Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Kills Off Mac IE, Blames Safari
aliebrah writes "CNet reports that
Microsoft will not release any more major upgrades for Internet Explorer on MacOS. They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision, and say that Safari is a better browser for Macintosh systems. Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system."
Yeah, that must be rough. Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC.
They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision
The best part is, Safari isn't done yet.
Vonal Declosion
Now if they'd only do the same for the Windows version of IE...
It was bound to happen. IE hasn't been updated for ages, and it's embarassingly out of kilter with standards, even in comparison to Internet Explorer for the PC.
I suppose they want everyone to get MSN for Mac OS X if they want the Microsoft "experience."
Woohoo! First post!
iqu
Did they ever bother to port Outlook to OS X? I think it's already dead. Regarding IE, I'm not incredibly surprised. How long has it been since a major update? Seems like at least 2 years to me.
that Office will certainly be last. That's still a good source of revenue.
.-.--
...and Microsoft bails out.
Insert your own anti-Microsoft statement here, this is really too easy :-)
So when do they kill off Windows and blame it on Linux?
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
There's no way the cult of Apple will ever disappear completely. The Apple crowd are the ones who produce most of the attractive media anyway. Maybe one day I'll stop seeing sites that require IE because of this decision.
Is Safari a w3c compliant browser?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
So finally Safari will get a boost since it's inferior competition goes down the toilet.
:)
IE is famous for being more a we-kill-open-standards vehicle than a browser at all. Lacking such simple features like killing popups IE is wayyy after his competition like Safari or especially Mozilla.
Now you may flame me like you're getting paid for it
.. anything that doesn't make them money. Remember, they're ruthless business people, not ruthless idiots.
(even though it can be hard to tell the difference)
By dropping support for earlier versions of Windows and Macs, IE will not forever be hailed as a "standard." People are still using Windows 98, 5 years after its release. Microsoft is betting its IE market share on its DRM.
In Open Source Heaven :)
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
...yeah, that is a real problem with open source.
Wait... when MS doesn't have unfair control over a market, the better product wins out?
Too bad the goverment isn't going far enough to make them allow fair competition in the Windows market place.
I don't want MS to be taken apart. Just that other companies need to have equal access to the underlying OS and protocols so that they can make products that compete.
I think they are confusing Windows and Mac OS X. The underlying operating system, Darwin, is open source. Or are they referring to the window manager? Why would they need access to the Window manager source???
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Let the slashdot bashing of MS begin yet again. This move makes complete and total sense. Any bashing of this move would just be childish. It makes total sense from a marketing, technology, and overall business point of view. I don't see the inside-info-on-the-OS claim as whining. It is just fact. MS is simply stating it as a valid reason to leave that market (OK, technically, it's not a market because it's a free product).
Should the headline of the story be "MS Makes Smart Move: Leaves Low Margin Market to Focus on Windows Platform". I guess I just can't wait to see how the slashdot crowd turns this into some sort of conspiracy or sign of weakness for MS.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Speaking with Bugs Bunny voice:
"Of course you realize this means... WAR!!!"
(Steve J. hangs up and speed dials Apple Legal Dept. and DOJ...)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Five years down the road, when IPv6 is implemented, will most likely need more up to date browsers than IE6. Since there are still a whole lot of people using Win98, 5 years after its release, they will need to upgrade. By that time, Mozilla and Safari should overtake IE6 by leaps and bounds. -- Free Porn.
My first Macintosh was purchased July 2002. Since then, I've not seen one update for IE on the Mac.
Safari came out later which gave MS Plenty of time to improve their browser. But they didn't.
I won't miss it, because I never used it. I used IE about long enough to pick up Mozilla.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
to quote the article
"Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete."
I believe that in truth they mean they don't have access to the Macintosh customers that they need to compete. MS is so used to having people get Ie on their computer, (and on their own OS whenever they want to upgrade their OS they go to windows update and get it pretty much automatically) that when another browser is geared to come with the OS they don't see any advantages to their browser (its only advantage currently being that it comes with the OS) so they decide to discontinue it. That's my take anyway.
The other thing that kills me is that the article mentions sites that require Internet Explorer compatability... Since when did Mac IE have the same rendering engine as windows IE? From what I recall if the page doesn't work in mozilla, it prolly won't work in Mac IE either. Oh well, I say no loss here, I'll take safari over IE any day.
Microsoft is no longer producing Outlook for Mac. They will rely on Entourage for Exchange support. Which is just grand since Entourage uses WebDav and WebDav does not support SSL (we run SSL to our front ends).
-a
isn't the "underlying OS" open source? Even the parts that aren't open source are pretty well documented.
-- Charles A. Plater
This move by Microsoft could be the beginning of standards acceptance by web developers. Too many sites require Internet Explorer to work. Maybe web developers will wake up and start supporting standards, instead.
Alternately, this could spell big trouble for Apple. How will my Mom feel when she can't check her mutual funds using her Macintosh because the browser isn't compatible?
Is this an example of a development community unwittingly aiding and abetting Microsoft's abuse of monopoly power?
IE was the biggest piece of junk I have ever used. I haven't been able to use it for 6 months, and generally when something like that happens, I try and fix it. But then I realized IE just plain sucks, so I put it away and haven't touched it since. If they had put some time and effort into it, it may have been better. But they haven't even bothered updating it.
;)
;)
On the topic of MSN, the current version is laggy. With multiple users, its' performance was stagnant, barely usable. Although it was fixed up a bit, it still needs a lot of work. There will always be another outlet, like Mac Messenger.
And if not, go open source.
Oh well, I still have Safari and Camino. The only gripe I have with Safari is that BBEdit won't recognize it.
-Boo
'Give me one more medicated peaceful moment'
The article states that an issue for Mac owners:
Microsoft's decision creates a conundrum for Mac users seeking maximum compatibility. Many Web sites are designed to work best or, in some cases, only with Internet Explorer.
However, I work at a Big 10 university where we've upgraded our Macs to OS X and I checked this morning and my simple homepage with some basic CSS tags won't even work correctly in IE. I think this is a good thing, and Safari will help out Mac users much more as far standards compliance than Microsoft ever would...
Something clever...
because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system
*Right*. Last I looked, the underlying OS was open source.
As a Mac user, I've been seen it coming.
The latest version is Internet Explorer 5 and no news ever about IE 6 or even that it is been ported.
It has been having great stability problems on my machines after installing java-plugin and latest MacOSX patch and I've been looking for patch or something for months now, and nothing. The Mac page is even harder to find these days.
Jimmy Grewal, the lead developer for Mac IE, is leaving Microsoft. He's an interesting guy, and a real Mac fan. Even his web site is running on an OS X server.
His blog is pretty interesting, if you're into such things.
http://www.jimmygrewal.com/
That way, Microsoft will be forced to kill Windows entirely!
Arf!
Wadda matter? Competition a problem? Good riddance, that's what I say.
would Microsoft throw in the towel?
Wow, it's one of the first times MS recognize they make crappy software..
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
The death of IE, to be honest, shouldn't be much of an issue. Apple would have killed it in Panther anyway, surely...
:s
The more concerning thing is Office. Office v.X is excellent and all, but what happens when the new PC version comes out and Microsoft decide that they're bored of updating Office for the Mac - will they just kill that too? One of the key points of the Apple sales strategy is that Macs have Office - without it, things will become more challenging, I'd have thought.
One could point out that anything different in file formats will break compatibility with older versions of Office on the PC too, but so what? It's all part of the Microsoft upgrade strategy anyway. PC users will always have the choice (albeit expensive) to upgrade. What if Mac users don't?
Zealots will, of course, talk about OpenOffice and the Aqua port, which Apple could of course assist in the development of, but it's got a fair way to go before near-perfect, nearly-all-the-time compatibility is achieved.
Will be interesting to see how this all plays out...
iqu
why continue on a product that doesnt bring any cash? The only reason they had a version for mac earlier could have been to support an argument that "they are not killing off the competition" and actually supporting apple by releasing free IE browsers.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
I imagine the number of bugs found in Macs just had a steep drop!
Now all we need is Safari on Windows, and we'll see if Microsoft can put up a decent fight and innovate in the browser domain again.
Anyway, Mozilla played as much part in its demise. I've used Moz since it's been available for OS X and aside from being slightly sluggish in early versions, it has always been a better, more stable, more compatible browser.
MacIE was the best browser Microsoft ever made: it was nearly 100% CSS1-compatible, and shared none of the WinIE's vulnerabilities.
Not to mention it had far better HTML (standard) support than WinIE, better PNG handling, a good DOM level 1 implementation, and support for ECMA 262, not "Javascript" or "JScript".
Tantek Ãelik and team did a wonderful job, and it's a real bad decision by the Seattle Moloch to axe their one product you cannot complain about in all fairness.
Microsoft should have based WinIE 6 on MacIE5.
I hope the people that worked on MacIE are the ones that will build the next-gen IE, and not those incompetent hacks who made the Windows versions.
You should always read slashdot articles cynically...
0 6&mode=thread&tid=113&tid=126&tid= 95
This is the most recent example of this. Microsoft, in a previous slashdot story two weeks ago, announced IE 6 SP1 or whatever will be their last update ANYWAYS even for WINDOWS.
Conclusion?
1) MS has no plans to develop IE further anyways for any platform, AND
2) MS therefore couldn't care less about Apple
Of course, Apple will say MS made that announcement because they were gonna be faced with stiff competition, or that MS will still develop the browser in secret (for all platforms), but let's face it. MS covered their ass already.
Just click on TOPICS and then INTERNET EXPLORER. It's the top article!!! Here's the link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/31/16502
Cover your eyes and click this link!
The only reason Microsoft did this was because development of IE was costing money. It was technology they were giving away for free. They don't do this to Windows and blaming it on Linux because they sell Windows and make a huge load of money on it. They have to fight that fight, but with IE for Mac, it's just not worth that fight for the small Mac browser share and the costing of millions of dollars in development. This is only business sense, and it makes perfect sense.
Damn, I submitted much the same yesterday, but probably a bit too late. Next time. Thereâ(TM)s a complementary piece at MacCentral. Also, thereâ(TM)s a bit of discussion at the MacNN board, most of which centers around Safari being able to seamlessly spoof IE 5 and future versions in using bank sites, online purchase forms, etc that are putatively restricted to IE. In any case, given that IE was the most bloated and slow browser available for OS X, this is no big surprise after the release of Safari.
Nonetheless in the MacCentral story, Microsoft does state âoeMicrosoft and the MacBU continue to be committed to the Mac platform. We are excited about the new versions of products coming out like Office, Virtual PC, Messenger and MSN for Mac OS X. Our commitment hasn't wavered, it's just a matter of doing what's right to meet customer needs.â
Whoopie, MSN â¦
MSIE may have 97% of the browser market, but what kind of "market" is it when the product is free? I've always been Netscape-centric & that's just the "corporate standard" at our house. My wife, who is not computer savvy, made this comment when she had to use MSIE to access a site: "This Explorer thing is CHEESY. It just feels cheap & thin after using Netscape." She should be getting paid big bucks by CNET for her opinions, IMO!
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Microsoft will not release any more major upgrades for Internet Explorer on Windows. They cite competition from Mozilla as the reason for this decision, and say that Mozilla is a better browser for Windows systems. Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Mozilla, because IE has better access to the underlying operating system.
I was thinking how many days rather than years. :)
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley
Microsoft will not release any more major upgrades for Internet Explorer on MacOS.
.NETand passport less and less a viable product.
It seems like that Microsoft is slowly imploding over the past 2 years?
The above statement, obviousally a threat made to try and control apple does more harm to Microsoft in the public's eyes than any good that could come of it. Now they are directly trying to piss off the mac users, PLUS increase marketshare for the other browsers making
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Try turning off java, cookies, not using IE, and search for the term "security" on www.microsoft.com look at the results! Got to ask yourself, what they meant by they were going to improve security.
Love Music? Got a Band? Are you a Label? http://garageradio.com
...is that Apple needs to get their act together regarding Safari, even more so than it is already.
The number of people they have working on Safari is substantially less than what Microsoft has working on IE. Granted, the way IE is designed requires more people to begin with (it's tightly integrated of course and it is a highly sophisticated piece of software), but more developers means a better product made in a shorter amount of time, assuming their priorities aren't skewed (hint: security). Except for a difference in the level of integration with the OS, Safari is now to OS X what IE is to Windows, and Apple needs to treat it as such--a product as vital as OS X itself.
Safari always had the feel of a side project, a "just in case" plan. Well, "just in case" has arrived, and it's time for Apple to get serious.
The coolest voice ever.
I mean, what possible benifit could there be in releasing their browser for free? Besides, that'd be anti-compatitive and monopolistic, and I trust MS never to do anything that predatory.
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system.
Are they admitting that the only way Microsoft can compete with other software manufacturers, is by having access to the operating system's sourcecode, to which other's don't? And is there any doubt left that MS in fact used this unfair advantage against Wordperfect and Lotus?
Sigged!
Of course Microsoft would want more web browser competition, that's what they need right now to keep the states off their back..... But the web browser doesn't even compete with them since it's on the mac, and ms was making the software for free for the mac anyway... So now it's a great situation for MS, as almost everything it does is. And they put the focus on Apple for doing exactly what MS was accused of doing. HAHAHAHA. Sucks for Apple. And Apple users, too. For some reason, Everybody wants choice on Windows but in the mac world, everybody gets just one choice per application category? What the hell? How can just having safari be good for the mac? Isn't competition good? Now the direct competition is Windows versus Apple. We are right back to the pre-web browser era (or soon will be.) Except that Windows just like back in 1990, is installed in more computers than Apple. HAHAHAHA. Ya this is really good for Apple. One web browser. Hidden API. IT is much better for MS when it's biggest os competitor ( a non-competitor ) is accused of the same stuff as it is... ha! This is not good for macs. (As an operating system)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Is Safari better than Mozilla(Firebird)?
I don't find that the KHTML/Konqueror browser works that great with a large number of web sites.
On Linux I mostly use MozillaFirebird (what a stupid name, phoenix was better) and when things don't work I'll run Opera in "IE" mode. Konqueror is not even on my list, it works with less sites than Mozilla. On Windows I use Firebird and rarely have problems (sometimes I have to back off to IE). On OS X I've been using Mozilla, but I admit that I don't use my Mac very much.
So why is Safari so popular on Mac when Mozilla is available? Is it because Firebird isn't available? Although the whole Mozilla suite is kinda chunky, I think Firebird would kill Safari.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
After seeing that they "can't compete with Apple":
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I'd say "How do you like them apples", but it's too obvious a pun.
To be half serious, it was obvious this was coming - they've been in maintenance mode on IE/Mac since MacOS X 10.1 (fall 2001) - the only updates they've done since then have been for security/critical bugfixes. Until Safari, Mozilla/Camino was the only real option for a forward-looking browser.
Also, apparently there's a IE release coming out Monday, after which it's over except for the aforementioned security/critical bugfix patches. If IE breaks on 10.3, for instance, it's a pretty good bet that a fixed IE will ensue - elsewise their browser share in the Mac market goes to 0% real quickly.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
"Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC."
;-)
So, what are our alternatives?
Media Player: VLC, MPlayer for OS X
MSN Messenger: Proteus, Fire
Office: Apple Works, Keynote as Powerpoint Replacement, Open Office, AbiWord, Gnumeric
Outlook: Apple Mail.app, iCal, Evolution,
Virtual PC: Ya, well, maybe sometime RealPC will appear after they settle with Microsoft. But who uses that stuff anyway?
Last but not least, Internet Explorer: Safari, Camino, Mozilla and maybe soon again Omniweb, thanks to WebCore. (Yes, i left out Opera & iCab)
Okay, did i miss something?
In related news, Microsoft has announced that they will stop all future development on software, citing that user's feature requests are answered by competitor's products.
That brings up a thought I had when I saw this story on macumors a little while ago. Is this decision the reason Safari exists? It kind of chicken/eggs the story... but is Microsoft cancelling mac IE development because of Safari, or was Safari created because Microsoft is cancelling IE development?
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
I've seen the new version running on WinXP via a Microsoft tech. The best quote from him was "We would have bought VMware but, VirtualPC intergrated so nicely into our OS that we decide, what the heck". This was followed by a quote from a VM manager to us that up until recently, MS was their largest customer including running an unreal amount of ESX servers. For those of you not familiar with this product, it is a custom Linux install running some truly outstanding server software.
Since server integration is the next big money maker for a LOT of vendors, I'm sure that MS will use the "no one uses V-PC on Macs anyways so we're redirecting our R&D to the Windows version" excuse here shortly.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
With that being the case, it doesnt seem like there would be a need/reason to continue development of the product on other platforms.
Also pointing out what other people have said:
its a free product, so why would a business compete over it.
Safari is much better/faster
MS doesnt have to make software for apple if they dont want to, there is no iLife suite for windows.
Yes there is an outlook ported for OSX but it strictly works with Exchange servers, no imap,pop or anything else
This is not such a bad thing.
It means that as long as Apple retains its current market share, there will be a sizeable portion of internet users browsing the web without IE, which will hopefully result in less browser-specific coding by webmasters.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
As an Apple programmer and developer I will tell you that statement is crap!
Because Apple opened up Darwin and gave a lot of comprehensive information on the APIs, it is easier to program for the Mac. ANYONE who doesn't support the Mac is either stupid, producing crap, or is shortsighted. Market share or not, Apple people BUY software!
In Open Source Heaven :)
Try 8 computers world wide, like it or not MS forced a lot of growth for the home user, you would be wise to remember that.
Safari is based on the KHTML engine from KDE. See here.
I can't help but find it amusing that they laud Konqueror's "About" screen (complete with screenshot) on the front page while stating that Konqueror itself isn't completely HTML4.0-compliant and doesn't have CSS2 fully implemented.
The coolest voice ever.
I can't complete half my transactions over the Internet with Safari. As a rule now, I just start up IE when I want to make a credit card or business transaction. Safari is too young to carry the browsing flag. The tab feature is weak. Autofill is weaker.
Really, now I can count on another 5% of the market for supporting my claims to my bank that i really do not have any possibility of running IE on my machines!
The Mozilla team also doesn't have access to the OS, and they do much better than IE on Mac OS X.
Or maybe Microsoft just became so used to having access to the OS that now they can't do it any other way.
The only thing that botters me is the number of web sites that don't support anything other than IE. The company I used to work for even went as far as supporting only one single version of IE (5.5 if I'm not mistaken). Amazing.
Does anybody else see the double irony in this? Not only is a large chunk of the source code freely available, but Microsoft has had a long history of hiding its own operating system from everyone. Serves it right.
Or maybe Microsoft have decided to drop making free products for a platform that has less than 3% of the global audience ?
smart buisness says:
if($devCosts>$ROI){
profits--
project.stop()
Even if I don't use ms office a lot personally, this would really be a big problem for apple, cause for many people ms office compability on the mac is one of the key requirements for buying. And discontinuation would have a significant effect on sales.
Media Player
:). This will be round for ages. It has the featueres, the user base, not really the price but it has enough sales on MacOS that its not going to be taking a hike for a long time.
Well quick time is an execelent player (no dobut) i use it very rarly on the PC, but i guess Apple users use it all the time. I wonder why MS havnt pulled media player yet? Media player easier to support? I'd say that would have something to do with it. Media player is basicly a player and some codecs. Were has the web browser IE, is much more, you have to worry about JS support, w3c standards, HTML,XML,CSS,XSL etc... and integrating other technologies into the borwser such as flash, other media formats etc... So my guess is media player will be ther for some time (unless the plan is to just forget about macOS users, which could very well be the case).
MSN Messenger
Who cares?
Office
The best office suit in the world arguable
Outlook
I'd guess maybe the next thing to go? Sure its easy to support, but without its goood buddy IE, i cant see it sticking around for years. Chances are, this might be the next thing apps attempts to emulate! There for, it'll be the next thing to go.
Virtual PC
eh?
I dont think too many things are going to go. Outlook would have to be the next one, and coming in a close second would be media player.
But, if Apples market share increases, i'd think MS would be bringing back IE and wouldnt even think of not providing its products to apple, otherwise they'd be hurting themselfs (i was goign to say kill themselfs, but common, pins wont kill a giant).
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
This is very interesting since many web desingers still prefer mac.
If IE is history on mac we can expect them to make web pages that works in safari.
Now, remember that safari is based on khtml, perhaps we can get a larger percentage of websites that can be read in other browsers than IE.
This could be a very good thing.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Needing access to the underlying OS is just a poor excuse. Mozilla is a far better browser than IE, and that works on just about every OS imaginable, so presumedly you don't need to low level OS know-how to make a top notch browser.
thanks for the links
But they're one and the same, remember? You kill off IE, you kill off Windows!
*rubs chin*
The coolest voice ever.
They say competition from Safari, but I believe the most important statement is "Some of the key customer requests for Web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,"
This is the argument that they made about their browser and their OS. What better way to bring credibility to their argument that stating that another OS will be better served with a browser that closely integrates with its OS.
This would be mean a decrease in market share for IE (assuming Apple doesn't die) which is good for us Linux and standards-compliant browser users!
So, what's the catch?
Most here, obviously in light of the fact that MacIE is such a piece of crap, are more worried by the thought of MS killing Office for OSX. People claim that MS will break support for older versions of Windows Office on Windows because they don't care.
Wrong, they have to care. About 10% of all Office users are still using Office95, about 20% still using Office97, about 40 to 50% still using Office2000. (Office2000 can open OfficeXP documents without many problems). Not that many moved to OfficeXP. A new office that cannot save old Office compatible documents will not get many customers. MS will not willingly shoot themselves in the foot.
Your Office X will remain compatible for a number of years yet, no worry. After that you can switch to OpenOffice.
methinks you're high on something.
it's true. the only software i've ever bought on my own dime (max/msp) is mac os software. the rest has all been for evaluation only.
"No IE 6 is planned," Sommer said in a telephone interview. "Safari is turning into a better answer for (Apple) customers."
did that really come from microsoft? when will they confess anything is a better answer for anyone than windows/explorer?
ok, some people might be happy using their products/services, but that can't be more than a handfull.
"On the Windows side, Microsoft has said that it will stop development of standalone versions of Internet Explorer, instead evolving the browser as part of future updates to the Windows OS."
well, that's antitrust for ya
isnt the xbox losing tons of money?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Having the Darwin core open-sourced does NOT give, say, Linux or Microsoft any competitive advantage. However, open-sourcing, say, Quartz would actually be useful for many other projects, which is why Apple doesn't do it. That was pretty much my point.
Unfortunately, Apple's platform is extremely difficult to develop for if you are a PC guy. You need to not only have an expensive Mac box, but also learn Mac-specific stuff like Objective C in addition to the APIs. If you want to sell your program, you will have to use Macs for a year or two until you start to wrap your brain around how users expect the system to work. Sure, you might capture a segment of the market if you have a really good program, but the costs of development are unlikely to get recovered. Besides, the Mac software market is already pretty crowded, and there are too many heavyweights like Apple themselves.
WebTV
XBox
Hotmail
Passport
Tablet PC
Movies on Demand
Chromeffects
Farenheit
Microsoft Reader
"WORTH: Holloway, you don't get it.
HOLLOWAY: Then tell me, please, I need to know.
WORTH: It's maybe hard for you to understand, but there's no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a masterplan. Can you grasp that? Big brother is not watching you.
QUENTIN: What kind of f&*%ing explanation is that?
WORTH: It's the best youÂre gonna get. I looked and the only explanation I can come to is that there is nobody up there.
QUENTIN: Somebody had to say yes to this thing.
WORTH: What thing? Only we know what it is.
QUENTIN: We have no idea, what it is.
WORTH: We know more than anybody else. I mean somebody might have known sometime, before they got fired or voted out or sold it. But if this place ever had a purpose, then it got miscommunicated or lost in the shuffle. This is an accident, a forgotten propetual, public, worksproject. Do you think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck. I mean, I lead on my desk for months. This was a great job!
QUENTIN: Why put people in it?
WORTH: Because it's here. you have to use it or admit it's pointless." - Cube
The ______ Agenda
hahaha... no.
/. reader has a coronary.)
moz has always been faster on that same "slow-ass hardware and operating system". faster than on windows with hardware *of similar cost*. linux i won't speak to 'cause i don't know. (somewhere a
What is so incredebly tricky about this is the legal aspect of it. Microsoft is pushing its IE-Windows integration to the fullest, exactly why everyone is all over them (with their monopoly and so on). By claiming that custumors demand the kind of features only Apple can provide because of their OS-browser integration and thus that they cannot develop anymore for the mac because of the integration between Safari and the OS they make their own case for the integration of IE and windows stronger. "Hey, when "our competitors" are doing this, we should also be allowed so, right?"
On a positive note the macbusiness unit also stated that the coming office for mac will not be the last.
You probably never done any programming. Otherwise, you would know that any program that creates windows would need to use the window manager, and that having the source would help tremendously
Are you sure you have? You don't need source to interact with the windowing system, of course you know that so I'm not sure the point you are trying to make. OSX has a standard published API that developers can use which unlike MicroSoft doesn't have some special conditional APIs that are hidden away.
Ms already announced that it wasn't going to release anymore browsers for older versions of Windows already. I am concerned that it might be a challenge to Apple and their iTMS, because Ms wants to build their own. They will say "Apple does not have access to the underlying source code, and therefore cannot compete". It might be a sacrifice play, giving up one product so that Apple willgive up one product for Windows. Or Ms might be pulling their support for other OS's in a futile grasp for the power that they are currently losing.
yeah now only if your market share wasn't shit you might have a chance.
I was prevented from completing a qbasic mmorpg because Microsoft decided it'd be fun to try and obfuscate socket code for a decade or so.
Whatever, preaching to the choir, I just think that line is funny and I haven't figured out how to mod up posts.
God spoke to me
until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC.
Goodbye, oh treasured MS applications.. We will all sorely miss you once we have Mac boxes running numerous better alternatives..
Ahh
After all, Microsoft won't release another stand-alone browser for Windows either. They're really pushing for an operating system that let you browse the Internet instead, where perhaps the browser component of the OS might happen to be called Internet Explorer. The browser in Windows Longhorn will probably not be downloadable separately, and Microsoft will get complete freedom to do whatever they wish to do in that browser to make it necessary to upgrade to Longhorn to use certain services.
And according to this news post...
"Ironically, they also say that they can't compete with Apple, because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system."
I guess there's the proof; they can't integrate the browser into the OS on a Mac. So long, Apple.
Not that I think Mac users will suffer a huge loss. Perhaps it will even turn the tide in a positive way since webmasters will no longer have an excuse to make IE-only sites if they wish to make it run on Mac's. Sure, Mac users are in minority, but they're not in such a small minority that I would suggest any serious web developer to simply ignore them.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Microsoft: *stomps foot* YOU'RE NOT PLAYING FAIR SO I'M NOT GOING TO PLAY ANY MORE! YOU'RE JUST A BIG POOP BUCKET HEAD AND YOU SUCK.
Just the first thing to come to mind. Why are they just picking on Safari, though? I do use Safari, on my iFootlong, but I also use Opera 6. I'm sure there are also hundreds of other people who don't use IE in favor of other, more common browsers. Mozilla. Yeah. Mozilla! There's a good one. Are they not a threat?
Infact, IIRC, Mozilla was why Microsoft said they wouldn't enter the browser game on Linux/UNIX.
Informatus Technologicus
From the inventors of not giving access to the underlying OS.. because Apple has better access to the underlying operating system
-Cnik
Favorite quote: "Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS"
Hint to "the customers": Stop requesting idiotic features ;-)
You don't *have* to learn Objective-C. You can still use the C/C++ Carbon API, which is much more "traditional".
Nope, no MS-style hidden APIs here. And yes, I'm an ADC member but there's nothing special going on here. Run ObjectAlloc on Safari and watch the NSFlippableView, NSTextField and NSMatrix instance counts go wild as a page loads (amongst other objects). Write your drawing code with Cocoa and get "Quartz" text for free. These are hardly low-level and even Apple recommends you use Cocoa or Carbon calls higher up rather than calling Quartz 2D directly (though you can if you really feel like it).
Or you could buy a Mac emulator and do it on the cheap. just saying.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
But isnt it possible that MS made a crappy ass browser, i.e., IE for Mac in attempts to coarce Mac users to PC's. After all, web browsing probably is in the upper 25% of all computer usage, and if users weren't getting a good internet on Mac experience they'd consider switching. And perhaps now they realize that their garbage code is to difficult and time consuming to fix to compete in an arena that never had competition before (before safari came).
I'm still using IE mac for most of my browsing, though migrating to mozilla.. I like the tabs alot..
I have to say IE mac has been pretty good at rendering most pages and fairly stable. The history tab is really usefull, as is the ability to quickly hide the top navigation bar to get more screen space when on a note book.
It was free and helped MS "Win" the browser wars.. I'll will miss it though...
I'm 'Murphey old school' and refused to upgrade to 10.2.x because 'Nothing Appears Broken' on 10.1.5.
In turn, Safari is not available for me...and Camino and Mozilla work fine.
I will look forward to a dual or quad 64 bit machine before I upgrade and have a 'what's that' attitude for MSIE.
No, you don't get it. You're supposed to blame SARS (or the economy or 9/11 or the war in Iraq) about Mac IE's failure. Sheesh!!! Get with the program!
Market share or not, Apple people BUY software!
Good point. Apple people are willing to pay more for a less useful product. They should start an advertising campaign around that.
One of these bugs renders it pretty much useless for use in the enterprise. If one runs a Microsoft ISA server and uses it as a proxy where clients need to authenticate against, the Active Directory with NTLM, Mac IE crashes hard ever since version 5.1. Version 5.0 on OS 9 worked flawless, higher versions including any native OS X versions go down hard.
This is a known problem since a while within Microsoft and will probably not be solved now. The only solutions is to make the authentication process basic/clear text on the serverside. Something admins will be glad to do... Not....
Imagine what the effect will be on the remaining Macs in the enterprise...
Ahh, one of those stupid incompatible Macs again!
Quartz would actually be useful for many other projects, which is why Apple doesn't do it.
How? The source is only useful to people a) debugging the code, or b) interested in by-passing the API to shoot themselves in the foot by using internal, unpublished features. Apple keeps it closed source to maintain their competitive advantage in being the most visually appealing desktop experience, not to spite anyone.
but also learn Mac-specific stuff like Objective C in addition to the APIs.
This is uninformed rubbish. Objective-C is in the gcc compiler. Mac OS X uses the gcc suite. There is nothing "mac-specific" about Objective-C. The API has been around for over 10 years. It's called OpenStep, and if it has survived that long commercially, then perhaps it just might be worth learning. Lastly, we have source compatible OpenStep libraries for many other Unix OSs: GNUStep.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You deserve a +5 >>>>> the parent OBVIOUSLY is moderating his own posts! Good post!
Microsoft only has a handful of products that make money directly through sales to their customers. Windows. Office. Some of their games.
Most of Microsoft's money comes from their ability to control their markets. For example, Hotmail. It's free, right?
For you, perhaps. However, when you use Hotmail, you're one of *tens of millions* of people around the world who use it. The amount of money generated by selling demographics, advertising, and "partner services" through Hotmail is staggering.
X-Box. Loosing money? Now, sure. But suddenly Microsoft controls a considerable segment of the video game market, and when a company develops a game, they have to consider Microsoft as an option. It will make heaps of money, if they can stay on top of their game (so to speak).
Business is complex. Don't think, for an instant, that any of the free services you receive are purely the product of altruism. It may be free to you, but somewhere, someone's coughing up $10 million dollars for a five year advertising or services contract.
So what, microsoft has said they won't release any more version of IE for versions of windows without DRM either so its not like us windows users will be getting a new IE anytime either.
Well, not truly "kill" it off, but 'tightly integrate' it into office, as IE has gone back into Windows.
Remember Office is the real money maker now, windows is just the medium.
Then blame OSS competition for their reasoning. ( to appease the FTC/DOJ/ETC )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
He's selling his Mercedes off road vehicle.. then he has a gallery of him beating on it off roading..
He doesn't claim lightly used though...
4 million songs to apple users with very low market share, hmmm ... Apple people don't buy anything!
The July 2003 MacWorld magazine (in print, but not sure I can find the relevant article online) prints a short interview with Roz Ho, General Manager of the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft.
Two questions they ask:
Q1: Apple released its Keynote presentation software and a beta of the Safari Web browser. What has been the reaction to Apple's foray into areas that have been your strongholds?
A1: We've heard positive things from Mac users who have tried Keynote and Safari. We believe customer research is key to developing quality products and we continue to listed to our customers on Apple's products and ours.
Q2: But from the outside looking in, the assumption might be that it would strain the relationship. Has that been the case?
A2: No. Our relationship with Apple continues to be solid, and our commitment to Mac customers is as strong as ever.
Now, in light of the new news and articles coming out. What can we assume about Roz Ho?
1. Nice but ignorant. Not high enough up on any ladder in Microsoft to know what she's talking about.
2. A liar who clearly was talking out of one side of her mouth for this group despite knowing things about the troubled relationship and product jeopardy.
3. Partially truthful. She used many hot marketing phrases for promoting a sense of trust in her responses, but she didn't actually say anything that would ensure a future where MS for Mac products were developed in the future.
4. Completely truthful. Translations: We like Apple doing the R&D for us so that we can steal the good bits from their products to integrate into the next versions of ours. With horrible history of abandoning file format compatability, bug riden cross compilers, onerous upgrade prices, and constant threats of product discontinuation, our commitment to Mac customers is as strong as ever.
I'm completely at a loss as to which way I should interpret her statements and therefore be able to interpret future statements.
>> Quartz would actually be useful for many other projects, which is why Apple doesn't do it.
> How? The source is only useful to people a) debugging the code, or b) interested in by-passing the API to shoot themselves in the foot by using internal, unpublished features.
I think he meant that it would be useful for other BSDs and Linux because Quartz could (and would) then be ported to them, giving Open Source OSes (a big part of) the same advantage as MacOS X... And that is of course why Apple doesn't Open Source it.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I want to start by first saying that I do not own a Mac, though I have nothing against them or those who do.
I read a lot and I read the different Mac magazines. From what I gather from different writer's opinions, IE for the Mac is good enough to use so you can download another browser of your choosing, such as Safari or Opera.
David
They don't need IE for Mac anymore, because they killed the only real threat they felt they had: Netscape. Now that AOL has essentially killed Netscape/Mozilla off, Microsoft can end the charade.
Microsoft just gave up a big chunk of IE marketshare. With some sites, especially ones that appeal to artistic/creative types, they've basically reduced their marketshare to 50%.
Now, if 50% of your users run IE, and the other 50% run an amalgamation of Mozilla, Konqueror or Safari, Opera, and *, this will force developers to consider web standards.
Businesses may have been able to justify ignoring 5% of their market, but you can't ignore 50%.
Assuming that this isn't just a Microsoft plot to clobber Apple into accepting something, this is fantastic news indeed.
All I needed was sockets, and it was running :)
God spoke to me
Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC.
Outlook for Mac is already dead. The last version of Mac Outlook was Outlook 2001. It is an OS 9 only product. Office X includes a mail client but this mail client does not speak M$ Exchange (it only does POP & IMAP).
If we follow your train of thought we could say that we should thank a bank robber for unknowingly killing an escaped serial killer during a hold up. The ends do not justify the means.
Time makes more converts than reason
correct me if im wrong, but isnt osx designed heavily around freebsd? and since freebsd is oss, doesnt EVERYONE have complete access to the underlying operating system?
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she explained.
Total Irony and Wimp. If access to the underlying code was all M$ cared about, they would have all of their software ported (non-free of course) to Linux and BSD. Mac OSX is as close as they would come, but because OSX is controled by Apple, M$ has to bow out. They are paranoid of the dirty tricks they play on others and can't stand to work with anything but their own garbage. People said that M$ was only working with Apple for the anti-trust trials. Now they seek to eliminate them.
I say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha!" M$ has as much a chance to eliminate Apple as they do to eliminate free software. People like it, use it and will pay for the services. It's more likely that people will continue to abandon the M$ rape. It was obvious to me that KDE had a better browser and interface and word processor and ... anyway.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
They've already won: http://www.macdailynews.com/opinion_comments.php?i d=P1240_0_2_0_C
Well, assuming M$ is following a good software design methodology (except for the PolyGlot of Spaghetti Code one), why don't they just introduce a level of abstraction, i.e. a defined standard of lower-level API's (left to the O.S. vendor to implement)...then the core IE code is built upon calling those API's...and if Apple doesn't want to divulge it's OS details, that's fine...they only need to implement the lower level API's and provide access to them.
Assumptions are the futhers of all muck-ups.
-jc
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From scottlockwood@hotmail.com Fri Mar 29 15:54:18 2002
Return-Path: scottlockwood@hotmail.com
X-Originating-IP: [63.74.34.71]
From: "William Scott Lockwood III"
To: jeremy@satanosphere.com, cyborg_mmonkey@yahoo.com, flikee@xmission.com, hurstdog@kuro5hin.org, inoshiro@kuro5hin.org, rusty@kuro5hin.org, trlockwood@yahoo.com
Cc: benevolent_spork@yahoo.com, kdogg731@hotmail.com, elby@adequacy.org, jwipotroll@hotmail.com, j0nkatz@hotmail.com, spiralx@spazmail.com, sarah@johncglass.com, quacky@rocketmail.com, BlueBear@meowmail.com, momocrome@momocrome.cjb.net, pen1s_goat_guy@hotmail.com, tjfriese@shaw.ca, revlucion@journalist.com, adamtrowe@hotmail.com, sarah@aphasianetworks.com, drhelpful@portalofevil.com, spacefem@starmail.com, sporkopolis2001@yahoo.com, hanales@hotmail.com, trollaxor@mac.com
Subject: Retiring the scoopizoid site.
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 15:54:18 -0600
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
Message-ID: F1629Qs96i1QwCfWaL40001112f@hotmail.com
I'm going to retire scoop.giz. People are right about the geekizoid name forever being associated with crap.
We will go back up with a new domain name at some point in the future when I find something I like. Any suggestions on a name?
Scott
This is the best part about this. Suddenly the 1% or so of users on *nix OS's have a couple more percentage points worth of users, many in corporate environments, who will demand web standards compliance since IE only pages won't work for them anymore once MS comes out with its next standard-smashing version of IE.
For now of course everyone already has the current version of IE for Mac, but when that version becomes obsolete the enemy of my enemy will once again be my friend. Yay market share buddies!
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Make sure you pool your efforts with this guy: http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/
This effort progressed quite quickly after the announcement of Safari, but appears to have slowed a tad... however that doesn't stop all of those budding win32 open source programmers getting into it! I'd love to see this proceed...
You raise an interesting point. However, it is likely that this is also a warning from Microsoft to Apple. Safari's wonderful ... you can have that market, KeyNote is cute ... but really isn't a threat to PowerPoint, but do any more and see what our commitment to VPC and Office updates are. Granted there has been significant revenue to Microsoft from Mac Office in the past, but Microsoft is clearly telling Apple to be careful in what actions it takes.
And even if you "had to." Objective-C is C (do you know C?) with an OOP layer on top, like C++ only C++'s OOP layer is mixed up in the language making it harder to learn than Objective-C.
Any decent programmer who knows C can master Objective-C in a day at most.
Now I can get rid of my Javascript that detects MacIE and tells them to go download Mozilla or Safari!
Awesome.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
I thought everybody has access to the underlying operating system
Good point. Apple people are willing to pay more for a less useful product. They should start an advertising campaign around that.
Define "less useful".
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
I was under the impression that Safari wasn't tied to the OS, in the way that, say, IE for Windows is. Or are they refering to Apple's use of undocumented APIs? Or are they just bullshitting?
Either way, 'competition from Safari' is a joke. What does Microsoft do when facing competition? Do they run away? Hell no! They crush it. And that's what they're trying to do. First IE, then everything else MS makes for the Mac, until finally they axe Office. Fortunately, Apple knows this already. Hence, Keynote, and whatever similar office-style products they come out with.
Safari is not GPL'd. Thank god.
:>
Oh, wait. Sorry, I just saw this:
Oh, and Safari freezes my g4 powerbook all the time. I use Opera now.
Sorry, I didn't realize you were a fucking troll.
It must be ROUGH when the independent devloper with free access to Apple PAIs just like MS can beat MS at innovation and competition..
OpenSource-The Independent Choice to Squashing Monopolies
Don't Tread on OpenSource
But thanks goes to us, they got zillions of bucks to waste for such projects ;-)
Microsoft can't make IE the default browser and uninstallable on Mac OS, so they are discontinuing development.
Maybe M$ wants access to Apple source code. Longhorn is due 2005 after all.
Mods, the parent post is a troll. Please note the following Mac myths being propogated: 1) Difficult to develop on a Mac 2) Mac's are expensive There is also some ignorance of the Human Interface Guidelines available from Apple, which do not require you to "use Macs for a year or two until you start to wrap your brain around how users expect the system to work." No, you certainly don't have to use a Mac for a couple of years. Read the guidelines, use the (free) development tools available from Apple which guide you towards the guidelines by their very nature, you will be able to successfully program on the mac in no time. Check out Hydra (http://hydra.globalse.org/index.html), written in about 8 weeks and totally rocks. I use it for collaborative programming on scripts. Find a Mac and check out this software, it will blow you away. Written in 8 weeks. Whoops, rambling,, lost the thread here. Oh, yeah, TROLL!
If I had some ham, I'd make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread
Yeah... they have to stop because people are using the browser that comes installed (doesn't software update install it, pretty much automatically?), instead of the version they have to go out and download? If the irony was any thicker, we'd need hip waders. Oh, wait...
(cue the guy with the Baldrick sig on irony)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Define "less useful".
Having fewer uses. For instance, having much less software available for it. Having much less hardware available for it.
I do desktop support for a middle-sized University (around 30,000 total computer users). I support all client OSes and because I have some past experience with mac administration I get a lot of the mac support. As such I run OS X. It is not only safe to upgrade to Jag, it really is a vast improvement. Many bugs have been worked out and the speed of the GUI and the smoothness of the experience is vastly improved. In this regard you will do well to upgrade. Additionally, it isn't Apple's style to retrofit OSes. Maybe some in the Gil days but with Jobs? Hell no. If you Safari you're gonna have to upgrade. To be honest you will have an improved experience if you do upgrade and that's not hype or BS.
