Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Escape Its Reputation

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."

Comments

question: does IE support adblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[BarbaraHudson]

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.

Re:They made their bed

[afgam28]

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.

Re:Mozilla should consider doing the same for Fire

[AmiMoJo]

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.