Internet Explorer has gained a bad reputation since its launch in 1995, and has been ridiculed for being slow and unreliable. After 20 years, Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s marketing chief, announced that Microsoft has finally decided to pull the plug on Internet Explorer. Windows 10 will feature a faster version of Internet Explorer, called Project Spartan. Although IE will still exist in some ways, mainly for business capability, Project Spartan will be the primary way for Windows 10 to retrieve the web.
Microsoft is hoping that by dropping IE, it will shed its bad reputation for being buggy and slow. The company has also talked about changing the name to separate the new browser from the current one, in an effort to move towards other popular browsers like Firefox.
Project Spartan has three main features:
- Collaboration function where multiple users can use a stylus pen or fingers to markup any webpage
- Improvements to existing reading feature: Spartan can save web pages and PDFs to a reading list
- Cortana will provide contextual information, as needed.
On March 16, Chris Capossela told a conference: “We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10. We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We had to name the thing.”
It is not surprising that Microsoft is testing out multiple names through marketing research to see which ones are more popular. It turns out that using the Microsoft brand over the Internet Explorer brand is more powerful and more attractive to users. Microsoft has yet to reveal any plans on when it will roll out the name of Internet Explorer’s successor.
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