"What we do in life echoes in eternity." Maximus Decimus Meridius
Since we know that IE loved to make its own standards, which causes other browsers to choke or have the site reject them because they aren't using IE, I'm more worried that Mac users may lose a browser that had a fighting chance of accessing pages made by the MS webmaster drones (that is, a webmaster that does not assume non-MS users will access the site and uses proprietary code in the page that only IE/Windows understands).
The good thing is that Apple's new web browser team is very ferocious in adding features. The first thing many screamed about when Safari came out was tabs, and now, they're there, along with other features. Apple could take a lesson from the Omni Group and its browser OmniWeb, which had a preference that could make the browser say to sites that it was IE/Windows, IE/Mac, or other browser to fake it out and allow access. From there, Apple should add preferences to give Safari as many IE compatibility elements as possible--better, add them as options that the browser can sense when you go to pages that use IE/Windows features that normally aren't compatible. The user can opt to switch on these features from a modal dialog that appears on downloading the page to make things work a bit better.
The waning of IE/Mac isn't good for people like myself who try to make Macs fit better in the enterprise. PC/Windows users aren't used to choice in the browser world, so IE is their only browser, and Netscape is now a rarity in business circles. Many business-related pages are created with the various MS tools, and many webmasters are unaware that there is a Mac version of IE, much less the fact that it works much like its Windows counterpart. This change will mean that techs will have to educate the webmasters of Safari's differences to get business pages to work--not that such explanations get lots of results anyway.
The positive news is that Safari generally holds its own in compatibility more than any other browser, and has even shown more compatible than IE/Mac in some of my trials at work, which I why I use it almost exclusively today. Will the loss of IE/Mac throw Mac users back in a web-access Stone Age? Probably not, but you never know what some whacked out ideas have to be added as features in some feature MS webmastering tool that work only for IE/Windows.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I was going to post something about this, but there was a knock at the front door. It was Irony, and boy was he pissed off.
About time too, and I'm glad Apple saw it coming. And much as I don't want to see the internet becoming marginalized because microsoft will continue to make things "their way", I don't *fear* two different internets either. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this entire internet thing. I would rather access an internet that didn't run on microsoft anything or didn't require it. I don't want to conduct business with their stuff, have my government run or use their stuff, and quite frankly, would be quite pleased to not have to worry about the net getting borked because of their stuff. hard to describe but they just induce a feeling of "icky" in me, they give me the creeps. I can't describe it better than that, not even addressing any specific part of their tech, just the over all feel, it's just wrong to me somehow. They had their chance,in the beginning made actual contributions to the rise of personal computing and the net, they made huge sums, but it's time to move on now, they became too arrogant and bullyish for any sort of continued support from people, IMO, and their products are reflecting that, their announcements keep reflecting that,and they are actively still seeking total control. They are absolutely no different now, in fact, they have grown even worse. Screw em in other words. If they are so bound and determined to "take over", I say let them,let them take over and destroy what they seek in their blindness, just use social and business aikido and step completely around them, let them fall flat on their face from their own out of control inertia and predatory aggression, develop a more advanced and honest and open and free-ish alternative internet where open source and anything *not* microsoft can go. Nixinet in other words. Browser wars? Minor skirmishes, I say let's get down and dirty, have complete net wars,let them control their version of the net, let it turn into a dung pile of bloat and bugginess and viruses and worms, who cares, I would gladly boycott any site/net/domain that insists on microsoft/IE only, just as now I don't access "aolnet". I don't care if they "dominate", their own bugginess and insecurity and upcoming massive big brotherism schemes will destroy their efforts anyway,so who cares? Let people keep getting burned and stung, eventually they'll see the light. Perhaps this is a good time to move forward, and not fight microsoft, just ignore them and abandon them to yesterdays business model, and yesterdays technology.
This article could relate to the other article on Ipv6 as well, suppose everyone who used a *nix variant of any flavor just went there and did that? Along with fast adoption of advanced wireless, peer to peer, shared hosting a la bit torrent styled efforts, and so on and so forth, similar efforts on rapid new and improved. Create a modern autobahn while microsoft stays stuck on the two muddy ruts gravel road model of computing and the net.
Shunning and avoidance are underrated, it's a very good technique, and usually you are a minority in the initial stages of that effort following all the previous classic examples. It's possible too, look at all the servers for instance that don't use their products. Desktops are one thing, the servers with the content have the ultimate power.
In fact, if you really get down to it,most of all the advanced stuff that makes up "the net" is non microsoft already, it is definetly nixy flavored, so it wouldn't really be that much of a stretch to take it into another gear and put the throttle down, just pull away from them. Linux and the BSDs are doing it, we still have the other unixes, and OSX's uniqueness,there's some really big companies out there that see microsoft as an annoyance, and there's enough people now who would probably like to see the next advanced internet. Seems a natural to me, the leaders lead, the herd will eventually follow or get left behind. There would need a transitional period, where both sorts would interact, but we should get beyond it as rapidly as possible, IMO.
Let them have microsof
It's kind of funny, because for the average Mac user there's a stigma before even using MS products that they're buggy and unreliable. You would think the MacBU would've went out of their way to alter that reputation. For example:
Windows Media Player for Mac - Feels like an absolute piece of Beta software. Moving the window, resizing it, or moving other windows on the screen usually makes the video disappear in WMP. Occasionally I run into a file that simply won't play in it. Since MacBU isn't working on a browser anymore, how about some Windows Media Plugins for Safari, and player that does more than "kind of work?"
IE for Mac - Great in OS 9; so slow that it was almost unusable in OS X. In comparison to other browsers it felt more like a beta release. Right to left language support was never attempted in any version, even after it was available with the release of Jaguar last year.
Office for Mac - For the most part, I have no complaints about Office X, and even think it's worth the money. My only complaint is it can't handle right to left languages, so exchanging Arabic or Hebrew documents with Windows users of Office is impossible. Fixing this would probably require a simple patch, one that could've been released a year ago since Jaguar was released. Also, my experience has been that Office X isn't nearly as stable as its Windows counterpart, so I chronically save any important documents (more so than I would if working in Windows). On a 800mhz PowerMac Office X still feels incredibly slow.
MSN Messenger for Mac - Works as advertised. The new version is actually great. I'm suspecting it's related to their release of MSN for Mac though, so that's probably why it's polished so nicely. With AIM and MSN supposedly merging, perhaps iChat users will be able to converse with MSN Messenger users too. If that happens, the importance of MSN Messenger on Mac may decrease.
The only significant thing MacBU has released this year has been an MSN client -- something the vast majority of Mac users could care less about. Instead of fixing important pieces of software, they decide to release their equivalent to AOL on Mac. Good versions of their most important products (Office, WMP, IE) might actually showcase how stable OS X is, and how friendly the Mac environment is in comparison to Windows. Of course, that wouldn't be good business for MS. Even though the MacBU supposedly operates independent of MS in Redmond, it still seems to make sure Gates' bottom line is always fulfilled -- make the Mac look like an inferior platform. MacBU hasn't released anything for OS X except buggy, unpolished, beta-like software (notice I left the OS 9 versions out of this).
Just to go back to the Arabic and Hebrew support in Mac Microsoft products for a second. For the longest time MacOS was the only choice for word processing in right to left languages. There were two things in my opinion that moved Arabic speakers from Mac, to Windows. The first, and most obvious, was that while MacOS supported the language, no browsers did. MS could have easily fixed this problem when they began working on IE for Mac, but never bothered. Secondly, Word documents became a de-facto standard, and while the PC version of Office supported Arabic, Mac Office didn't. On top of all that, instead of using the agreed upon standard for Arabic characters, Microsoft created their own. The result is total market domination in the Middle East, though I guess that's not too frightening since no one in the ME actually pays for Windows or Office anyway.
If Apple (or any other company for that matter) can release a product better than Microsoft Word, I'll use it in a second. Unfortunately OpenOffice just doesn't feel right to me (yet). It almost seems that Microsoft never expected Apple would release their own browser; perhaps they were expecting Mac users to remain dependent on the inferior Mac IE for a much longer time, and Apple's success with Safari has on
You know, that's the sort of thing they may regret saying during the next DOJ/MS antitrust trial. There will be another one, of course...we all knew that right? ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This is part of an interesting pattern of MS killing off competing products, esp. on competing platforms.
I submitted a story (which was rejected) about this little gem:
Microsoft has purchased the RAV antivirus program, and will discontinue the Linux version.
Now this is interesting: they kill IE for Mac. They kill a product that allows a Linux/Sendmail based system to scan for viruses before they are delivered to the end user.
Question: has MS lost all fear of anti-trust action, and begun the final offensive against all competition?
Do bears excrete in the forest?
Do trolls post on Slashdot?
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'm sure a lot of /.ers would cheer then :)
Ok, seriously, Microsoft do have a habit of "innovating" only reluctantly. Development on Internet Explorer seems to have stopped now that it has the majority of the market, and has fallen way behind Opera and Mozilla in terms of features, speed and usability.
Likewise, Microsoft Word seems to have, if anything, gotten worse over these past few years. They seem to have ran out of good things to do to it, and instead are content to obfusicate their file formats to maintain dominance.
How many "innovations" has Microsoft actually completed that aren't blatent copies? I can't think of one.
Of course, from a purely capitalist point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable choice. Why bother improving stuff that you have a monopoly over, a monopoly that's likely to remain untouched for the next few years at least? Competition is capitalism's way of improving software, and with a monopoly, there's no incentive to improve.
Which is why there are laws concerning monopolies, and strict regulation of such entities. But with the DOJ in Microsoft's pocket, there isn't any enforcement of these laws, and thus Microsoft can get away with making a profit without expending any effort.
first off, that was a pretty lousy article. There are what, 3 quotes in the whole thing?
One quote says that Safari is better than IE, that is the half of the real reason for dropping IEMac. MS isn't planning on making IE for windows XP any better, why would they bother making the Mac version better?
And if MS did improve IE over Safari, they would have to make it a LOT better in order to get Mac users to drop a Mac product in favor of an MS product.
My last thought is that this is a Good Thing. Although it will only cause the MS market share to fall by 1% or so, that is a pretty large number of people that will no longer be using IE so banking and other web sites will have to write their pages so that they don't require IE or will have to lose their Mac customers.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
1) You can write programs in pretty much what ever language you want. There's Java programs, there's C programs (Carbon), heck there are even Python and C++ bridges to call the Cocoa API. There's also RealBASIC too. Objective-C maybe the prefered langauge, but it's not the only one.
2) Would you really try to see a linux program ported from windows without first try to figure out how the system works? I think your 1 to 2 year learning curve to be way too steep - OS X doesn't have that many nuances.
3) What cost of development? You mean the free development tools? Yeah, that's hard money to make back. Plus, mac users, IMO, are much more likely to pay shareware fees than linux users.
I am so confused. Why is it starting to go around that it is hard to program for Mac OS X? My theory: FUD being thrown around because people are starting to realize that it's really really really easy to program for Mac OS X... but it's just a theory.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
It's all about Digital Rights Management. Microsoft is likely increasingly to integrate its proprietary DRM system into Windows -- see, for example, http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-1000411.html. Future versions of Internet Explorer will, in turn be integrated with those operating system services. Which they can't be on Mac OS, because the services won't be there. Hence Mac OS gets left behind (at least in the Microsoft world view) with an IE version that knows nothing of Microsoft DRM.
"Try 8 computers world wide, like it or not MS forced a lot of growth for the home user, you would be wise to remember that."
What about the original 8 bit ranges (Commodore, Atari, Spectrum, Dragon, etc.), and the Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad, Apple etc. There was plenty of growth in the home computer market before MS came along, and it would have continued even if they hadn't appeared (and may have advanced even faster).
Microsoft brought IE to mac to gain leverage during the browser wars - also helped them with a few of their antitruse issues.
;-)
This being said - I think that Microsoft put good amount of development into IE for mac - still a piece of crap - but they tried. They knew that mac users would not put up with mickey mouse BS like IE for windows. They should add some of the features from their mac browser to IE on windows.
Omniweb (Webcore), Camino, Mozilla, and Firebird are, and have been for some time, the most competitive mac browsers. (left IE in the dust a long time ago) To imply that Safari is the undisputed king is nieve. I actually think that Omniweb 5.0 is going to shake things up a good amount when it arives ( Omnigroup has a lot of former neXtstep people).
Microsoft is pulling IE because it does not fit into their Palladium/DRM strategy. I am sure there will be no tears shed over this one - they can have both Pallidium and IE - need to keep those 'features' for the Windows users.
> Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which,
> impact when, and years until these other Mac products
> get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office,
> Outlook, and Virtual PC.
Yes,kick them all... I mean, I had no application on MacOS X that crashed till now - exept for MS IE and Office... I changed to Safari and I'm glad, and when OpenOffice is ready for everyday-use, I will kick MS Office as well - any objections?
Tend to post comments only when drunk
As others have already mentioned, lots of people are still using Win 95 / 98. I sell Pentum I 166MHz computers all the time. There is a big user base out there that uses there computers for web browsing and email and that's it. Why should these people upgrade when Win 95 / 98 suites there needs. Micro$oft realizes this. Now if Micro$oft stops developing stand alone IE for Win 95 /98 there will come a time when IE 6 will no longer be compatible with more and more sites. You will start seeing web sites that will say "This site is best viewed by Win XP". This now gives all those Win 95 / 98 users a reason to upgrade. If Apple is in the right position at this time they well be able to get some of those people to buy a Mac. One of the biggest reasons these people will buy a Mac instead of a Windoze box is because of viruses, especially the ones who have been burned in the past by them. This is one of the reasons Micro$oft is now talking about securing there OSs.
This means that IE is the de facto standard of the web. If I go to a site that OmniWeb doesn't handle well (typically commercial sites), that's when I fire up IE on my Mac.
That's step one of the real threat. Step two is this: If IE doesn't run on the Mac, then there is no de facto standard browser on the Mac.
Step three: The Mac market is small enough that many of the mainstream sites may just not care. You know how much they care about Linux-based browsers right now.
