Microsoft is killing off the Internet Explorer brand
americasmarkets.usatoday.com
americasmarkets.usatoday.com
Firefox is too slow. As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times. I may be an outlier but I think most people who spend a lot of time on browsers will notice even small differences in load times. I've long switched from Chrome as my main browser, disliking the direction Google has been going with several of their products.
I might be an outlier, but I'll give Spartan a chance to impress. [As a side note, it's amazing how crippling to your reputation bad technology decisions are. IE 6-9 gutted respect for Microsoft]
Vivaldi has a cool story, former Opera guys that want to make a browser for the power user, not your mom- which is basically the only browser that actually targets me as it's intended audience. The downsides are it's only in technical preview mode and they pretty openly admit to tracking your usage [at least their openly admitting it, everyone else does the same expect maybe Old Man Firefox]
On the desktop, I presently remain a Mozilla partisan, sticking with Firefox through thick and thin. But I have acknowledged that in terms of pure page user interface and interaction speed on a Windows PC, nothing can compete with IE. Its use of GPU acceleration for 2D page rendering makes things like CSS transitions shockingly smooth and fast. The CSS transitions for gradients are particularly delicious; I still have an optional subtle animation in the background of my blog using the gradient transitions. I used to have more animation in my blog (before readers convinced me it was annoying), and IE made Firefox and Chrome look as if they were running on clunky hardware from 5 years ago. IE is the only browser that—even when rendering typical web sites—reminds me that my workstation is a 3770K with a high-spec nVidia GPU. In Firefox and Chrome, I can easily forget how powerful my PC is until I fire up something that kicks off some 3D.
I am hopeful that Spartan will continue to lead in that area of so much importance to me: perceived performance. If it improves its actual JavaScript performance and CSS capability versus IE 11, which I expect it will, I'll likely be quite impressed.
However it appears that the average web page has gotten more than 40x slower. (They're also not really pages, they're "apps".)
People my age or a bit younger (early 20s) say craigslist and hackernews look "hideous" but dammit this is how web pages are supposed to be.
Even the small layout changes Reddit has done the past few years has started to drive me away.
I've been using the web for a long time, and while loading was slow, I don't remember UIs feeling so sluggish and unresponsive.
Not for me. I'm 18, and I think HN is doing great with this webdesign. As well with other sites.
I prefer an application for e.g. Twitter, because the website is way too slow in Firefox. Especially when you follow over 1000 people.
I also really liked http://motherfuckingwebsite.com as an example explaining what is wrong with websites these days.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary?
>As a power user I notice millisecond differences in page render times.
No you don't. As a web developer, I personally can attest that's not true.
Also, what evidence you have that says Firefox can't be slow(even with all the add-ons it supports). In fact, those hundreds of bugs will be quite a sufficient evidence that it indeed is for many people. (It's coming from someone who still hasn't converted to Chrome)
You might dismiss it as pedantry, but there is a clear linguistic difference between "I notice millisecond differences" and "I notice differences of 300ms".
It's fast in benchmarks… but it's either single-threaded or has horrible locking. One slow script somewhere will not just block the tab, but the entire browser. Good luck hunting it down with 40+ open tabs.
(I really miss Opera 12, it's still the only browser to decouple the UI to its own thread so a long-running script doesn't lock up the page. Or the whole browser…)
Humans are impatient to the core.
Really? I didn't notice. Mozilla are working on the new generation of browser engine anyway (Servo), which is much more performant. However Firefox itself is nowhere slow.
The first half of the IE6-9 era was part of a deliberate scorched-earth strategy to harm the open Internet, and the second half was them furiously backpedalling from that when it failed.
It wasn't a technical decision, it was cynical business strategy, and having their IE brand get trashed is the least of what they deserve. I'm kind of annoyed with how quickly people are willing to forgive them, considering what bad actors they've been up until recently.
I wish someone would just make a new browser that lets people browse a mix of native apps and web pages so we can stop bolting more crap on top of HTML/JS/CSS.
You on the other hand are being completely impractical by expecting Microsoft to just roll over and work towards a goal that they don't agree with technically and philosophically. I wonder how you feel about Apple and their choices?
So go use your other browsers and don't use anything from Microsoft. It's funny that you even have a choice since Microsoft is apparently in control of the whole industry!
But the Mozilla Foundation was founded in between IE6 and IE7 and, if I recall correctly, their stand on a standards-based web was there from the get-go. They fought a war, against Microsoft in particular, and were starting to win by the time Chrome came in and cemented the victory.
