.microsoft.com/k... [microsoft.com]
enjoy.