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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."
They can't name it after Steve Ballmer either, Chrome is already taken by google.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
...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.
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.
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.
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.
McDonald's is happy to introduce the all-white-meat chicken McNugget!
Wait ... what the fuck was in it before?
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.
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.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
...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.
Microsoft Considered Renaming Internet Explorer To Netscape Its Reputation
I mean it worked for Windows Vista. (I'll always wonder if they didn't have to rename it would we have gotten what became Windows 7 as a service pack.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
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?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
From Wikipedia: "Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic in 1995 for US$2 million, modified it, and renamed it Internet Explorer."
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
As much as Enterprise customers like to push the "it has to work on IE" crap (because they're usually working with lazy IT departments or legacy applications written by people with less interest in standards compliance than me), in reality that shouldn't be my job for writing a web application. I code to the standards or I use libraries and frameworks that code to the standards. These work in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome with minimal modification (assuming I'm not using a cutting-edge new feature like web audio, notifications, or O.o()) and impressive consistency.
They never work in IE without modification.
That's not my fault. That will never be my fault.
If you want to court developers, you go out there with IE, pick apps that have not gotten IE-fixing mods, and YOU (Micro$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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Microsoft Chair - makes the internet so fast, it flies.
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.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
HEY! Most of the ducks I've met have been more competent at running computers than your average MCSE.
Not a sentence!
I nominate the name (acronym): UFIA or UFIA explorer
How about "Webbie" who would guide you like clippie ("It looks like you are searching for tentacle porn, today")?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Microsoft Chair - makes the internet so fast, it flies.
How about "Stool" instead.
No, you see, they're trying to change how we perceive it, not reinforce the current perception...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
"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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC