It was once used by nearly 1bn people, making it one of the world’s best-known technology brands. But even Microsoft, its maker, has been forced to admit that it is deeply unloved.
Internet Explorer — the software that launched the browser wars of the 1990s and became a symbol of the Seattle company’s former stranglehold on the tech world — is about to be ushered into retirement.
The group confirmed this week that it would not use the IE name for the new browser that it plans to ship with the next version of its Windows operating system, due later this year. The revised software, codenamed Project Spartan, is intended to catapult Microsoft beyond the Web 1.0 world for which IE was designed.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the then-head of the IE business, confessed at an industry conference: “We messed up.”
With Spartan, Microsoft hopes to vault past IE’s weaknesses to produce a browser that is more suited to a digital life lived on multiple devices — part of the strategy of new chief executive Satya Nadella to break the company’s reliance on its old PC monopoly.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency owned by WPP, said the 20-year old brand was long past its sell-by date. “In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he said. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
Microsoft has admitted that it failed to make IE a more loved part of daily life over the years. It even resorted to self-mockery in some of its advertising, referring to it as “The Browser You Loved To Hate”.
“It’s been a product problem for a long time,” said Dan Brewster, a senior interactive designer with Wolff Olins, the marketing agency. “People don’t like it,” he added, but used it only because it came pre-installed on their computers or because they were required to by their employers.
IE’s historic significance was sealed in the late-1990s. Designed to counter the rise of browser pioneer Netscape at the dawn of the internet, it was shipped free with the pervasive Windows operating system — a tactic that later made Microsoft the target of an antitrust investigation.
It overtook Netscape within three years and went on to dominate access to the online world, accounting for an estimated 95 per cent of browser usage soon after the turn of the millennium. But a combination of complacency and the failure to anticipate the shift to mobile sealed IE’s fate.
First the open-source Firefox browser and, more recently, Google’s Chrome ate into IE’s market share, using faster technology and slicker design to win users. Microsoft’s share of browser usage has fallen to around 20 per cent, similar to Firefox, while Chrome has risen to nearly 50 per cent, based on online activity.
Although being pushed into retirement, the IE name will live on, if only for a short time. A new version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to make life easier for companies that have developed software to work with the browser.
"Universities are no longer institutions of inquiry but ‘safe spaces’ where delicate flowers of diversity of race, sex, orientation, ‘gender fluidity’ and everything else except diversity of thought have to be protected from exposure to any unsafe ideas.
As it happens, the biggest ‘safe space’ on the planet is the Muslim world. For a millennium, Islamic scholars have insisted, as firmly as a climate scientist or an American sophomore, that there’s nothing to debate. And what happened? As the United Nations Human Development Programme’s famous 2002 report blandly noted, more books are translated in Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. Free speech and a dynamic, innovative society are intimately connected: a culture that can’t bear a dissenting word on race or religion or gender fluidity or carbon offsets is a society that will cease to innovate, and then stagnate, and then decline, very fast.
As American universities, British playwrights and Australian judges once understood, the ‘safe space’ is where cultures go to die."
I remember Tim Russ ("Tuvok") describing his encounter with Avery Brooks ("Sisko"); Tim said Avery was "physically intimidating"; Tim is no skinny-fairy, either - but one can easily see that, besides cultural hangups, a physically imposing body plus a certain assertive attitude generates the same reaction around you.
Honest question: is it any good? I deal with A LOT of pdf files on a daily basis (theoretical physics) and I've always wanted a big-screen, e-ink reader (plus free wireless access to Wikipedia, if I remember correctly).
If you click on the small triangle/"arrow" in the bottom-right corner (when the "New Message" window is open) you are given the possibility to "temporarily switch back to the old Compose".
> My OS X Lion System finally (finally!) stabilized
> around 10.7.5, stopped kernel panicking, beach balling,
> and just outright hanging.
May I ask what you've been doing? Old Unix/NT guy here (Unix from 1988, NT from 1994), using OS X since 2008. Never had such a problem with my 17" MB Pro (early 2008)
It was once used by nearly 1bn people, making it one of the world’s best-known technology brands. But even Microsoft, its maker, has been forced to admit that it is deeply unloved.
Internet Explorer — the software that launched the browser wars of the 1990s and became a symbol of the Seattle company’s former stranglehold on the tech world — is about to be ushered into retirement.
The group confirmed this week that it would not use the IE name for the new browser that it plans to ship with the next version of its Windows operating system, due later this year. The revised software, codenamed Project Spartan, is intended to catapult Microsoft beyond the Web 1.0 world for which IE was designed.
Nearly a decade ago, Dean Hachamovitch, the then-head of the IE business, confessed at an industry conference: “We messed up.”
With Spartan, Microsoft hopes to vault past IE’s weaknesses to produce a browser that is more suited to a digital life lived on multiple devices — part of the strategy of new chief executive Satya Nadella to break the company’s reliance on its old PC monopoly.
Tom Bedecarre, chairman of Akqa, a digital advertising agency owned by WPP, said the 20-year old brand was long past its sell-by date. “In the war of the future, which is mobile, they’re losing,” he said. “Nobody’s going to download Internet Explorer as their mobile browser.”
Microsoft has admitted that it failed to make IE a more loved part of daily life over the years. It even resorted to self-mockery in some of its advertising, referring to it as “The Browser You Loved To Hate”.
“It’s been a product problem for a long time,” said Dan Brewster, a senior interactive designer with Wolff Olins, the marketing agency. “People don’t like it,” he added, but used it only because it came pre-installed on their computers or because they were required to by their employers.
IE’s historic significance was sealed in the late-1990s. Designed to counter the rise of browser pioneer Netscape at the dawn of the internet, it was shipped free with the pervasive Windows operating system — a tactic that later made Microsoft the target of an antitrust investigation.
It overtook Netscape within three years and went on to dominate access to the online world, accounting for an estimated 95 per cent of browser usage soon after the turn of the millennium. But a combination of complacency and the failure to anticipate the shift to mobile sealed IE’s fate.
First the open-source Firefox browser and, more recently, Google’s Chrome ate into IE’s market share, using faster technology and slicker design to win users. Microsoft’s share of browser usage has fallen to around 20 per cent, similar to Firefox, while Chrome has risen to nearly 50 per cent, based on online activity.
Although being pushed into retirement, the IE name will live on, if only for a short time. A new version of IE will be included in the next Windows launch as well as the Spartan browser, to make life easier for companies that have developed software to work with the browser.