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Microsoft's big mistake with Edge

Internet Explorer was the first web browser developed by Microsoft, starting in 1995, for their Windows 95 operating system. Over its first decade or so of existence, it became extremely infamous for being really low-quality, being quite loose with the HTML and HTTP standards of the time, and breaking tons of things. Its infamy became worsened by the fact that due to it being bundled with all versions of Windows, and the default browser in them, millions and millions of people used it as their default and only browser. Especially in these early years of the WWW and HTML, the incompatibilities and custom behavior that Internet Explorer had compared to other more compliant browsers caused endless headaches for web servers and web page creators and administrators. (Some things were so bad that a misconfigured web server would in some cases still show correctly in Internet Explorer because it played so fast and loose with HTTP and HTML, while browsers that were more compliant would show the content erroneously, making many people think that all those other browsers were the buggy and broken ones.)

As the years and decades passed, and as new HTML standards appeared and were widely adopted by other browsers, Internet Explorer started lagging more and more behind in terms of this adoption. Its ubiquity still some time in the first decade of the 2000's was becoming more and more of a headache for web developers who would have wanted to start using newer HTML standards. At some point Microsoft literally stopped developing Internet Explorer for like a decade.

Finally in the second decade of the 2000's the vast majority of people finally started moving away from the now hopelessly antiquated Internet Explorer to more modern web browsers, like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Internet Explorer will forever live in that infamy.

In 2016 Microsoft released a new web browser for Windows 10: Microsoft Edge.

I have noticed that Microsoft made one huge mistake with it, though. A mistake that they have still not corrected, to this day. What is this mistake? The logo of the browser. Just compare the logos of the latest version of Internet Explorer to that of Microsoft Edge:


They are extraordinarily similar. And that's a problem. The Edge logo looks just like the Internet Explorer logo. It gives the strong impression that this is just a new version of Internet Explorer.

The thing is, Microsoft Edge is a completely new program made from scratch. It has absolutely nothing to do with Internet Explorer. It's my understanding that its development team is completely separate, and uses its own original codebase that has nothing to do with the old Internet Explorer code. Microsoft Edge has been built from the ground up to be a modern web browser that has very good support for the latest standards. (In fact, according to tests, it even supports some things from the HTML5 standard that eg. Firefox does not. Its overall support is relatively good.)

The problem is that many people don't know this, and think that it's just a new version of Internet Explorer, and thus are dismissing it outright.

Microsoft is fully to blame for this confusion. They have not made it clear enough that this is actually a completely new browser that's not related in any way, shape or form to Internet Explorer. Their biggest mistake is, of course, that logo. They should have gone with something completely different, something that does not resemble the Internet Explorer logo at all.

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