Microsoft Is Rumored To Be Building A New Browser That Is Not Internet Explorer

Remember when Chrome was fast? Microsoft might, if ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley’s recent report that the software company is building a lightweight browser, codenamed “Spartan,” bears out.

According to Foley, Spartan is “new” and “isn’t [Internet Explorer].” Her post notes that it could be set free inside of the Windows 10 release schedule. In short, Microsoft may be building a speedy, simpler browser that maintains use of Internet Explorer’s rendering engine.

Internet Explorer has had a ribald history, growing from zero market share, to market-dominating heights, to slow decline in the face of Firefox, to faster decline in the face of Chrome, to a recent re-acceleration under a new, standards-based approach. Its life has been bitcoin’s late 2013 to date, but stretched out over several decades.

Whether the company’s recent moves have been enough to salvage Internet Explorer’s tarnished brand, however, is open to interpretation. Microsoft certainly wants its browser to gain market share, especially on the new Windows 10 platform that it hopes to deploy from smartphones all the way to televisions.

If Microsoft wants Windows 10 to function across all platforms and wants developers to be able to develop once and deploy everywhere, then creating a new browsing experience that is built to handle all sorts of inputs — without the baggage of a traditional desktop browsing experience — would be a decent idea.

Microsoft did not return a request for comment by the time of publication.

The second half of January is going to be a bit Microsoft-heavy. The company, expected to release the consumer-facing preview of Windows 10 in that window, is under some pressure here. If it fails to impress, it will directly undercut the momentum that it has built for its new operating system. A new browsing tool could help boost human interest in its new platform.

Perhaps it is better to ask ourselves what would happen to Microsoft’s browsing market share long term, if it fails to reimagine Internet Explorer.

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog