> "Not that Internet Explorer branding will vanish entirely. It will still exist in some versions of Windows 10, but Project Spartan will be the main way Windows 10 users roam the Internet."
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.
The same way users were going to flock to Netscape instead of IE?
Spartan will be pre-installed and "good enough" for a lot of people. IT departments will de facto have to support it because it comes on the Windows image. Joe User read a lot things about Chrome spying on him or blocking his favorite ad blocker and might want to try it out.
>If IE was an issue for users
IE as legacy browser tied to active x junk and old school enterprise sites was the problem. Spartan dumps all of that. Oh some $crappy_site_coded_for_ie6 doesnt work in Spartan? Too bad. IE is there for legacy stuff, Spartan is for modern stuff.
If MS doesn't screw it up, Spartan may be a big deal and could cut into Chrome's marketshare. I wouldn't write it off.
I think part of Spartan's success will live and die on how well it supports addons/extensions. I imagine it won't be backwards compatible with IE's old COM extension nonsense, so it will be interesting to see what they do there...
The rumour at the moment is that they're going to use an extremely Chrome like extension system, either native support for Chrome extensions or an extremely minimal conversion process required.
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.
If Microsoft wants to "win the browser war", in my opinion the best thing they could do would be to create their own WebKit (or even Chromium) distribution and have it installed in Windows by default.
That may work, but it would be bad for the market overall. The more browser engines we have the better, least of all we wind up in another IE6-like situation where one browser/engine rules the world and dictates web-features.
PS - Yes, I know Google broke away from Apple's WebKit branch. But a lot of browsers are still very WebKit-like.
And that's also a pretty big reason why Microsoft may not want to be on WebKit. Google forked WebKit because it and Apple couldn't agree on what direction to take things. Why would Microsoft be able to work with either of Apple or Google than they could work together on WebKit? So it's very likely that it wouldn't be a WebKit-based browser, but a browser based on Microsoft's WebKit fork or Microsoft's Blink fork.
If IE was an issue for users, pretty sure that means they'll continue to use Firefox or Chrome, not Spartan.