Don’t. Need. Another. Goddamned. Browser.
If it’s a more reliable, lower-memory replacement for IE, that’s great! At $DAYJOB, most of the internal websites now work with Firefox and Chrome, having replaced earlier IE6-only versions, but the default browser is still IE8, and it’ll probably get replaced with IE11, rather than genuine Any Browser pages. (Mostly this is customized stuff from the HR department, or occasionally training videos that insist on using antique browsers.)
Would you prefer You can have any browser you want, as long as it’s Mosaic. ?
Am I the only one who can never quite suppress a smirk at Microsoft’s apparently unironic “Let’s brand assorted banal software and services from a gigantic software and IT services company with terms drawn from a video game where you are a totally badass cybernetic space marine who, like, frags all the aliens because the hot AI chick in his helmet tells him to!!!” trend?
Spartan actually does make some amount of sense if it really is meant to be a lightweight browser…
On the other hand, there’s “lightweight” and there’s “Microsoft-lightweight”. So it still can be expected to take a rather significant amount of resources.
They called their version of Siri “Cortana” without actually having a little holographic blue lady answering your questions like some brilliant personal AI (that no one would mind if it gave stupid results because it’s amazing), now their new browser is leaning on borrowed interest from the Halo series but this will not make browsers cool and dynamic. It will slap an internet explorer logo on Masterchief’s chestplate.
The war has been over for a few years now; IE hasn’t felt like a weapon of embrace-extend-extinguish since version 9 or so. The lingering problem is that Internet Explorer is a war criminal, and for the world to have true closure it must confess its crimes and be destroyed.
No one cares, Microsoft, if you’ve managed to produce an adequate alternative to Firefox and Chrome. What do you want, a medal? What people care about is the unspeakable crawling by-blows of your previous crimes against nature, which even today cling to a hideous parody of life in sunken intranet crypts outside time. Make whatever new browser you want, just for the sake of humanity put a bullet in IE and let the nightmare finally be over.
Particularly if much of the work is done by a helot service in the background.
That said, it’s not as though Microsoft is picking illogical names from Halo for their products, it’s just that watching them pick names from Halo for their non-entertainment products seems really weird.
Microsoft should just not make a browser. I think there is a cultural problem that’s way too baked in for them to make a competitive product that people would actually want to use.
I’m going to guess now that “Spartan” will include sound effects.
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