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Microsoft Is Killing Off the Internet Explorer Brand
An anonymous reader writes: The Verge reports that Internet Explorer as we know it will be taking a back seat to Microsoft's new browser, Project Spartan, in Windows 10 and future projects. IE will still exist, and stick around for compatibility issues, but Project Spartan will be the default way users interact with the internet. Microsoft wants to distance itself with the negative connotations Internet Explorer has acquired through the years. They still haven't decided on an official name for Project Spartan, but it will probably have the company name in it.
Isn't this how the XBox became the XBox? They released the code name of their internal project, people kept using the name, and then they just stuck with it?
On the one hand "Microsoft Spartan" doesn't seem corporate enough. On the other hand it'll fit right in with Firefox & Chrome, which also have non-descriptive names that are pan-inoffensive yet interesting...
The previous CEO of Microsoft assured European regulators that IE was so deeply embedded in Windows architecture that it could not be replaced.
It's not impossible at all -- Spartan is a copy of the IE engine code, repackaged as a Metro app and will be updated on an ongoing basis through the Windows App Store model. Anything that doesn't work in that space like ActiveX/COM, Browser Helper Objects, etc. are all stripped out.
IE11 will also remain in Windows 10, with good ole' MSHTML.DLL and all that other cruft that developers (and parts of Windows itself) have been taking hard dependencies on for 15+ years. It will receive security updates, performance improvements and so on, but it will not be updated at the pace of Spartan.
Maybe shipping two browsers with the OS will upset some people, but this should actually work out pretty nicely.