IE may have had utterly stank HTML compatibility, but adding XMLHttpRequest and inventing AJAX was probably the single most profound changeset in the history of the web.
[I think this proves what i said right](http://www.paulirish.com/2012/box-sizing-border-box-ftw/)
No you don't. Or if you do, it's a strange definition of notice. A millisecond is one tenth of how fast the centisecond counter on stopwatches change -- while one can obviously see that change, could you tell the difference between two different counters going ten times as fast, but at a difference of a couple of milliseconds? I don't think so.
One light-millisecond is ~300 km, or roughly the distance to the horizon at a height of 1000 moh, for another frame of reference.
That happened January 1998, which was 17 years ago, and 4 years before Firefox was released, which itself was over 12 years ago.
Eventually Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox picked up the mantel. Then (somewhat) Chrome, though it's getting really effing annoying these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
The original idea came from ActiveX, but it didn't take off until it was implemented across browsers via JavaScript as XMLHttpRequest over the next 6 years, and didn't become "Ajax" until the Adaptive Path blog post about Google's innovations with Maps and Gmail in 2005. Microsoft then added support for XMLHttpRequest a year and a half later in late 2006 with IE7, which of course had very little adoption, particular among businesses, because of IE6 (see IE6 @ 49.8% and IE7 @ 17.1% IE market share at beginning, March 2007, of this graph: http://www.w3counter.com/trends).
And I can't. Was it Async Javascript and XML? Or was it ActiveX related.
It did change things immensely.
The name comes from this post:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-appl...
Microsoft evangelized the combination of DHTML, Javascript and ActiveX data controls to build applications similar to what we now call AJAX. Microsoft was ignored for various reasons.
Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest and evangelized DHTML, Javascript and XMLHttpRequest. They were ignored again.
It was not until the introduction of Gmail and Adaptive Path's coining of the term AJAX that people finally got it. By this time, Microsoft had already put IE on the back burner.
I remember the day IE introduced Javascript (v.3 I think it was) & going round chatrooms that let you post HTML and griefing with inline images.
IE was very forgiving with its HTML engine. There was a time when missing a /td or /tr would leave you with a blank page in Netscape but IE rendered the page just fine. This led to hundreds of websites that only rendered in IE because that's what people checked them with.
So in this way it was the "best" browser because you needed it to browse half of the web!
But Trident will still be around, for compatibility with old websites (especially for enterprise applications).
So, it's not just marketing...
[1] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
So what Microsoft have done is create an entirely new browser, using the EdgeHTML fork, while keeping IE around only for enterprise installs. Then they went on a killing spree in the EdgeHTML source, ripping out all the crap that they were previously stuck with, then adding new features into their newly cleaned-up codebase. This will then form the basis for the new, consumer facing browser in Windows 10.
They should eliminated native code apps in user mode in Vista and forced developers to ship only managed code with legacy native code apps running in a virtual machine sandbox.
They should have finished WinFS and transcended the files and folders thang. (No, SQL Server does not count as WinFS, it should have been THE file system in Vista.) They should have fixed the file locking thing on open files, geez I hate hate hate that DOS backwards compatibility.
They should have done something/ANYTHING amazing with WinCE beyond pocket office with the insane lead they had. I was running .exe's and playing DOOM at a decent clip on my Samsung phone in, when, 2004?
There's so many wouldda couldda shoulddas I have lined up in my mind wrt Microsoft. Makes me sad.
I truly hope Microsoft wants to win this new browser war. I truly hope there is some fire left in you M$. Show me what money combined with hardcore computer science can really achieve!
Just because it's not packaged as Safari doesn't mean it's not available.
For all practical purposes, Safari is an OS X-only browser.
Whether it's popular on Windows is also irrelevant with regard to the fact that it does, indeed, work on Windows.
Windows Phone uses Trident + Chakra for its IE deployment, as well, so if we're going to make that argument, then IE is multiplatform, as well :P
1. Within reason, of course. It's not on my router (but maybe it could be)
Those were terrible, terrible times. Mostly due to IE.
At the risk of sounding like a complete lunatic, here's my prediction for the next 10 years:
* Microsoft abandon traditional Windows development. * They take a FreeBSD/Linux distro and add a "Windows" layer on top, ala Apple. Unix and Unix-like OS's become the only game in town. "Traditional" apps are emulated. New Apps are written in a CLR-compatible language only for the modern runtime. * IIS, IE, Sivelight - all are left to stagnate. * Office becomes HTTP/JS, hosted only.
