Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer has been the cornerstone of its software range since the web was small – unfortunately for many years the name has had noses turned up against it in the web development community as it became infamous for not displaying websites in the manner intended and not the same as equivalent other browsers – causing headaches and hacks to get things to work nicely.
Despite many revisions since the dreaded days of IE6, which was generally considered the worst of the bunch, version 11 which is the current version bundled with Windows 8 is still sneered at by many as being the poor man’s Firefox or Google Chrome.
It was announced late last year that Microsoft is taking more of a drastic turn and ditching the Internet Explorer name altogether for its next release. Currently only known by its project codename as ‘Spartan’ – Microsoft promises a rethinking of how the browser ticks, with a lightweight, fast browser with extensions (much as Chrome and Firefox, in honesty).
Can Microsoft catch up the engineering of these two? IE still has the market share of browsers due to it being bundled with all PCs installed with Windows but in terms of performance, it lags behind its rivals.
