[andhof-mt]

Browser war? Sure.

But regardless of the improvements MS makes, they still have years worth of a bad reputation they have built up to get over.

It will take leaps and bounds for them to ever build up the respect that Mozilla and Google have for building web technology.

[billyhoffman]

This. Disbanding the IE team after "winning" the first browser war was a terrible mistake. IE fell behind technically, but they caught up again in recent years. However their reputation among web developers and even end users hasn't really recovered.

As an aside, a great way to anger an IE engineer is to remind them that the entire reason their team exists is because of Mozilla and Firefox. I truly believe that had Firefox not come out, the web browser winter would have continued until the rise of smart phones.

[bwy]

I don't quite follow your reasoning here. It's got a really bad reputation with devs and people "in the know," but for the average user turning on the computer, it's perfectly fine, and that has to count for something.

[mark-r]

That's the part I find interesting - despite being good enough for all the major sites on the internet, they kept bumping up against cases where it didn't work. But I don't understand why they needed a new browser to fix that; the article implies that all it required was a change in focus.

[Mahn]

Exactly, this is the thing people keep forgetting. IE has a market for people who don't change the default browser from their computers, and it's a good thing they are getting a better, modern browser (not that IE11 is bad, mind you).

[EdSharkey]

If you think of the Browser-as-Operating-System, then building a legacy-free IE makes a lot of sense. That kind of OS development is right in Microsoft's wheelhouse and they need to do it to stay competitive if they want to continue to be a client-side application host.

If this Spartan team does a good job, then they'll brain drain the rest of Microsoft the way XBox did. Building a web browser from the ground-up in 2015 would be a pretty sweet project to work on. I'm nerd-salivating.

[thebouv]

For Devs to use their browser, sure.

But if it is pre-installed on my mom's Windows machine, she'll be using it. They still have that as a huge advantage.

So kudos to them for at least trying to correct mistakes legitimately this time.

[heleph]

Their problem is more that it's not installed on Mum's phone or tablet. :)

[thebouv]

That's true. I so wanted to like the Windows Phone. I bought a Lumia 1520 and it was a beautiful piece of tech. And I like the default interface of the home screen (Metro works on a phone, not on desktop imho).

But .. then I tried to use the store to get apps and it was a desert. Or the things I could find, worked poorly.

[wluu]

That's the thing, it might well be on "mum's (next) tablet" (probably not phone).

There's a raft of really cheap (7/8/10 inch) Windows 8.1 tablets that are price competitive with their Android equivalents. At the moment they are running full Windows with an Intel Atom processor. From what I've read, these will all be capable of being upgraded to Windows 10 when release.

Spartan is going to be released for both Windows Phone 10 (or whatever they are calling it) in addition to Windows 10, from what I've read.

[Varcht]

Currently as a user base we jump back and forth mostly on one criteria, resource usage. If IE can compete there, I think users will come.

[scholia]

See roghummal's comment above, granddad ;-)