This new browser, is it married to Windows? Ibm went through this, they were maybe the most dominant corporation the world has ever seen, then the government scared them and the micro revolution happened. IBM switched from trying to own every deal (well they still wanted that) to being satisfied to get a slice of the action, it became all about open. Ms seems to be switching from "windows everywhere" to "helping you be the best you" or some other theme. I'll be impressed when they support a browser and office on linux.
Every other type of business startup is going to use Windows because software. Call centers, restaurants, supermarkets, retail stores, real estate, financial, pharmaceutical, etc.
But Azure is a fairly cool product overall.
I'd love a Windows machine to work the same way I use my OSX machine: using Terminal.app and HomeBrew to develop and use unixey apps, but with a nice GUI and hardware support that's better than the Linux distros out there. I can confidently develop say, rails applications, test them locally, and just push them to production on Linux servers and I've never once thought "hey, I wonder if this will break due to differences in OSX to Linux." It just never has made a difference. I want windows to be like this too.
I can get there with Windows now with Cygwin or SFU, but I want it all to ship with Windows, and binaries I create are unlikely to work anywhere except other people who have installed the whole stack. Plus there's no good terminal emulator for windows I'm aware of.
No. NT is a far more advanced kernel than any of the free unixes. If anything, they'll make it the other way around; a decent "linux" subsystem which can seamlessly run ELF binaries. Like FreeBSD's linux binary support. Or like coLinux, but without the overhead of virtualizing another kernel.
Oh joy, another browser from Microsoft to test. :\
Later edit : Multiple implementations of a standard is a good thing.
I agree, as long as they are by companies, organizations, and teams other than Microsoft. And that's what we indeed have already: Gecko, WebKit, Blink (and Blink is new, which is great). I very much look forward to additional open engines (and POSIX-compliant operating systems, for that matter) by companies, organizations, and even unofficial teams of dedicated individuals that are not Microsoft, of which there are many.
Firefox on Android is pretty great.
Except that is hardly the case.Competition is good,that's what forced IE to evolve as it was losing marketshares. But let's not kid ourself thinking all the players are in it for web standards.
> Yes, let's all use Webkit. Much better.......
Because IE supremacy used to be better...
I dare say that if all operating systems were nix, that might also be a good thing. It certainly would make life easier for developers.
I understand the problems of monocultures when they are controlled by a single profit-motivated company, but is a monoculture based on open source software so bad? Besides, both webkit and *nix systems aren't exactly monocultures because they have so many different implementations.
How?
Windows and Unix have evolved entirely different ecosystems. Most developers have a tendency to exist entirely in 1 or the other with only a little interaction between them.
I personally am able to use either environment comfortably, but that's actually a big part of the value I bring to certain environments. But that isn't the norm.
This will make things harder to maintain, and if you have enough investment, you'll eventually want to fork it (Blink).
People don't really use different Webkits - there's Chrome and Safari (incompatible forks) and Opera (declining market share) and that's about it, really.
Making all OS' Nix would again be a bad thing, because there'd be no level playing field.
The current Unix players are similar in some ways, but have different APIs and behaviours (so OpenBSD has better randomness, Linux has some cool perf monitoring stuff, OS X has its GUI lib) and what you'd essentially find is that there'd be loads of incompatibilities that'd make developing cross-platform a nightmare. Since not all devs run all common operating systems, it'd be hard to motivate fixes.
So, you'd develop for one of them, not all - and then you're not in a much better place than the situation with Windows - where you can share a lot of your code cross-platform anyway, or write in a JIT'd language etc.
For a developer's perspective being able to write once and have it work everywhere is pretty darn big "pro". What are the practical "cons" that outweigh this?
We have to support Ie7,8,9,10,11 and 11 for metro in and out of compatibility mode across three fucking platforms due to control styling differences. Now we have Spartan and whatever shtcrock will ship as legacy.
We'll lose IE7 when vista is dead. We'll be left with enterprise IE11 well into 2028!
Why? In financial services all our clients are cheap, dumb and incompetent. Unpatched win7 from "managed service providers" is the reality. If yore lucky they're not some hideous terminal services shit crock.
This is why we go "oh joy".
Its also why everyone who works at the places goes home to Apple and Android kit.
Blame companies for demanding an app specific to one version. Blame the developers for writing apps that only work on one version. Blame Microsoft for making breaking changes between versions. But only one of those things is Microsoft's fault. They've been pushing people hard to update their browser since IE7 was released.