Step four: With a seemingly flakey web experience, who besides the real die-hards would buy a Mac? This means that Apple is in a life-or-death race to be fully IE compatible.
Step five: Who controls what IE does? Do I even have to mention step five?
Checkmate.
Unless web sites chose to be more generally compatible and test with some Mac-based browser, they can easily and accidentally become incompatible with Macs. Currently they don't have to ask the question because Mac IE is almost the same as Windows IE. All they have to do is avoid ActiveX controls, which most do.
Yes, some will care to be careful. But many may not.
This puts Apple in a very bad position.
No, it is not GPL'ed. But the underlying code is.
b core / the sources we will
- ---------- On Tuesday 07 January 2003 20:31, Don Melton wrote: ----------
Subject: Our changes to KHTML and KJS
Date: Tuesday 07 January 2003 20:31
From: Don Melton
To: Lars Knoll , Harri Porten , Waldo Bastian
, Dirk Mueller , Martin Jones
, Torben Weis , Antti Koivisto
, Simon Hausmann , Daniel Molkentin
, Stefan Schimanski , Peter Kelly
Hi,
Here is the second email I promised which details our changes and
additions to KHTML and KJS which were done for Safari.
As it says on our open source web page at
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/we
post later today are based on KDE 3.0.2. The best way to see every
change line by line is to diff against the originals.
- --
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer
Sorry if you think that's a troll, my anonomous friend. Have a nice day.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
I should move to F@%*$&% Canada.
I still get flakey cookie activity with safari and have submitted bug reports with each version and seen no improvement here -- at least MSIE worked the way a browser should work -- I would hate to have to go write new cookie-setting code for all my sites so that less than 10% of the world can access them just becuase Bill wants to pull a tantrum.
Apple had better realize that safari is still a toy (pos) and had better get it working like a real browser given which way the wind is blowing.
cyberRodent.com
Talk is cheap. Supply exceeds demand.
Why don't they just buy Safari, then discontinue it?
John Kerry is a Joke!
Try out the latest beta version of OpenOffice on Windows (haven't tried Linux version yet) and open a bunch of legacy documents. It's already near-perfect, nearly-all-the-time, and I'm currently predicting that it will get even closer to perfect all of the time by the end of this year.
:-( (I REALLY hope opening password-protected files gets into OpenOffice soon). Inspired by Ximian, I set the default Save file types to DOC, XLS, and PPT, and it works well so far. I'm an early adopter in my organization, though I hope to be able to certify the newest OpenOffice as good enough for wide-scale deployment by the end of this year :-).
It's actually good enough for me to remove Word and PowerPoint from my system and associate all Office file types (except Access, of course) with OpenOffice. I still need Excel to do my time sheet, which has password-protected sheets and thus doesn't open in OpenOffice yet
Now the OS X version is an entirely different story, and I hope I can find time to contribute to its port, especially after learning more advanced OS X programming at the Apple Developer Conference in a couple weeks.
They'll Kill Off anything that doesn't make them money. Remember, they're ruthless business people...
Any business worth even 1/4th it's value on wallstreet does this.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
There was an article on MacEdition a few weeks ago in which CodeBitch talked about tabbed browsing.
The most interesting part of the article though, was the graphic halfway down the page that showcased the browser shares of Mac Edition visitors from November 2000 to March 2003.
You do know that MS predates most of those "Home Computers"?
Hell I got a C64 when I was 6 (1986) and I'm pretty sure (remember its been a good long time) that the operating system on that was Microsoft BASIC V2.
Anyway I wouldn't consider Apple or any of the others ground braking considering you were locked into hardware they chose and programmed for.
Long live the clone and MS DOS!
They don't have access to the underlying system....
This is hilarious for two reasons:
1. The well documented API provided by Apple is pretty nice from what I have seen, and heard from, from developers for the platform. Ever seen MS documentation? Lots of it... too much of it, and none of it is worth reading enough in a mad quest to find something relevent.
2. 2/3's of the OSX system is open source BSD license(actually, I think Darwin is converted to some apple open source license that is very open still, but I could be wrong). But either way, how much more open do they need it?!?!?
Then of course there is that whole, 'whats good the goose is good for the gander issue' with IE vs Netscape and underlying code knowlage advantages.... it all just makes MS look very very dumb.
But yeah, Safari is a better browser than IE. But does this mean that Chimera should quit now because if MS can't make it in the market, then no one can!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Microsoft will kill off first:
Media Player
MSN Messenger
Office
Outlook
Virtual PC
Cowboyneal, but I'll never give up my old fat binary of him.
demonstrate a propensity for evil
Wow, I thought we were describing Bin Laden there...Try looking at other companies -- you'll be suprised how many others demonstrate a propensity for evil. I'm not saying no one has power, I'm just saying: welcome to the world of business. If you don't like it, leave, but life is quickly becoming business.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Wah...
Microsoft has competition so they're going to quit. Poor babies.
This is kinda funny too 'cause normally, when MS has competition, they just buy the company.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
An settlement with AOL settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE? If IE is going to be an integral part of Windows does AOL still need any licensing?
(eom)
Of the times Apple killed off the Windows versions of Final Cut Pro and Shake (you can still get Linux and Irix versions, for twice the price). Let's hope that Digital Domain decides to release their in-house "Nuke" compositing software...
Allow me to advance another theory: The source would be useful to anyone who is developing a mac application where the OS does not appear to be doing precisely what it is supposed to. A skilled programmer could determine whose fault the problem was, and either correct his program, or report an error in the code to Apple, or even send them a patch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If we follow your train of thought we could say that we should thank a bank robber for unknowingly killing an escaped serial killer during a hold up. The ends do not justify the means.
Who said they did?
So we should all be thankful for Microsoft's bullying and exploitation because of one potentially positive side-effect? Microsoft's decision to license DOS instead of selling it outright wasn't for the good of the people, it was for the lining of Bill's pockets.
And? So what? Honestly do you think any computer hardware/software manufactures were in it for "The Good of the People"? Hell even Linux and the OSS is there to push personal political ideals.
Let me put it this way, would you rather live where you couldn't run anything but the hardware makers OS? You've got choice here buddy. And as much as it gauls you, you have Microsoft to thank for it.
Tekka who got screwed over by a dumb ass karma/post system.
Mozilla isn't under the GPL.
The OS X version of IE is a wonderful broswer, aside from the lack of tabs. It is faster, more stable, and all around better than the Windows version.
But we don't need it. OS X has an excellent port of Mozilla, which after over a year of use I can attest is excellent. Safari is also a nice option for users who want a less bloated browser, assuming that those users can tolerate that nasty brushed metal theme.
OS X users have two great browser options, we don't need IE. The only group who needs IE on OS X is Microsoft, and Microsoft has turned tail and run away after getting a nice ass-kicking in the OS X browser war.
OS X continues to prove that Open Source software is not just a niche market for programmers and sysadmins. Now we just need to educate Windows users about the great alternatives to Microsoft's products, and start beating down Redmond's doors.
But the underlying code is.
Someday soon I hope you will understand the difference between GPL and LGPL. I do not hold much hope, however.
Sorry if you think that's a troll, my anonomous friend.
Only a troll would lie like you did. Only a troll would claim that Safari froze his computer (literally impossible), or that Opera is superior (Opera is the worst Mac OS X application I've ever seen, bar none, without exception, and that counts the shit you see on Perversion Tracker.)
Maybe it's just me, but I can't think of a single feature off the top of my head that requires browser integration with the OS.
I suppose ActiveDesktop does, but I don't remember ActiveDesktop as being particularly popular. In fact, I remember seeing IE crashes on the desktop numerous times, and thinking it was a real pain in the neck.
They might be referring to the use of the web browser as a file browser, but that doesn't require integration; you can simply offer that feature, and if people want to use it, they will.
I certainly don't see a giant upswell of people asking to use Safari as the finder, although they certainly could if they wanted to.
Any other features you can think of?
D
Apple has better access to the underlying operating system??? . . . then mozilla and whatever browser must be imaginary sinse nobody had access to "underlying" windows.
Actually, it's probably more 'Hmmm. We're not winning in this market, and we DON'T REALLY CARE to expend the time and effort to, so we're bowing out gracefully. Good luck, have fun, and maybe we'll get together some time.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Before we start... Isn't it Entourage instead of Outlook? And there's a MS Media Player for Mac? First I've heard. I'd be a lot happier, of course, if they'd just port the codecs over the QuickTime.
Anyway... I don't really know the order in which they'll be axed, but I do believe the impact will be minimal unless they axed them all Monday morning. Why? Because all of them either have perfectly good replacements now or they will have easily within a year.
IE for Mac has always been a testing ground for new browser ideas within MS. The IE Mac interface is still miles ahead of the PC version... Also the real world fact is that many sites (to their discredit) depend on one version or another of IE to work properly. This is especially true of Microsoft sites like mappoint. IE was one of Microsofts best weapons on the Mac.
I'm certain Safari will continue to develop (it is already my browser of choice across all platforms), but one of the reasons Safari is so good is that it had something to compete against and a bar with which to measure itself.
I was looking forward to the next version of IE, hoping they would take the challenge offered by Safari and make IE better, faster, more standards compliant & robust, but alas the powers that be have turned tail and run for the hills. This is a sad day for Mac users, and for the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit which had been working on IE improvements for years and which has been consistently slighted by their own company and some in the Mac community.
MS moves to kill the standalone Windows browser and now this, bode ill for the the future...
Mac users still have IE 6. If Microsoft still continue to provide security and performance updates, maybe that's all they need in the next couple of years. IE doesn't made a lot of progress recently anyway. Mean while I hope alternative browsers have time to catch up to challenge the IE dominated web.
Anyway Microsoft made lame excuses in killing IE. They said customers were better served by using Apple's browser? Never heard them admit defeat so soon when Safari does not even have an official release yet. Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system? Safari is open source. I don't know how can they claim competitive disadvantage.
Balmer would then hold a conference to encourage developers to write a good browser.
"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
What he said is bullshit. I did not say that MS were killing off IE on Windows. I just said they were going to stop updating the Internet Explorer as we know it today, and I provided a link for people to visit to get full details. It's not like I mislead anybody. And another thing - I do remember reading that Mac IE is made by another team, but who would concern themselves with remembering that? Microsoft covered their ass already as far as the non-geek population is concerned. They aren't obliged to license for free any software including mac IE.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Nope. The current version of Explorer for Mac is 5.2.2... Presumably 5.2.3 will come out on monday...
I agree, M$ has shown every indication of integrating DRM in the OS with browser and viewer applications. Since they don't control MAC OS and therefore can't mandate DRM at that level, they choose to walk away. Good riddance. I would be more concerned if they kept "embracing & extending" their technology with MAC and Linux versions of IE, WMP, etc. DRM works only if the customer is somehow prevented from opting out. Getting rid of Windoze looks more enticing then ever.
Basically, Mac users will start seeing the same pressure Unix users have seen for the past years - if stuff doesn't work in your Netscape it's just because it's an inferior browser and IE is so much better, people should stop whining and use IE because it's free. Most reasons why sites only work on IE are due to negligence and lack of foresight on the part of the developer (read they could be made to work on all browsers without much effort, were the intent there).
Most banks and credit card companies already support IE only. Last year I did my taxes on hrblock and they insisted to only show the pdf in an embedded page instead of providing a link to download. I had to go to another computer with Windows just to satisfy this unnecessary requirement and get my document. Needless to say next year I'll ask first, but until people start following standards instead of jumping at the latest goodies in IE, we won't get anywhere.
nt
Please folks, Microsoft is no more evil than a tiger. It does what its enviornment has bred it to do, and what every firm in a competitive market is bred to do... it eats and competes.
Save your anger for the Republican administration, the political system, the judicial system and all the people responsible for keeping predators from biting the visitors to the zoo, people like you, me and our children.
The problem is the zoo administration and facilities and the lousy cages the animals are kept in... not the fact that the animals bite.
Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete
This is utter crap. Omnigroup is basing the new Omniweb off of the Safari rendering engine. They can do this because it is open source. Safari's Webcore may be part of OS X now, but the interface is documented and anyone can write a web browser to use it.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I do hope this behavior will be brought to the attention of all the people considering whether they should adopt open source rather than relying exclusively on proprietary software.
Otherwise, you are at their mercy, and they are counting on it!
Gosh, interesting how Apple seems to be able to make a better browser than MS can for their OS that isn't 'embedded' in the OS. ;)
It's also faster under the 'slow' OS X than MS's embedded Windows browser is on Windows, and certainly more standards compliant. Though, to be fair, MS's Mac IE was much better than Windows IE. Maybe Apple could hire away MS's Mac IE team.
You can sign up to get access to the developer tools and documenation for absolutely nothing at http://connect.apple.com
hooray! it's a sex wiki
I imagine the conversation with the guy assigned to work on a mac project a microsoft goes something like this: "come in here jenkins" "yes sir?" "you know those blue green supercomputers, the ones that we guard with tanks?" "yeah.." "well it turns out the potheads that use those things would like to explore the internet.." "hahah! sir, they have but a single button on their mouse! 'tis folly! wouldn't they be happier with some sort of egg or pod? We could even make some sort of cube! if you're high and time is blurred, it's almost like a hypercube." "I don't know what you're going on about, jenkins. I think mac users are mostly mammals." "sir you miss my point.." "silence! report to the macintosh bunker immediately!". So now this poor sap is on a mac, trying to write software. Twitching either his pointer or middle finger clicks the same button. He cries, now a hapless programmer held to a dungeon wall by an ADB chain. Engineering mac software is like trying to build a flying canoe: hopefully you can bludgeon someone with the oars and make your escape.
..if you're a Microsoft developer, and used to having access to all the hidden widgets, maybe you do need low level know-how.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Are any Mac users crying their eyes out over this one? All my experiences with IE for OSX have been exceedingly unpleasant. It seems to me that Microsoft is just reducing some of the clutter in the market.
Actually, IE5 for Mac is the best version of IE by far. It is the only one that renders CSS properly, for example.
Jeremy
Give me a break, M$ is just using this as more fodder in their "look we have strong competition in many different products!". Since they dont make any money on msie anyway, just gives them more time/money to spend upgrading/pushing their pos office/etc apps.
You know, consumers do NOT need fuking application upgrades every other year. It just makes administration of them a pain in the ass.
Maybe every govt. will mandate open source (if just india/china do, thats 1/3 of the worlds population!)
Microsoft-we create marketing to make you think you need us...BUT YOU DONT!
Alternately, this could spell big trouble for Apple. How will my Mom feel when she can't check her mutual funds using her Macintosh because the browser isn't compatible?
The same way my mom feels when she goes to a site that is IE specific and doesn't support even the most basic of web standards.
Mad.
But, as she has been informed by her son on Microsoft's efforts to deliberately break software compatability and internet standards in order for force their customers to use their product rather than the product of their choice, her anger is aimed squarely at the web site (or more precisely, at the company it represents) and at Microsoft, not at GNU/Linux or her browser.
She finds a competitor who is standards compliant and buys from them instead.
And guess what. She loves her Linux box, and will "give it up only when they pry it from her cold, dead hands." She is living proof that Linux is more than ready for the desktop, and not only usable, but often preferred, by those who are not computer literate and simply want to be able to use a machine simply, and without random crashes or data loss. Something Linux gives her, and Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver in nigh 20 years.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Everybody is raving about why IE would be better or not then Safari, but that really is not the question. Look at the future: Which functions would require that IE is incorperated into the OS? THAT really is the question. I think that MS would like to operate as a bank in the future: the company that not only sets the rules for online transactions by implementing features in the browser, but also by tightly integrating the hardware and software to create a trusted platform.
In other words: you only can buy something online if:
A) you're using the new chip Intel wil make in near future
B) are authorized through MS and their software and
C) pay MS a fee for the service they are providing.
That way MS can make much, much more money then simply providing software. Apple is out of their reach in all three points mentioned, so work on a new version of IE/Mac would not lead to the new role I think MS is persuing, Safari or no Safari.
The big question is, will Apple (and Linux) be in the position to offer the same trusted computing as MS/Intel will be able to. And if not, would the user of not-IE-software public be able to do ANYTHING online in future, like wachting online movies, engaging in online banking or alter your own medical files...
I'm no programmer or an Apple-expert, but I've always understood that MacOsX is based on Darwin and Darwin is Open Source. Only the Aqua-stuff isn't. So why is Microsoft saying it can't compete because "Apple has better access to the underlying operating system"? Please enlighten me.
Yeah, that must be rough. Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC.
what are you complaining about? you hate MS, obviously. If there are other better products then what's wrong with MS stopping the developement of their own for apple?
Anyone who is a ./ reader can attest to the fact that when Safari was first release as a beta browser, a lot of people came out to proclaim the superiority of Safari over IE5, which is true. So now MS is announcing no more IE upgrades, except for security fixes, and there you go again all bark like little puppets with no milk. It's not like there is a browser shortage anyway on OSX. It's their product, and if they don't want to support it, that's their money. If you don't like it, go write your own, and this is what Apple did with Safari.
I don't care what browser people use, as long as it has good CSS support!
And IE qualifies how?
OK, that's an exaggeration. But it breaks standards compliant webpages in so many ways that you end up doing the masochism tango to dance around all of them: the 3 pixel text jog, the broken box model of 5.x, element height issues, clears influencing elements outside of their containing block, the lack of fixed positioning, the funny way bullet images are positioned. Thanks to Microsoft, CSS is black magic.
I agree that it's better than the witches brew of tag soup you have to live with when supporting the abortion that is Netscape 4.x. But...
"don't use Netscape 4". Most of the cube dwellers have no idea there is anything else- and people that do know there are other choices ignore my suggestions anyway- which is fine.
If they're using Netscape 4, you could reasonably expect that they'd be willing to upgrade to Netscape 7 if they have any kind of broadband connection... or even Mozilla. The pop-up blocker *alone* should be reason enough, not to mention better rednering speeds and CSS support -- because yes, some of us have already decided that Netscape 4 needs to die, and unless a client insists, we don't support it. NS4 users get unstyled content -- it's still accessible, since it's good to do that anyway -- but nothin' pretty.
Tweet, tweet.
Apple should port Safari to Windows along with all of the Cocoa libraries. Tell developers that if they develop in Cooca, a windows port is just a re-compile away. Without Cocoa on Windows, you not only have to re-write everything you have to change languages too!
....same strategy as the iPods....
Windows actually started as a set of libraries for DOS programs to add GUIs. The library's popularity helped Windows beat out GEM and OS/2 and achieve total world domination. Apple could pull a similar trick with Win-Cocoa.
If apple ported the Cocoa Foundation, AppKit, and WebKit to windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. a lot of developers would develop in Cocoa simply because of how wonderful Cocoa is.... and even if Cocoa apps ran under Windows and Linux, they would still run best on OS X on a Mac
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Actually, it was Bugs that said "Of course you realize this means war." Daffy said "Of course you know this means war." "Know" vs. "realize" is a tiny difference, but if you want to pick nits, pick them right.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I got my fist mac a few weeks ago and the first thing I did was ditch IE for Mozilla. If you've ever used IE on a mac its the biggest piece of trash ever. So instead of M$ putting resources towards fixing their crappy software they're ditching it. Long live Mozilla and Safari!
Actually, no you don't. If you take a look at Microsoft's site here, you can download a free version of Microsoft Outlook 2001 designed for connecting to Exchange servers only (read: no non-MS mail servers). It's not completely like Outlook for Windows, but it'll at least get Mac users talking to their company's Exchange mail servers.
If they're using Netscape 4, you could reasonably expect that they'd be willing to upgrade to Netscape 7 if they have any kind of broadband connection... or even Mozilla.
Broadband? The Mozilla appsuite is a smaller download than Netscape 4.x. Just start the download, put it in the background for an hour while you browse Slashdot, and by the time you've trolled every discussion, it'll be done, even on 56K dial-up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You bring up a good point. I believe there is a standard for calendar and contact MIME attachments. If you had an IMAP server, you could duplicate the MS functionality of Exchange "contact" folders by having a folder full of (null) emails with such attachments. On the mac, you could lightly integrate iCal with Mail to achieve this. Same thing with the Address book. Those 3 apps together would be not only the Mac Entourage/Outlook killer, they'd be the Exchange killer too! Now that would be insanely great.
who cares about apple. people follow apple almost like it's a fad. they aren't superior machines, you can't play games, you can't do as much as you can on a pc. im glad more of microsoft's software is being taken away from them.
why do people still use apple machines?
oh wait...?
~werd~
Let's just talk about the claim the Microsoft can't compete with Safari because it doesn't have the underlying source code. Sure, it might not have access to quartz and aqua, but guess what? Darwin's open source. So are most implimentations of KHTML, if you want to get technical about it. It's not like, say, Windows, where the source code is secret, copyrighted, locked up... and where the person who has access to the source code can actually use that to make speed improvements (and security holes.) No IE for Mac? Fine with me. I deleted the damn thing anyway. Between Mozilla, Safari, Chimera, Omniweb, Opera, and the various browsers I can get working on AppleX11, I've got more choices for browsers on my Mac than I do for windows!
Quickime, Quicktime Streaming Server, Web Objects, Filemaker Pro, and for a while Apple (then Claris) Works.
There might be other apps but those are the ones I know of.
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
Only a troll would claim that Safari froze his computer (literally impossible)
I like Safari. I use Safari every day. Safari once froze my computer and I had to ssh in to kill the process.... though I suspect it was some bad java causing indigestion for my old G3 -which you may not want to blame Safari for.
Since I have experienced something that you think is impossible, I must be a troll and it is your high duty to mod me down....
But first, you might want to spend a few minutes with google and find out what a troll really is. Dipshit.
Perhaps a case could be made for the post as flamebait, but it is most certainly not a troll.
And if you're moderating, you shouldn't post to a discussion as an A/C or under another log in. That makes you an ass in addition to being a dipshit.
And since I'm bitching about moderators and burning Karma today anyway.... why are all of the standard pro-MS and anti-MS rants getting modded up instead of modded as off-topic? Such moderation is only decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio. It's hard to find any actual discussion of Safari or what this means for Apple.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Seriously, the Moderators today suck! Mod stuff up that is on-topic and insightful and Mod down that standard MS-bashing offtopic stuff that we may agree with, but we've all heard before. It's not September already!
Remember that Clinton signed the DMCA and CDA into law.
.... Emperor Gates is pulling out! Our operation: safari resistance has succeded! We need to send out the Jaquar tanks finish the Jobs. Good thing we have the Linux Penguin battleships on our side or this war against tyranny would've been over long ago. Vive le resistance! .... Ah! I had that nightmare again where Bill Gates took over the world again...
Apple currently has about 3.5% marketshare but marketshare and installed base are two different statistics.
Mac users and Mac based industries use Macs longer before replacing them. A printer I work with has a 10 year old Mac running his image setter. "Why don't you upgrade?" "Still works." he answers."
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
Personally, I think MS just wants to drop IE for MacOS.
This leaves several questions.
MSN for OSX includes a web browser. Based on a review i've read, it handles diffrently then IE so it's probably something else. Has MS has created something new or they are using third-party technology to provide web access?
Since AOL settled, they now have a license to use IE again. Will they switch to IE on the Mac, even thought it essentially dead or continue transitioning to Gecko? MS killing Mac IE may give AOL a good reason to keep Netscape Around.
Also, a MS spokesperson said, "Some of the key customer requests for Web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,". So how did developers add tabs to the open source browser Camino? Note: Camino's interface is native. It doesn't use cross platform widgets like Mozilla.
~Scott
The difference between IE and Office though is that Microsoft wasn't making any money off of IE. Let's think about this. It costs money to keep a product updated and to continue supporting it. If Apple is willing to take this job over for Microsoft, why not? Microsoft is simply doing the economic thing.
Unfortunately though IE has become something of a pseudo-standard. There's already one too many websites out there that require a user to be using Internet Explorer, and even a few that will stop the user from entering unless they're using Internet Explorer. A number of undereducated website admins haven't even looked at Mozilla and tried to get it to work, considering the only IE security flaw, sorry, I mean "feature", that doesn't work to any extent in Mozilla, under windows, is ActiveX controls. Granted ActiveX isn't going to work well on a Mac either, but for some reason a number of sites check specifically for IE.
If you want to look at where IE for the mac is, take a look at IE for the PC. Neither have been updated in a good amount of time, nor have there been any significant features added in either. Feature-wise both are very much behind Mozilla, which has such nifty things as Tabbed Browsing and built-in popup blocking which is superior to any add-on for IE.
~Noodle
Microsoft really means "the ability to overwrite and combine IE and the API"
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
It's funny how when you say something true, it's considered a troll, but when you say something false, it's considered a joke.
Hell, I'd like to see a 98-Lite style setup where you can replace the IE rendering crap in Windows 9x with a trimmer, lighter, more standards-compliant khtml.dll.
You wouldn't be able to keep your Windows as up-to-date because Windows Update relies on proprietary features (read ActiveX controls) of MSHTML.dll.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Microsoft will do what they can to stay on top of the OS market, but the server products are being pursued for a whole other reason.
E-commerce.
Microsoft is simply expanding into other markets to ensure stability and future financial growth. Would you argue that the X-box is an attempt to lock people into using Windows and Office?
-Lucas
I have to say that IE for Mac OS X gets my top billing for worst computer program ever. I had used IE 4 and 5 regularly under OS 8-9, and when I installed OS X beta I figured that version of IE would be pretty much the same, being a straight port. Boy, was I ever wrong. IE under Public Beta and 10.0 was the slowest program on my machine to launch, was terribly slow at loading pages, and would occasionally crash when I tried to access certain websites. Granted, there could be other factors involved in this, namely my dialup, the relative speed of my computer (400MHz G3), and the fact that both PB and 10.0 were essentially unfinished releases; but that doesn't change the fact that whenever I searched out an IE alternative, invariably its performance was far superior to IE. Even a full install of Mozilla, with all its infamous bloat, was consistently more stable and usable than IE, if somewhat uglier. With the advent of Camino and now Safari, I personally have no reason to use IE. I haven't used it regularly since a brief spurt in the early 10.1 days when my Moz install mysteriously broke. It's still installed on this iBook (for some reason), but I've launched it maybe twice in a half-year of ownership. Under OS 9, sure, IE was pretty good. But I'm never going to use it again under OS X.
Apple has no extra tie-ins with Safari. Everyone who knows anything knows this. Mozilla's Camino and Firebird kick IE ass. Camino is VERY close to Safari in terms of speed, and its more mature, when Safari catches up to Mozilla, they will be the same speed. Its hardly noticable to me right now. IE blows chunks and has for a while now. It was obvious to many of us that IE was not being supported well, and that it was only a matter of time before MS completely integrated IE into the OS. (Although I thought it would be years with the anti-trust keeping them on the mac. But as we have seen the weak settlement is not even being followed...and to no surprise.) As nice as the irony may seem, there is NO IRONY here. Apple has NO advantage other than its browser is based on KHTML. And all the other open source browsers are much better than IE. The disadvantage is bloated IE and small development group. (closed source) I expect Slashdot to know better, but the rest the world will fall for it and see it as "Ironic". It will also be interpreted by some as a blessing of the extreme bundling MS does. Everone else does it correctly, or more correctly-- they loosely couple their software. The unix paradyms are followed. MS tightly couples everything. MS can never understand unix.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Maybe there never should have been a "browser industry".
The following is from "Weaving the Web", by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), page 117:
I don't understand what all the complaining is about.
(1) Tight integration with the operating system was part of the vision quoted above, so Microsoft is merely following through on the vision.
(2) Some could argue, Apple is also following through this vision, by providing their own browser.
(3) Microsoft's decision doesn't change the fact that Mozilla is still open source.
(4) Opera has one less competitor to worry about on the Macintosh platform.
Just for your information. Today is June 14, 2003. That's right - 2003, already (surprised?). And today people use the current version of Netscape, which is 7. Some of them. Because the most of non-IE users prefer Mozilla. Well, some strange non-IE users prefer to see ads in Opera or to money for the browser, but they are really weird. The other group of strange users prefer a KDE-based browser (which stinks in its standard compliance comparing to Mozilla) - either Konqueror or Safari. But the most of people, those who don't like IE UI, IE standard compliance, IE bugs and IE binding to the single OS, they prefer Mozilla. Which has a very nice tab-based UI, opened sources, the widest range of OS/arch platforms, and of course the best standard compliance.
