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."
question: does IE support adblock and noscript? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm perfectly willing to believe that the core IE engine is much improved from its terrible days of the past when it was intentionally non-standards-compliant, slow, and insecure.
However, I ask this as someone who hasn't touched it in many years: does it support adblock, noscript, ghostery, and httpseverywhere? If not, then I would not call it "quite good" no matter how much the core has improved. Those features are essential for using the modern web.
Re:They made their bed (Score:5, Interesting)
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 was always playing the "short game" - after all, it was always about announcing the latest vapour-ware, future plans to pre-emptively ward off competitors, etc. to keep the stock price up, We saw how that played out in both the phone and tablet markets, which is where both current and future growth is.
"Never interfere with your opponent when he's making a mistake." Sure, the opponents often didn't have the resources to interfere significantly, but there's one resource Microsoft couldn't control - time. The accumulation of mistakes over time hurt them badly. Thank Ballmer. Also thank Gates for making sure Ballmer was CEO way past his best-before date. Just goes to show, we all bear the seeds of our own destruction.
Why not just deprecate IE and save some serious $? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, one can argue that MSN made a lot of money because it was the default homepage on IE, but MSN would have made the same amount of money if Microsoft bundled Netscape with Windows & set MSN as the default page--and would have pushed off all the R&D and risks onto a 3rd party. But no--almost 20 years later, we're still dealing with the hangover of those decisions. Business students should be doing case studies on the MS-IE debacle...
So, Microsoft, please deprecate IE!!! Do the world, and especially your shareholders, a favor. Stop at IE11. You've proven that you can deprecate things and support them on newer OSes (e.g. Jet/ACE). And since you'll need an HTML engine in future OSes (e.g. HTML Help, etc.), throw some money at Firefox (or Google, Opera, etc.) and force all "newer" internally developed programs (e.g. Visual Studio) to call this engine--while "older" apps stick with the deprecated engine (which still receives security updates) and/or are moved to the newer one over time... IE and its engine becomes a legacy feature and be done with it.
But, alas, the inflated IE ego syndrome still permeates within Microsoft...
Re:They made their bed (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I remember around the early to mid 2000s there was an article on Slashdot along the lines of "who will be the next Microsoft?" and the general consensus was nobody - because Microsoft wouldn't be stupid enough to be the next IBM. IBM's mistake in the 80s was to hand over control of DOS, and Microsoft understood this and wouldn't repeat it.
Now in 2014 it's easy to see that IE6's stagnation and Ballmer's laughing dismissal of the iPhone has put the company in a very similar place to where IBM was in the mid 90s.
Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this really what is going on at Microsoft? Their staff has so much free time that they can sit around sorting out whether or not to rename a browser?
Are we going to get an educational campaign to go along with it? After all they will have to explain to people that, "Internet Explorer is not really gone. It is now called..." What is the life span of a bad idea in the minds of computer users? We still make fun of Clippy after all....
What an epic waste of time.
They need to suck up the fact that their product was sub-par for years. Focus on the improvements. Continue moving forward.
The exact audience who cares about the differences between IE, Chrome, WebKit, Trident and all of the cross roads of the various technologies is not going to be "fooled" by a re-branding. Those are the people who matter. Those are the people who are developing web technologies. Give them the features that they want. At the same time, give the end users a stable, secure application.
The truth is that the war is over. HTML5 is here. Everything that used to require ActiveX can now be done in HTML5. I am already seeing large vendors make the switch. One of our larger LOB application, a web app with hundreds of internal users, recently went HTML5. The vendor did a great job. The UI looks exactly the same. The only difference that the end users see is that the site now "magically works in Chrome".
Re:Mozilla should consider doing the same for Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be honest, Firefox was never that great. It was just far, far better than the competition, which was mainly IE6 at the time.
The add-on architecture is antiquated and a security nightmare. Security issues in add-ons can be easily exploited. Firefox had some major memory and performance issues for the first few years, and now it has been surpassed by Webkit/Blink based browsers. The rendering engine is average, but doesn't get as much development effort as Webkit/Blink.
The UI was always just adequate. Nothing special, and outright bad in a few places like the history view (which was incredibly slow and lacked a search box) or the preferences window. Tab handling was awkward for years too, until they copied Chrome.
I switched to Chrome years ago, mostly because of the rapid release schedule and constant breaking of the UI every time I got used to it. In hindsight though, I wouldn't say Firefox was ever a really good bit of software. It just sucked less than everything else, except maybe Opera that never gets any love.