Microsoft drops Internet Explorer brand

Ziggy | 18 Mar, 2015 08:52PM | Leave a comment
Internet Explorer, the Microsoft browser that is almost 20 years old, is to be killed off and replaced by a new operating system.

Microsoft has confirmed that its new browser, code-named Project Spartan, that is due to be unveiled later this year, will not use the familiar Internet Explorer name.

How Microsoft 10 can divide up the screen

"We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," the company's marketing chief Chris Capossela told a conference.

Internet Explorer once dominated the market and had more than one billion users but it could not compete when Firefox and Google’s Chrome launched with faster technology and slicker design.

Microsoft is thought to be dropping the brand in a bid to shed “negative perceptions" gathered since its 1995 launch.

The software is known to be slow and has had various security problems.

The company has often talked about changing the browsers’ name to rejuvenate its reputation.

Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, then-head of the Internet Explorer business, is said to have told an industry conference: “We messed up.”

Windows 10 will feature a stripped down, faster browser more suited to multiple devices.

Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency, said the Internet Explorer brand was past its sell-by date.

“In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he told the Financial Times. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”

Jason Liggi, a developer at Ascot-based digital agency Rawnet, said: "Microsoft’s change in direction is a smart, albeit bold, and a symbolic gesture. Internet Explorer has developed a fairly bad reputation over the years, by and large because of IE6-7, but also because of its implementation of web standards.

“This change in name is going to bring with it a raft of psychological improvements for users. Internet Explorer, and referring to it as ‘IE’, generally elicits groans across the board, even with people outside of tech communities. It's just got negative connotations nowadays, and it will be interesting to see the changes the new name will bring for the brand.”

Despite the rebrand, a version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to aid companies that have developed software to work with the browser.

-telegraph.co.uk