Microsoft has hinted that Internet Explorer brand was going to be scrapped. Now it’s official.
Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s head of marketing, made the announcement Monday at the Microsoft Convergence conference.
Microsoft is placing its bets on its new and speedier flagship browser codenamed Project Spartan.
Project Spartan will not be associated with the Internet Explorer brand, Capossela said. Microsoft is working on a new name and a new brand for Project Spartan, he said.
“We’re now researching what the new brand or the new name for our browser should be in Windows 10,” Capossela said, according to The Verge. “We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing.”
Not that Internet Explorer branding will vanish entirely. It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet.
“Microsoft is making compelling software right now, software as good as Google and Apple. But they still have a perception of lagging and they are trying to break that perception and that includes retiring brands,” said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.
It’s the end of an era for Internet Explorer which launched nearly two decades ago.
Over the years, the browser became the bane of some office workers’ daily lives. A series of security flaws also damaged the brand.
Microsoft has struggled to revive the Internet Explorer brand as competition heated up from Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers.
Dean Hachamovitch, the manager of the Internet Explorer team, left the company in December.
“At one point Internet Explorer commanded north of 80% share of the browser market, but with the explosion in mobility, that market share has dwindled to 30%,” said S&P Capital analyst Angelo Zino. “The platform isn’t cutting it on mobile devices and that’s where the focus is today.”
Project Spartan will run on phones, tablets and personal computers but was expressly made for the mobile experience, Microsoft says. It will also have the personal voice assistant Cortana built into it.
“Project Spartan is Microsoft’s next generation browser, built just for Windows 10,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement. “We will continue to make Internet Explorer available with Windows 10 for enterprises and other customers who require legacy browser support.”
Can Microsoft regain ground it has lost? It will have to deliver a better search experience, greater speed and new bells and whistles for mobile devices such as voice commands, basically borrowing a page from Google’s Chrome, analysts say.
Even then, “it’s really going to be difficult for them,” Zino said.
But he added: “This was definitely a must for them.”
source: usatoday