So, my friend. Time to wake up and tell you customers up front: Mozilla.
Less is more !
The version of IE that they had for OS X was buggy, held over from OS 9, and crashed pretty often, necessitating a visit to the Force Quit option. Despite the fact that it worked as an effective demo of how and why to Force Quit (and how rock-solid the OS was after), it's nice to have an OS that doesn't crash with one less app that does crash.
Now, if they'd just harden up or cancel Excel X.. that thing breaks like.. well, something that breaks a lot.
The market needs more diversity in terms of browsers and operating systems. If Mac users can't use the crutch of a browser that calls itself "IE" (but really is different from IE on Windows) anymore, then web site designers (many of whom are Mac users) may finally get the hint that they should write standards compliant HTML, not something that "works for most users".
I think Apple and Macintosh will not suffer from this. The Mac is about style, consistency, and appearance, and removal of IE will, if anything, improve the style of the Mac, since IE for Mac never quite fit in with the Mac UI.
I thought Safari was open source. Am I mistaken?
A thought just occurred to me, and scanning the comments here, I didn't see anything about it. (I don't browse lower than +1, so if I missed it, I'm sorry.)
;-)
What's stopping Microsoft from wrapping their own GUI around WebCore? If Omni can use it, Microsoft can, too.
Pride? Legal issues? Apathy? Arrogance?
They could easily adopt it, augment it with extra services, and wrap it in a cute (/sarcasm) MSN-style GUI. Problem solved.
"Embrace and extend" is policy, right?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
For a long time I was an IE user. My machine would constantly fill up with spyware and adbots because of ActiveX. I tried disabling ActiveX and browsing was almost impossible because of IE's insistance of notifying me about every page that has ActiveX disabled. Could not stop these dialog boxes, and I got tired of it. I tried Opera and Mozilla, and I now I am a tried and true user of Mozilla. Although I have experienced some minor crashes with it, I'm willing to put up with these because my machine no longer fills up with spybots. Mozilla is superior to IE and the only way for others to know this is to explain them what the advantages are. Something free of questionable value is not really worth much.
In my mind, I think that IE dieing on the Mac is a good thing. Those sites that only code to IE's standards will now have to rethink that policy if they don't want to lose Mac users.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Netscape? I suppose it's still there, though most of the comercial bits are slowly being replaced by the Mozilla project. Oh yeah, that's a hoot too, Mozilla works better on w2k than IE does, despite M$'s advantageous position as owner of the OS. MicroSoft always did sound sort of shrivled and powerless.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If the API doesn't do what it is told, you can really expect developers to start talking about it. And if that's what happens, then you can surely expect it to end up on the Apple Developer mailing lists.
Oh, wait, you didn't know that you can get in contact with Apple engineers? Gee, maybe that's because you're fucking uninformed.
If the API is misbehaving, report it. You don't need the fucking source to tell you that. Jeez, when will these slashbots stop it with the 'open the source, make the world a better place', forgetting that:
Thank you
is that for a couple of years, IE 5/5.1 was by far the best browser on MacOS 9.x. MS basically ported it to OS X and called it 5.2 and it's pretty much been languishing since. I wonder what happens with MS's Media player (a clumsy, bloated, buggy, piece of crap). Will they now bow out of the Mac platform an concede to Quicktime's clear superiority (ever try to scan quickly through an audio or video file with MS's player on Mac?) But the real question regards MS Office. Media Player and IE bring no direct revenue to MS. The same cannot be said for Office. Media player is inferior to Quicktime's player and IE has been eclipsed by Mozilla (finally) and now Safari. None of the open-source office replacements are ready for prime-time yet. (ThinkFree might be close - I haven't used it on X yet).
I'm not a zealot of any OS, use both Linux and Windows, but Apple seems just as shady as Microsoft, they're just not as good at it. Apple wonâ(TM)t sell their operating system for none Apple hardware, hell they don't even allow companies to make Macs the way any manufacturer can make and sell IBM compatible hardware. They sue every company that makes a PC the same color or size as a Mac and have copyrighted the name Apple (the word Apple was never used before 1980?). And most atrocious is their taking of open source software in the form of using Darwin for the under lying Mac OS along with other system tools and don't give back to the open source community by releasing the Aqua interface to the open source world. Seems like if you're going to take, you should also give back. I'm not claiming M$ isn't as bad as a company as some here think, but simply don't understand the love affair with Mac. In my opinion they are equally if not more an unethical company as Microsoft. Theyâ(TM)re just not as successful for theyâ(TM)re too afraid or incompetent to make Mac OS available to the X86 world and allow other manufactures to make Mac compatible hardware. They did something right by moving to a *nix kernel, so theyâ(TM)ve just expanded the software that run on Macs by 100, but just imagine what they could do if they released Mac OS to the x86 world? How long would it be before they were the dominate OS? The power and stability of UNIX and the eye candy of Apple would be a hard combination to beat. But theyâ(TM)re too greedy and too short sighted to release it. Mac OS is the only reason people by their hardware for its less powerful and much more expensive than PC equivalents, so if they did open up the Mac OS to the PC world, then they would most likely shift to a software only company. Would they make more selling just software than they do now? Iâ(TM)d bet they could take on M$ and be much more successful.
You forgot to call Apple 'beleaguered'.
Most web sites ensure they work with IE. Many of these sites don't care much about other browsers. This means that IE is the de facto standard of the web. If I go to a site that OmniWeb doesn't handle well (typically commercial sites), that's when I fire up IE on my Mac.
More people use IE/Mac than OmniWeb. Therefore, web designers are far more likely to design with IE's rendering bugs in mind. A less-buggy browser/renderer like Safari/WebCore or Camino/Gecko is much easier to design for.
That's step one of the real threat. Step two is this: If IE doesn't run on the Mac, then there is no de facto standard browser on the Mac.
But IE does run on the Mac. This announcement only says that they aren't going to develop new versions. Just like they already announced for Windows. In other words, they're saying that IE will languish and die. Thank god for that.
Step three: The Mac market is small enough that many of the mainstream sites may just not care. You know how much they care about Linux-based browsers right now.
Nearly every browser for Mac or Linux is either Gecko- (Mozilla, Camino, Firebird, Galleon, Epiphany) or KHTML- (Konquerer, Safari, forthcomming versions of OmniWeb) based. They're also far more standards compliant than IE. So, really, one has to try hard to not work right across these browsers. I'm sure a lot of these "mainstream" sites put a lot of effort into being incompatable.
Step four: With a seemingly flakey web experience, who besides the real die-hards would buy a Mac? This means that Apple is in a life-or-death race to be fully IE compatible.
HA HA HA HA! Flakey web experience? Safari? HA HA! Life-or-death race for IE-compatability? HA!
Step five: Who controls what IE does? Do I even have to mention step five?
Checkmate.
Um, no. Far from it actually. All Microsoft is doing is saying that they're going to stop making their shitty browser. Whoopty shit. Apple's got a much better one.
Unless web sites chose to be more generally compatible and test with some Mac-based browser, they can easily and accidentally become incompatible with Macs.
Currently they don't have to ask the question because Mac IE is almost the same as Windows IE.
HA HA HA HA! Sorry, but you're very wrong in that regard. Yes, they do share a few of the same rendering bugs, but by and large, they require whole different workarounds. I know quite a few web designers (I used to myself, but tired of it), and all of them design for standards-compliant browsers, only using hacks and workarounds to make sure that IE's own stupidity doesn't fuck up the site. I had a friend spend three hours trying to get one box to line up correctly in IE/Win only to discover that the workaround he used broke it in IE/Mac. It worked perfectly in Safari, Camino, Mozilla, and Firebird, and reasonably in Opera and OmniWeb.
This puts Apple in a very bad position.
Yes, having the world's most agressively competitive software company stop competing with you is a very bad position, indeed.
There's always Display Ghostscript. It probably has the potential to become as pretty as Quartz.
I have not heard about IE 6.1 from these stories.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
They argumented as if Apple would be do the same as M$.
Thats not the case.
Everything is there to write a great browser. If they can't do it, its just their fault - as Windows.
I do all of my development work in Dreamweaver, mostly on a Mac, but sometimes on a PC. As a result, IE is one of several browsers I check against.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has done a tremendous job in getting market saturation with FrontPage. Since FP services the low end of the web development market, it stands to reason that a significant amount (if not a majority, I don't know) of web sites are developed with FP. And obviously, using FP is the easiest way to create IE-only sites.
Apple wonâ(TM)t sell their operating system for none Apple hardware, hell they don't even allow companies to make Macs the way any manufacturer can make and sell IBM compatible hardware.
Uh, they did it for a while in the 90's and it almost killed the company, so they stopped it.
They sue every company that makes a PC the same color or size as a Mac
Uh, it's called "trade dress," and they were certainly right to do it for some of those blatant iMac ripoffs. Same with the Aqua skins for Windows-- because there are plenty of people in this country who'd be dumb enough to think that a Windows machine with that skin was actually running OS X, and would develop a negative opinion of OS X as a result. If you don't think people in this country are sufficiently dumb for that to happen, I've got two words for you: WWE. NASCAR.
And most atrocious is their taking of open source software in the form of using Darwin for the under lying Mac OS along with other system tools and don't give back to the open source community by releasing the Aqua interface to the open source world. Seems like if you're going to take, you should also give back.
Uh, Aqua is one of the major things that makes a Mac a Mac. Apple was in a five year long lawsuit over the look and feel of their OS, and now you think they're just gonna give it to the Linux herd? Puhleeze! Furthermore, if you want examples of Apple "giving back," look at Safari.
just imagine what they could do if they released Mac OS to the x86 world?
Uh, they'd go out of business in about six months to a year, because you cheap fucks wouldn't buy Apple hardware if you could avoid it. Get this fact through your thick fucking skull, moron: Apple is a HARDWARE company. Their software is what sells their hardware. Their hardware sales are what fund their software R&D. You remove half of that equation and Apple ceases to exist.
These things have all been discussed on here ad infinitum, I guess you've been jerking off to pr0n in a cave on the dark side of the moon for the last year or so.
BTW, please tell us if you think Apple hardware is still crap after June 23, when they release the 970-based machines.
Who was the judge in the anti-trust suit who reserved the right to continue watching M$ arse for anti-competitive practices????? This should definately be brought up.
It has the potential to become as pretty as DOLPWEED!
A student of mine recently created a rather wonderful PowerPoint presention on her very nice Mac laptop (I'm quite jealous). Upon learning that none shall be permitted to use their own laptops at the conference next week, she transferred her PowerPoint slides to a W2K machine to test drive the talk.
The slides fail utterly to work, despite Microsoft's assurances of complete compatibility between the W2K and Apple versions of PowerPoint.
Thanks, Microsoft! Thanks a whole big bunch!
I think I'm going to eat some asparagus, drive over to Redmond, and pee on their shrubbery.
your not straight on your facts. Apple shows how it should be done. Job's philosophy is all about HOW you play the game not in winning and losing. Gates is all about winning at any cost. The companies largely reflect thier dictator ceos. But somehow with Apple, the stock advisors don't like how Jobs has all people who think like him. But for Gates, who did the SAME thing, they don't say anything. That is the philosophical difference between the two, and it has effected their companies to a large degree. Apple has to make money, so does MS. But MS is only 1 step away from killing people; while Apple is continually bordering on death according to the constant reports for the last 15 years. Perhaps the HARDWARE market needs to come back. It used to be hardware was the biz, and software was junk that came with it. Now its the opposite world. Apple WILL release their software, if not open source it ALL the SAME DAY the market switches back to being HARDWARE DRIVEN. And that will never happen, because somebody (dell) will exploit the market's software and provide cheap hardware while doing nothing to contribute to the industry.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Having fewer uses. For instance, having much less software available for it. Having much less hardware available for it.
So, in other words, you're simply trolling...
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
But still, since I've got karma to burn and I like
taking the bait from time to time, here goes. With
the exception of a few software suites, anything
you can find for 'doze has an analog on the Mac.
There might not be as much, but it's there. Same
goes for hardwae. But you knew that, either that
or you're far more ignorant than you should be.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Then it hit me. I was mispronouncing it as DOO-bi-ya and misreading it as the Russian Parliment -- which is actually the Duma -- instead of a Southern phonetic spelling of "double 'u'" or "w". Christ.
are their degrees of success? I would agree with that and the point of my original post. Apple is not some benevolent, loveable company acting out the best interest of the user, they are just as greedy and shady as M$, their only M$ is a lot better at being a greedy monopoly.
mosaic is the best!
Please remove your tongue from Bill's ass, it's unseemly.
The only two ways I can think of somebody making a site not work on anything other than IE is to use Javascript, or pull some Apache tricks out of their hat. To tell you the truth, not many web designers I know of can even tell you what mod_rewrite is, soooo.
If you can't access something because it "only works in IE" why not just turn off javascript for a second? No javascript, no browser detection, almost no problem.
---------------
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I would say that this is one of the most insightful statements that I 've seen regarding the whole Microsoft situation. Yes, It is popular to bash Microsoft, but I think that they have done so much to deserve it. I think that the parent post is a very plausible explanation of Microsoft's goals and strategies. My only reservation is that I think banking and brokering is small potatoes. Once Microsoft has these sewn up, ALL online commerce would have to pass through a Microsoft product. That's where the money is. The bank can connect securely (in a proprietary format) to both your computer and the merchants computer.
It's a good idea, but I don't think that anyone should trust the words Microsoft and security to go together.
Actually, it's a really old amendment:
Here's a clip from FindLaw
Referred to the state legislatures at the same time as those proposals that eventually became the Bill of Rights, the congressional pay amendment had long been assumed to be dead. This provision had its genesis, as did several others of the first amendments, in the petitions of the States ratifying the Constitution. It, however, was ratified by only six States (out of the eleven needed), and it was rejected by five States. Aside from the idiosyncratic action of the Ohio legislature in 1873, which ratified the proposal in protest of a controversial pay increase adopted by Congress, the pay limitation provision lay dormant until the 1980s. Then, an aide to a Texas legislator discovered the proposal and began a crusade that culminated some ten years later in its proclaimed ratification.
