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."
American car companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
...feel Microsoft's pain.
After you push a substandard product for so long, nobody will buy your stuff even when it is improved to the point of being superior to the competition. The stink just will not wash off.
Polishing Turds (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isnt with the name Internet Explorer, the problem is the with the name Microsoft.
Microsoft is the one with the tarnished image.
They are trying to polish the wrong turd.
Mozilla should consider doing the same for Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't a bad idea. It's one that Mozilla should consider for Firefox, too. Firefox has gotten a bad reputation for being a slow and bloated browser with a shitty UI that just imitates Chrome. Users are discarding it left and right, causing it to now have an approximately 10% share of the browser market. What Mozilla could do is rename the browser to something else, and then proceed down the proper path of innovation and good UI design. Instead of working on stupidity like Australis, which pretty much all Firefox users hate, they could fix the memory leaks and improve the performance. A restoration of the old UI, which was really efficient and easy to use, could very well make this new browser a winner again. Basically Mozilla should repeat what Firefox did to Internet Explorer a decade ago, but this time it's their new browser Firefoxing Firefox and the total stupidity that Firefox has become lately. When a browser goes from a 35% share of the market down to 10% in only a few years, the path it's on is obviously wrong, and the people making these decisions are obviously foolish. Instead of waiting for it to get to 0% market share, at which point salvaging it will not be an option, Mozilla needs to take action now to correct the situation and get back on the correct path. This means undoing some of the obviously stupid changes that have been made lately, fixing the long-standing performance and memory consumption issues, and probably discarding those contributors who have been responsible for harming Firefox so badly these past few years.
Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember using ie4 on a sun Solaris box a long time ago. I was thrilled, because it was light years ahead of mosaic and Netscape.
Now? I don't care how good it is. I will never use it again. Microsoft's long established contempt for its users, laws, and even international standards bodies have guaranteed that I will never put anything even resembling trust in them ever again.
They made their bed (Score:5, Insightful)
And they should lie in it. Microsoft's monopoly in IE was one of the principal causes of stagnation in the industry during the mid 2000s.
Then again, that stagnation arguably led to some great innovations by others in the industry, which is why we've witnessed the mobile revolution and downfall of IE since.
Microsoft naming practices (Score:4, Insightful)
Never could decide which one I liked better: Internet Exploder or Internet Exploiter.
Microsoft should still be considering changing the name: As one posters here suggests, sometimes the stink will just not wash off.
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that worked (Score:5, Insightful)
Why compete with free? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without the market share needed to embrace and extend anything, is there actually a real reason for Microsoft bother having their own a browser at all?
Wouldn't bundling another browser with WIndows and laying off the IE division make more financial sense that carrying on with a product that cost money to make, generates no revenue and is so badly respected by customers that Microsoft literally can't give it away?
Re:question: does IE support adblock and noscript? (Score:5, Insightful)
on thing slashdotters have never learned to pick up on is PR.
This whole article is PR by Microsoft to spread the message that "IE is much improved". By encapsulating the message in a seeming criticism, people are lulled into joining the discussion.
Re:American car companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
In that time every category of safety, performance, features, and mileage received a huge improvement with no significant increase in cost. Across the board, across manufacturer and country borders. The gap has closed but foreign makers raised the bar again. Frankly I won't be surprised (or morn) if Chevy goes out of business completely. US manufacturers still have some innovation to do. They should start with expiring patents from Japan.
Re:question: does IE support adblock and noscript? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think noscript is arguably THE most important extension. It's not that much of a pain. All the sites I regularly visit have their essential scripts whitelisted, and no further action was needed by me after my first visit. The first time I visit a new site, I want all scripts disabled, for security and privacy. I'll look and if it seems sensible and the site seems vaguely trustworthy, I'll whitelist its domain and its CDN if it has one. No "ad tracker" scripts though, no "analytics", nothing like that.
Noscript isn't perfect, but it's the best thing I've seen to run the needed scripts while weeding out the unwanted and harmful ones. You can't do that with a single switch - you need a whitelist. Any browser needs that functionality at least as an extension, or it's a non-starter for web browsing. I don't know that many people who browse the web "unprotected" any more. Like a friend told me, "it's like a condom for your computer".
agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
Those 2 years of bug fixes made a big difference to the reliability of Vista. It also helped that the price of RAM fell by more than a half.
"not my job" - It is *Microsoft's* job (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as Enterprise customers like to push the "it has to work on IE" crap (because they're usually working with lazy IT departments or legacy applications written by people with less interest in standards compliance than me), in reality that shouldn't be my job for writing a web application. I code to the standards or I use libraries and frameworks that code to the standards. These work in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome with minimal modification (assuming I'm not using a cutting-edge new feature like web audio, notifications, or O.o()) and impressive consistency.
They never work in IE without modification.
That's not my fault. That will never be my fault.
If you want to court developers, you go out there with IE, pick apps that have not gotten IE-fixing mods, and YOU (Micro$oft) fix the browser to the standards-compliant web applications already out there.
