UPDATED 22:15 EDT / DECEMBER 29 2014

NEWS

Kill it with fire: Microsoft said to be dumping IE for new browser

ieIs Microsoft finally dumping its long maligned and unloved Internet Explorer (IE) browser? A report today suggests that Microsoft is planning on doing just that.

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet claims sources at Microsoft are saying that the tech giant is building a new lightweight browser, codenamed Spartan, that will abandon the legacy supporting IE and deliver something closers to Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers.

Spartan will use Microsoft’s Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine, but a new version of Trident than currently used in IE.

It’s suggested that the desktop version of Windows 10 will ship with both Spartan and IE, with IE there for backwards compatibility. The new browser will also be available on mobile, although there is no word whether Microsoft will provide a version for non-Windows platforms.

The name Spartan is said to be the project’s working name only, and is unlikely to be the final name of the browser if and when it’s released.

Microsoft has a press event scheduled for January 21st that has been promoted as “the next chapter of Windows 10” that will reveal “more details on the Windows 10 consumer experience,” and would seem like the perfect time to reveal a new browser.

Once the world’s most popular browser following the anti-competitive browser wars of the late 1990s, Internet Explorer holds slightly less than 20 percent of the market, with Google’s Chrome inching towards a 50 percent share as of November 2014. To Microsoft’s credit, it isn’t the non-standards compliant abomination it once was, but the legacy of the brand remains in a market that has never had more competition.


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