If you’ve read the news over the last day, you’d been under the impression that Microsoft has finally slayed its unloved browser Internet Explorer.

If you believe that, you’d be mistaken. Internet Explorer isn’t going anywhere, at least for a good few more years to come.

At the Microsoft Convergence conference in Atlanta Monday, Microsoft’s Marketing Chief Chris Capossela did officially reveal that Windows 10 would be shipped with a new browser, codenamed Project Spartan, and this new browser will be the default browser for Windows users wanting to access the internet.

But he didn’t say Microsoft was killing Internet Explorer either, adding that the browser would remain on at least some versions of Windows, particularly for enterprise users who need backwards compatibility.

Dumping the IE brand

Capossela explained that the thinking behind introducing a new name for the new browser had much to do with perceptions about the Internet Explorer brand, a brand that will forever be remembered for being a non-standards-compliant abomination, despite Microsoft’s improvements to it over recent years; Spartan, despite being written from the ground up, would normally just have been a new version of Internet Explorer.

Surprisingly, though, despite the launch on Windows 10 being only months away, the final shipping name for Spartan hasn’t been revealed, except that it will likely be called “Microsoft something” due to its current market testing.

Lurking nightmare

There’s no surprise that Microsoft isn’t lining up the nails for Internet Explorer’s coffin quite yet, although it’s a lurking nightmare of its own making: Internet Explorer 6 code on corporate LANs.

It may have been released in 2001 and replaced by IE7 in 2006, but it set the standard for backwards, non-compliant coding that was the bane of anyone who designed websites for a living for many, many years to come.

To put it simply: It didn’t render CSS properly. If you were designing a website you’d have to often offer two stylesheets, one for every other browser and one for Internet Explorer. And given enterprises were nearly universally Windows shops running Internet Explorer, internal sites and services were mostly coded to run in Internet Explorer only.

The open Internet has moved on from those days; rarely do you see messages such as, “This website only works with Internet Explorer” in 2015, but the same isn’t true in enterprise setups, particularly when it comes to internal corporate LAN pages. In a year that Windows XP still has a 19.5% market share, there are many legacy internal pages and solutions that while the coding may be dated, still not only work for those using them, but would have presented often a serious outlay of time and money building them.

As long as these pages exist, Microsoft has no choice but to continue to offer Internet Explorer.