Internet Explorer for Android/iOS isn’t on Microsoft’s agenda… for now!

Microsoft isn’t planning to release Internet Explorer for Android or iOS devices – at least for now – as the team is busy the best browser for Windows Phone, the Internet Explorer development team said during an Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Thursday.

When asked: “Will internet explorer be ported on Android or iOS?” Charles Morris of the Internet Explorer dev team replied: “Right now, we’re focused on building a great mobile browser for Windows Phone and have made some great progress lately. So, no current plans for Android/iOS.”

“We are committed to improving our own engine. We love the fact that the web was built on multiple competing (yet interoperable) platforms and believe that this is how it is going to move forward into the future!” he added.

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Another question on similar lines got a similar reply. When asked: “Any chance that IE will become platform agnostic?” Jacob Rossi of the IE dev team replied: “We don’t have plans for that at this time.”

Jacob added that one thing that is important for IE team is to provide Mac developers with the ability to test sites easily in IE. For this, Jacob added, they have launched modern.ie and are providing free virtual machines and other tools.

One question that was being asked repeatedly was whether the IE team and other folks at Microsoft thought about renaming Internet Explorer to something else to wash off the tarnished reputation. To this Jonathan from the development team replied that there have been intense deliberations and “Who knows what the future holds :)”

Some even asked as to when will Microsoft start rolling out feature updates rather than just bug fixes every month to which Jacob replied, “Starting with IE11, we’ve been shipping more than just security & reliability features via the existing monthly “Patch/Update Tuesdays”. Last week we shipped new F12 Developer Tools, WebGL Instancing Extension, and the groundwork to support WebDriver. We’ll continue to use this approach.”

Read More: Microsoft opens up Internet Explorer developer channel for early access to next-gen features

One developer issue that has been at the forefront is the one to do with non-conformance of IE with existing web standards which has forced many developers to jump ship and adopt rival browsers. “As a developer, the “leverage the features” mindset is why I dropped IE as a serious player a long time ago. We don’t want to “leverage your features” we want you to conform to existing web standards”, said one redditor.

To this Jonathan replied that the IE team has been actively working on conformance aspect of IE and working with “Google, Apple, and Mozilla (among others) on developing new standards for driving the web forward”.

“As an example, just about a month ago we found ourselves having a discussion about response media – after a few minutes we decided to reach out to Google for some joint-discussion”, he added.

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There were those who raised the question of IE playing a catch-up game rather than innovating to which Adrian Bateman replied that browsers implement features in a different order. Giving example of IE 10 Adrian said that IE 10 brought with it support for touch features while IE 11 brought with it support for streaming videos without plugins among other things.

Microsoft announced a few days ago that Internet Explorer will start blocking dated plugins starting September 9 and starting January 2016, it will drop support older Internet Explorer versions including IE 8. Users will have to migrate to a newer platform to continue receiving security updates and bug fixes.

For those who are interested in knowing more about the IE roadmap can navigate to status.modern.ie.

Ravi