Microsoft killing off Internet Explorer, replacing it with “Spartan.”
Fuck Internet Explorer! Yeah! I ain’t used that since 1994, and that was just so I could download Netscape. And I been using that browser since! But man, maybe I’ll get back into the Microsoft browser game. Crazier things have happened. I thought I had sworn off snorting frozen Mountain Dew shards and…here we are. Gutted nostrils and crying loved ones. Whatever.
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.
Seriously, call it Spartan. Skin it with a default Master Chief theme. Have the links be Mountain Dew Green (I’d love it). You’ve already got Cortana. Let’s let all of Microsoft go Full Halo