Comment Waste of time (Score 3, Interesting) 426
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".