Ummm that's confusing. If you're going to kill it, kill it dead.
But the non-awful modern browser, that won't be called IE.
I came here with the exact same concern as the GP comment.
“We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan..."
It just reeks of marketing double-speak that gets engineers excited, only to find out that they're stuck maintaining code for N + 1 browsers now.
Incidentally, Microsoft rebranding exercises infuriate me. Arguably, Spartan is a "new" product, but by that measure any product rewrite should get a completely new, unrelated name rather than a version number. I remember COM + DispInterfaces ==> ActiveX, Outlook Express ==> MSN Messenger, MSN ==> Bing. It's just irritating and confusing to both developers and consumers.
Rather than it be offered by the operating-system division, they should have the product engineered and marketed by the search engine division. The integration to Bing! should be uncompromising and a genuine step change in usability. This does not have to appeal to the 'power users', however, if it has a few usability tricks that make it more useful for most people in most circumstances then they could do fine with it.
With an integrated approach of browser plus services such as search this browser could be great. As a mere browser it has no USP so I will stick with Chrome (on a Chromebook).
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.
If Microsoft wants to "win the browser war", in my opinion the best thing they could do would be to create their own WebKit (or even Chromium) distribution and have it installed in Windows by default.
PS - Yes, I know Google broke away from Apple's WebKit branch. But a lot of browsers are still very WebKit-like.
Spartan will be pre-installed and "good enough" for a lot of people. IT departments will de facto have to support it because it comes on the Windows image. Joe User read a lot things about Chrome spying on him or blocking his favorite ad blocker and might want to try it out.
>If IE was an issue for users
IE as legacy browser tied to active x junk and old school enterprise sites was the problem. Spartan dumps all of that. Oh some $crappy_site_coded_for_ie6 doesnt work in Spartan? Too bad. IE is there for legacy stuff, Spartan is for modern stuff.
If MS doesn't screw it up, Spartan may be a big deal and could cut into Chrome's marketshare. I wouldn't write it off.
In order to consistently have weight with changing CSS, HTML rendering etc you basically need your own browser - and most of the changes we've seen in the last few years have come out of Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple.
Microsoft need a browser and always will.
You hold the keys to the default search engine for that particular browser, to name an example. Even with the Mozilla-Yahoo deal it's still in MS interest to own a browser so they can push Bing and their other cloud services there.
And this is one area MS hasn't clarified yet, how long will they support IE. It's gonna take time for enterprise to switch to a new platform.
But that's why I love tech.. one day Silverlight (as an example) is flying high, the next it's dead.
Note that if other browsers themselves adopt new Windows APIs in competitive response, that actually still benefits Microsoft because ultimately they don't care about the browser for its own sake, they care about increasing Windows API and feature usage across all browsers. But in practice competing browsers tend to be late adopters of new Windows stuff (e.g., even now nothing but IE supports DComp/DManip and Chrome is just very recently getting around to improving its Windows high-DPI and text rendering support), hence Microsoft funds IE.
We can stamp our feet or work with that reality. We have 70% of China on Windows XP with no hope of a modern browser from MS (http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484761/microsoft-windo...). At least Chrome will work on those old systems. At least web devs can use modern features on those systems.
If the browser is the primary carrot to get someone to upgrade your OS, the OS value prop sucks.
Please, Microsoft, switch to an evergreen OS model like Apple has.
(Why didn't Microsoft make it for XP too? They want to squeeze that last sale out of people. They don't realize the greater threat is people leaving their platform entirely.)
Not many people run XP in China anymore. Maybe some netcafes with pirated versions that they don't want to upgrade. Its really been a while since I've seen anyone run XP in Beijing.
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/10/extending-chrome-support-...
Until next month, anyways :)
I don't know that the browser is a primary carrot, but it's part of the deal. If you can get enough of their new software to run on, say, Windows 7 to duplicate major functionality of 10, what's the point in upgrading at all? It doesn't make sense to have (people who will stick with the old OS no matter what) + (people who might upgrade, but don't because they can keep the old one and still get the cool new features of the new one) using older versions of Windows, thus increasing maintenance on old software.
3: Users of every other OS are enticed by features other than the browser. Only Windows ties the OS to the browser.
Are those people capable of installing a new browser after making the informed decision that it's better than IE 8?
> 3: Users of every other OS are enticed by features other than the browser. Only Windows ties the OS to the browser.
Every other OS? Let's look at the major players in desktop computing: Windows and OSX. Windows has IE/Spartan, you can as of now only get them on Windows. OSX has Safari, there was an abortive attempt to develop it for Windows but it didn't take off and is now abandoned. I don't think this is too surprising. Here I am on OSX Mavericks making this post from Safari 7.1.3 because Safari 8 is only available for Yosemite. Given that the browser is the main piece of software that many consumers interact with, I think it's fair to say that the browser is still a significant value proposition, even if it's not the only one.
.NET is great but this isn't really what it's meant for.
Firefox
Chrome
Opera
Internet Explorer
The name "Internet Explorer" was right, but the feeling that web developers have with it, ain't. So that's why they have to change it..
If they use Microsoft Web for a cross platform application, the naming would identify Microsoft and "Web". With Windows Web it's solely targetting the Windows platform (and not crossplatform as their goals are changing)
Take a long-term view of things - anyone born after 1985 will be the dominant demographic in 20 years. These people are more technically literate than the current dominant demo.
So yeah. My mom doesn't know IE from Chrome, but my 12 year old nephew does, as do all his friends. In 20 years, my mom will be 85, my nephew and his generation will be the dominant demo
That was probably Netscape 6 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_6), or Netscape 7 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_%28version_7%29), the two versions of Netscape that AOL managed to squeeze out after acquiring them before giving up on the "Netscape" brand entirely and laying all the developers off.
The thought back then was that there would be a "Mozilla" brand working on the core browser tech as open source code that was strictly for developers, while AOL would take Mozilla tech and use it to periodically release consumer-facing browsers under the brand "Netscape." This turned out not to work in practice, since the main contributions AOL would make in turning Mozilla into Netscape revolved taking a perfectly useful browser and making it less useful. (An example: Mozilla included a pop-up blocker, but AOL disabled it in their "Netscape" builds. Yes.)
AOL/Netscape ought to be a business school case study in how to completely demolish the value of a brand after paying out the nose for it.
I do remember it, and WebTV, being two thorns in a web developer's sides back then.
I know people who refer to IE as "the internet", and it's not very hard to make that association since "internet" is in its name.
So IE6 it is.
It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be
the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet.
Historically, Apple (at least under Jobs) were the ones to declare an old standard dead while dragging us kicking and screaming into the future. Microsoft always proudly stood by and told you that your crappy program from 1992 would still be able to run on each version of Windos that came out, no matter how big and bloated the beast became.
Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come? Could the next version of Windows (Not 10, obviously) finally declare the end of backwards compatibility and force obsolete software into a virtualization ghetto?
1. 70% of the world doesn't care about their browser and will use what’s is put in front of them. There was that classic video where people didn't even know the difference between the internet and a browser a few years back. For this 70% unless someone swaps then to another browser, which thankfully people love doing, they'll use IEX for the rest of their life. These people have been trained to click the blue 'e'. Why take that away from the masses and open the door for them to look for alternatives?
2. For the remaining people that do care about a browser, we're going to know if it’s a great browser or not. We understand IE6 is not IE11. In the same was FF was awesome a few years back, we know it’s fallen back, and would recognise it improving if it (hopefully) does.
3. Microsoft announcing they will create a new & awesome browser, and actually doing so, are not connected. It wouldn't surprise me if MS invest all this marketing money on spinning a product that is just as frustrating as IE, just for a new set of reasons. And now we have brand confusion + an annoying browser with a bad name. People prefer familiar bad, than unfamiliar bad.
4. Microsoft is a bloody big and wealthy company. They can afford developing 2 browsers for a while. Why not launch and release this Spartan browser 'for power users'. They can use it as an experimental ground to push boundaries whilst not risking the stability and working of their core product. As this team proves their metal, they can push components of Spartan into IE, or not if the browser fails to deliver. Spartan can be used to buy new street cred for MS. Mum uses IE but young me uses Spartan. And if spartan succeeds by default it will bring credibility to IE, risking much less if it fails to gain favour. As a marketing guy rather than building the conversation; Spartan vs Chrome I’d much prefer to have IE vs Spartan vs Chrome.
And if you bothered to read this far, you probably like browsers. So you might enjoy a video a buddy and I made while on holiday for some really serious (/s) browser speed testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaT7thTxyq8
3) and 4) Based on my experience with win10, MS are executing extremely well these days. I can't wait for Spartan and the new office.
[1]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2863878/microsofts-reported-s...
Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/26/inside-microsofts...
Recursively codenamed it, sneaky.