We May Finally See the End of Internet Explorer Next Year

Microsoft may be gearing up to introduce a new browser that's not Internet Explorer in 2015.

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Complex Original

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It's a makeover for Microsoft: its longtime browser, Internet Explorer, may be on the outs.

Internet Explorer was the most widely used web browser in the early 2000s, enjoying an incredible 95 percent market share at its peak. That's until competition came along. Let's face it, you likely dropped IE a long time ago, opting to use more stylish browsers such as Chrome or Firefox—and no one would blame you. IE has held a bad reputation over the last decade that it hasn't been able to shake, and both developers and users hate dealing with it. To its credit, Microsoft has worked on improving IE, but so far nothing has been able to repair the damage. Microsoft even made a commercial that tried to have some fun with the many complaints about IE.

So, what now? The next best move might be starting over from scratch, and it looks like that's what the company is prepared to do. Microsoft Student Partner lead Thomas Nigro tweeted that Microsoft is readying to launch a new browser codenamed "Spartan" that will come packed within Windows 10, the next edition of its operating system, next year: 

According to ZDNet, Spartan will support browser extensions and look like Chrome and Firefox. It won't be entirely different than IE underneath the hood since it will still run on Microsoft's Chakra JavaScript engine and Trident rendering engine, but Spartan will feel more "lightweight" compared to past versions of IE. Windows 10 may still come with a new version of IE for backwards compatibility purposes. Yet Spartan (or whatever Microsoft ends up calling it) will be the default browser, and not IE.

Microsoft will showcase Windows 10—and possibly Spartan—at a January 21 event, and the operating system won't likely be available until fall 2015. 

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