Because so many people are terribly unhappy with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, Microsoft is hard at work on an Internet Explorer reboot under a different name. Maybe it’ll get a new, gritty origin story about avenging the original IE’s death!
For a piece of pack-in software on the still-ubiquitous Windows platform, Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market is fairly low and losing ground. So, Microsoft is building an all-new, lightweight browser with plugin support, codenamed Spartan, for its Windows 10 release. What!? This is madness!
According to ZDNet, sources within Windows 10 development have indicated that Spartan won’t completely replace Internet Explorer when the next Windows debuts. Instead, IE 11, the current version, will be part of Windows 10 for backwards compatibility purposes alongside Spartan, which will be the new browser used across Windows desktop and mobile devices.
But IE’s days are surely numbered, in case you didn’t already think they were when Firefox—and later, Chrome—hit the scene. We don’t know what the Spartan browser will be called when it eventually comes to market, but ZDNet’s sources say it won’t be IE 12. That makes a lot of sense, considering that you wouldn’t want two browsers called the same thing confusing everyone, the code is probably fundamentally different, and everyone hates Internet Explorer.
Now the only question that remains is, “Why does Microsoft feel the need to make their own browser anymore at all?” Maybe they’re hoping it’ll be so good that people will buy Windows machines just to run it? I guess it would be nice if there were some reason to buy a Windows machine.
(via UPROXX)
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