I'm sick of and done with working around your messes for the last 15 years.
Re:Why compete with free? (Score:5, Insightful)
Renaming never worked to improve reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 7 was better received by the market because it was BETTER than Vista. Windows 8 was crap and got he reception it deserved. Merely releasing 9 without removing the crapstatic TIFKAM interface will result in poor reputation.
The reasons Internet Explorer got a bad reputation:
1. It was tied to the operating system, unnecessarily. The browser has exactly zilch to do with the operating system. ActiveX controls, tying versions of the browser with versions of the OS, varying behaviour of same browser version on different OS versions etc. If IE is renamed, it should be delinked from the OS like other browsers.
2. Intentional non-compatibility with standards, because of the arrogant assumption that with marketshare they can bully the World.
3. No sandboxing, no protection from ads, popups, malware downloads, sucking upto to the MAFIAA in proprietary standards and DRM.
Fix these issues in the browser FIRST, then call it Internet Shit-hole, but people will still buy it.
Re:"not my job" - It is *Microsoft's* job (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's ability to control de facto standards is long gone. When Netscape collapsed but Firefox was too immature, they had control. The Standards bodies worked to make html4 and Microsoft could happily ignore all of that, create their own broken implementation of CSS (this is worse than their jscript problems) and happily make everybody else play along.
Now what they want is that same control back, but as Disney once said, "That ship has sailed." This idea of pushing to developers to create specialized webapps that are IE compatible betrays the fact that they have not been in control for years now.
I am not going to code to IE compatibility; I'm not going to break my application by trying to get it passed IE's continually broken CSS. I code to the standards because the standards are the greatest likelihood that my application, if converted to a full-out mobile app via Cordova, or converted to a desktop-app via Adobe Air, will continue to function without change. My stuff mostly works in IE. It is up to IE to finish their job and fix their CSS and their event model and all of that stuff. I'll come part-way by using certain libraries that others are willing to address compatibility issues (jquery, for example) but no closer.
Re:American car companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
...feel Microsoft's pain.
After you push a substandard product for so long, nobody will buy your stuff even when it is improved to the point of being superior to the competition. The stink just will not wash off.
Completely agree. The stink will take [at least] a generation to wash off. In the 90's I owned a Honda and the company cars were Fords. The Honda never gave us any trouble; the Fords had constant issues directly related to poor manufacturing control (side panels that would pop-off when the door was closed---on a two day old car).
I no long work for the company that provided Fords. Since then I've bought 3 Hondas (all made in Kentucky), 1 Nissan, 1 Toyota (used), and 1 BMW (used; built in North Carolina). While I read the stats that say the American Big Three have their act together, I'm not about to bet $30K or more that they do.
Re:Mozilla should consider doing the same for Fire (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, the market share hasn't dwindled nearly as much as you claim. Second, if all you can offer is empty negative criticism, your opinion isn't worth much. Third, renaming Firefox won't help because people like you will just badmouth the newly-named version too.
I know we're all supposed to hate the loss of trivial UI features and the new UI, and the alleged "Chromeification", yet that's all people like you seem to have noticed since Firefox 3. Has there been nothing good since then? At all? Apparently Mozilla could have rolled a perfect 300 since Firefox 3 and you wouldn't have noticed. Things would have ended up the same regardless.
Besides that, I'm not at all convinced the new UI is as slow as people claim it is. I've compared Pale Moon and Firefox 31, and the new UI is not slower. Startup times are faster in 31 too. It's only when I load up the old UI with Classic Theme Restorer that the performance in both is comparable (ie, 31 becomes as slow as Pale Moon).
So you're either talking about YOUR performance with the UI (muscle memory), or bugs they haven't worked out (because people like you don't help figure out the bugs, they just flock to Pale Moon after a brief bitch-fest). To date it's the alleged fans of Firefox who have caused more damage to it than Australis, the Eich conspiracy, and all the other negatives.
Nobody cares about Firefox anymore, they just want it to stay the same slow, bloated browser so they can complain about how much faster Chrome is.
Actually, it's the PERFECT name (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, "Internet Explorer" is just about the perfect name. FOSS developers fail so miserably at naming, and should take a lesson from this.
If I was a clueless user and wanted to browse the INTERNET, what would I first think to use? "Mozilla," "Firefox," "Opera," or something else that has "Internet" right in the name?
"Photoshop" versus "GIMP" is just one more example. "Winamp" isn't perfect, but pretty good, compared with "XMMS" or "Audacious", and "iTunes" and "Windows Media Center" both hit it out of the park.
Forget the clueless users, even, and look at how you find software... How many times have you discovered that there was some application for task-X that you didn't know about, despite it being in the yum/dpkg list of your system?
When looking for an IRC client, I'm hardly going to expect "BitchX" is what I want. When looking for a new file manager, "Nautilus", "Konq" and "Dolphin" doesn't mean a damn thing to me... etc.
Sure, you could go for multi-million dollar ad campaigns to get your product's name out there (Firefox), or you could just damn-well name it properly in the first place, so someone looking for it, will find it...