Now that the provision is apparently a part of the Constitution, it will likely play a minor role. What it commands was already statutorily prescribed, and, at most, it may have implications for automatic cost-of-living increases in pay for Members of Congress.
Not even if they GPL Windows, Office, change the Windows Kernel to Linux or legalize hacking the Xbox... as long as you're the biggest, that translates into more antagony. It doesn't matter what you do. I'm not defending M$, that's just the truth, it's human nature. We critisize our bosses, the government, big companies...etc... The good thing on the other hand, is that the Open Source initiative is a step towards doing something about it.
Looking at IE, I wonder if MS lacks access to the Windows OS too
For how many decades have we all been doing things the old-fashioned way, using brick and mortar, mailing bills using the Postal Service, going to the bank when we need to do banking, etc..
Apple Computers are far from DIY enthusiast boxes. I suppose it's one thing to build your own Linux machine; someone who enjoys doing that may be in a minority of users simply becase not all users want to build their own computer from the ground up, but Apples are ready-to-go computers out of the box, more or less. They are not designed only for people who know a lot about computers.
The responsibility falls on the web sites themselves to support more browser options. There will always be those sites that only support MS products and protocols, but it's also important to realize that we have been living without those products for decades. I don't think that we will ever seriously get to the point where a person will be unable to function in society if they don't have a PC.
To say that someone who chooses and Apple computer is going to be missing out, in my opinion, is unrealistic. The responsibility does not fall with the end-user to buy PC architecture and run MS products, the responsibility is with the web designers to make sites that interact with a variety of platforms.
This Windows-only world is going to realize, sooner or later, that they can effectively generate additional revenue if they also cater to users of other platforms, and any investement they make to increase the diversity of user agents that their applications work with will more than pay for itself.
I would not give anyone a hard time for using any platform. Using Windows, that's great! Using Linux, that's great! Using OS X, great! Why would I want my website, or application, or service, to be available to only a certain user of a certain OS or OS/user agent combo?
If you actually look at the link (which compares CSS Support in a range of browsers) you gave, technically MSN for Mac OS X (which is basically the newest version of IE:Mac) clearly supports more "stuff" than WebCore/KHTML (and quite comparable to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine as well). There's a lot of new work put into standards-support in Microsoft's new Mac browser based on the chart.
And too bad, no one has seemed to noticed.
Which is too bad considering how much work the IE:Mac crew put into this new browser. Check out Tantek's log (he's part of Microsoft's IE:Mac team) about his disappointment with the news.
IE:Mac was special in that it brought a lot of innovation to the browser arena: Find as you Type, Text Zoom, Doctype switching and many more.
With the exception of a few software suites, anything you can find for 'doze has an analog on the Mac.
I prefer digital.
There might not be as much, but it's there. Same goes for hardwae.
Hmm, and I thought the whole point of this article was that IE was dropping support for Mac. So that means there will be no support for any website which requires IE.
As for hardware, there is currently no support for any of the wireless cards for Verizon Wireless on the Mac.
Chairman Jobs announced today the unquestioned victory of Internet Explorer. The Maximum Leader stated that because Internet Explorer had been so successful in developing and marketing a browser, his favorite browser, at no cost to Apple, that as a gesture of goodwill, he will be shutting it down. Workers formerly of the Internet Explorer division are instructed to report to the trainyards tomorrow at 0600 hours for transportation to re-education camps.
In other news, the Central News Service is reporting today that thousands of happy customers of OS X are thrilled to not receive any new version of IE, or any usable version of Netscape, for OS X. Instead, the users are receiving beta versions of Safari, which displays web pages correctly more than 60% of the time. "I am so thrilled to be getting this beta software instead of my old browser" says happy Apple customer Joe Schwatz. "Now I can cut down on my time spent browsing because no longer will so many sites be readable as they were intended. I am so happy I think I will compose a song praising Chairman Jobs for this wonderful event!"
Said user Jamie Greuel, "Praise this, the first step. One day there will be no Microsoft software, no Adobe software, no Quark software, to confound us. One day we shall never again be bothered by non-Apple software or non-Apple web sites. Praise be the one true Apple way!"
(With thanks to http://www.turnleft.org/apple/ )
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
I never said Safari supported more than IE, I said it has support for most stuff. I /did/ say that Microsoft said it was better than IE, and they're right. It's faster, smaller, and is more multithreaded than IE has ever been.
It's too bad you didn't seem to notice.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Hail internet explorer on the Mac!
You were first on ten but then again,
please fade away and don't look back.
We'll use Safari and gently say 'Amen'
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
But they did technically update IE for Mac OS X. What would have been the next IE version was instead bundled into MSN for Mac OS X.
The sad part is that this new IE is now one of the most standard-compliant browsers around. Just look at this CSS Support Chart. Tantek (an IE:Mac developer) hints even more support. From the chart, it's better than Safari and comparable to Mozilla. But no one seems to have notice.
Which is a shame on Microsoft for hiding this great new browser under MSN. With all the fan-fare on the (not-free) MSN look and feel, the technically superiority of the new IE:Mac rendering engine gets lost.
Thank you for getting that axing that piece of crap IE for Mac. If you will please do the same for your other Macintosh software, we can have a utopian platform devoid of shitty code.
Seriously, though, I bought a 12" iBook not too long ago, and it came bundled with MSIE as the default browser! This was during the early days for Safari, and I would understand if Apple HAD to ship a browser, but damn.
Microsoft is killing IE. Period. Not killing IE for Mac or Windows or Unix or anything.
See this article. It just looks like MS isn't making IE anymore for any platform.
Microsoft saved Apple. Period.
Well not directly. The recent buyoff from M$ to AOL/netscape is part of the war plan. Netscape will be degraded to a niche browser like opera and konqueror. This will mean that official institutions like e.g. banks will only design/allow IE as the official supported broswer. netscape site support will be removed. M$ wants to have their latest IE browser only on windows machines. The apple/IE story is IMHO part of the new policy.
Robert
I think while the core of Internet Explorer 6.01 SP1 for Windows 98/Me/2000/XP won't be updated, you may still see a number of Service Packs being released that may increase the functionality of the browser. I forsee Service Packs down the pipe that will do the following:
.PNG graphics files.
1. Provide better web page standards support, including better rendering of
2. Introduction of the Sidebar, something that was in early betas of IE 6.0 but was left out of the final edition. It will be highly customizable, much more so than what you see in Netscape 7.02 or the latest Mozilla builds.
3. Possible introduction of tabbed browsing for easier handling of multiple web pages.
I like being able to scrub through the clip and actually see the image, a feature Windows Media Player lacks. In fact, anything involving moving the playhead works horribly.
So QuickTime beats Media Player easily, in my judgement, anyway.
D
I don't think it's Alfred E. Neumann
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The "Automatic" choice is to have it identify itself as Safari. Not quite the AI engine you thought it was.
I don't think Microsoft will want to kill virtual PC off and the reason for that is that Microsoft is a software company at heart. Having Virtual PC around means that they can sell Windows to Mac users as well as PC users. Microsoft doens't care if you run on a Mac or a PC because as long as you also buy a copy of Windows, they will be happy!
Killing office for the Mac might happen to make more people buy Virtual PC, Windows AND Office as well as put the squeeze on Apple a bit more since Mac users would have to pay a LOT more to get all three of those together just to run office.
Apple would definately do well to start work on their own office software and make sure it stays compatible with MS Office to alleviate that threat. Better yet, they should pick up a copy of a current open source office package and improve it and send all changes back. If they helped make OpenOffice or some such thing run better on Linux and Windows, it would let Apple be the one to put the crunch on Microsoft instead.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
13 June 2003 :::
:::
5 pm est
R.I.P.
The rumors flew all day, but we held off writing about this until we had it from an unimpeachable source. Jimmy Grewal is a key member of the Mac Internet Explorer team and a stand-up guy. He confirms that IE5/Mac is dead.
There is much that could be said. IE5/Mac, with its Tasman rendering engine, was the first browser to deliver meaningful standards compliance to the market, arriving in March, 2000, a few months ahead of Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6. On a mailing list today, Netscapeâ(TM)s Eric Meyer said, âoe I donâ(TM)t think people realize just how much of a groundbreaker IE5/Mac really was, and how good it remains even today.â IE5/Mac introduced innovations like DOCTYPE switching and Text Zoom that soon found their way into comparably compliant browsers like Navigator, Konqueror, and Safari. And all but Text Zoom eventually made it into IE6/Win, Microsoftâ(TM)s most compliant Windows browser to date (and the last one they will ever make).
Bafflingly, after attaining dominance on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, IE stopped evolving. In the past three years, its existing competitors at Netscape, Opera, and the open source Mozilla project greatly improved their browsers, and new competitors flooded the market, but IE/Win and IE/Mac stayed as they were.
This might sound like the complacence of victors after throttling an opposing army. But inside Microsoft, nobody was slacking off. Our friends there, we knew, were working on improvements, particularly in the areas of CSS and DOM support. Yet no significantly new browser version ever came of their activity. IE6/Win still had trouble with parts of CSS1, still did not support true native PNG transparency, and still did not incorporate Text Zoom. IE5/Mac, which had worked well in OS 9, became flaky under OS X, and a minor upgrade did not fix its problems. Even die-hard IE5/Mac fans began switching to Camino, and, when it arrived, Safari.
Those who switched may have done so on the basis of features like tabbed browsing or popup blocking. Some in the development community may have switched because of the improved standards compliance in Gecko browsers like Camino and Netscape. But mostly, we think, the switchers were behaving instinctively.
With Camino or Safari, you felt you were using a living product that was continually improving in response to user feedback. Microsoftâ(TM)s browser engineers were busy working on something, but their activities took place behind a (figurative) corporate firewall.
Over the past weeks, the stories we and others have been covering (including the unavailability of an improved version of IE5/Mac outside the subscription-based MSN pay service, and the news that IE/Win was dead as a standalone product) painted a picture of a product on its way out. And now we know that that is the case.
We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers. We know that, on the Windows side, it will eventually release something that accesses web content, but that âoesomethingâ will be part of an operating system â" and that operating system wonâ(TM)t be available until 2005, and probably wonâ(TM)t be widely used before 2007. Whether the part that formats web pages will be more or less compliant with W3C recommendations than what we have now, we donâ(TM)t know. Neither do we know whether the unnamed thing that handles web browsing will support CSS3 and other specifications that will emerge during the long years ahead in which Microsoft offers no new browser.
From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if 85% of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.
But enough, and enough, and enough. We are glad of the latest versions of Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, Safari, and Omniweb. But on this grey and rainy day, this news of a kind of death brings no warmth.
help out.
They have the access they would need to compete on Linux, so when will we get Internet Explorer for Linux?
Dubya is Reagan II. His policies are far closer to Reagan's than his father's.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
And in this case in particular, there is still no complete Applecentric solution. As any honest Safari user must admit, you still have to fire up an alternative browser sometimes -- occasionally when Java gives Safari fits, or regularly if you do things like banking. I don't terribly mind the beta limitations, given the larger benefits (launch and rendering times, tabs, popup suppression). But the onus is now upon Apple to put its browser where its mouth is.
You.
Hell even Linux and the OSS is there to push personal political ideals.
Never heard of Linus Torvalds have you?
And as much as it gauls you, you have Microsoft to thank for it.
No. You didn't read my post did you? Why should I thank someone for trying to make as much money as possible just because it may have a positive affect on me? In reality I'm quite pissed at the fact that MS uses it's stranglehold on the PC market to force sellers to pay for their license on every box sold. They may have inadvertantly given people a choice in the beginning but they were sure to take it away by forcing people to buy their license whether they wanted Windows or not.
Time makes more converts than reason
Step three: The Mac market is small enough that many of the mainstream sites may just not care. You know how much they care about Linux-based browsers right now.
Yeah, well since the Mac market just purchased more music online in a month than any group in history and the foreseeable future, a lot of people have started to care :-) Let's assume all the pundits are right and iTMS is a big flop on the PC, who are developers really going to care about when it comes to serving up content? The people who only download when it's free, or the people who are willing to spend a buck? Apple is in a very desirable position right now. Either their iTMS for Windows is a big success, making them megabucks, or it's a flop and mac users are catered to like kings by everyone because "that's where the money is".
Safari appears to have a serious memory leak. I've seen it take up over a gigabyte of VM according to "top", and one of my Macs, which appeared to be frozen, after some very careful investigation turned out to be paging itself to death (ah, when disk drives were the size of washing machines, you knew when a machine was thrashing!), and killing Safari (which took twenty minutes to actually send the signal) unwedged the system immediately. I've used the Safari bug button to chide them about that; I hope they fix it before the final release. Until then, remember to quit out of Safari every once in a while...
In case you were under a rock, that site doesn't support Windows 95/98 anymore.
I have never owned a Windows 95 computer (I skipped directly from 3.1 to 98), but last time I checked on my laptop computer running Windows 98 second edition (a month or two ago), Windows Update still worked.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is no PPC mac emulator. There are emulators that equate to a hella-fast 68xxx, but the Mac is essentially un-emulatable on the current and future X86 architecture.
Unlike the X86, which is emulated quite nicely by a myriad of cross-platform apps.
Ummm...The GCC has objective C support, so it's hardly just an Apple thing..it just never really caught on for x86 etc.
I find incredible, to say the least.
:-)
:-)
:-)
While we are on the subject, I believe Monopolies are good.
No, I didn't lose my mind. I am also not finished yet.
I believe in monopolies, when everyone for example uses the same browser for >90% of the people out there and:
1) Source if freely available under either BSD or GNU.
2) Isn't controlled by any one company or individual.
Then monopolies are great.
Hopefully Linux will become a monopoly one day.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
MS is saying that Apple has access to OSX innards, hoping this will be construed that Apple is USING hidden features. (See! We're not the only ones doing the product-typing, hidden-API thing!) Of course, having access to and using are two different things, and many people don't know that both OSX and Safari are based on open source.
It's disinformation. The subject still makes MS nervous because MS Office has hidden API issues and that could mean more anti-trust problems.
This message also seems to say that the browser belongs in the OS, and that's why Netscape lost.
MS-Office is required period! Not to us hackers but to recieve spreadsheets, email powerpoint presentations and receive email from Exchange server its most required in a corporate environment. The hardcore mac market is made up of advertising and publishing industries. They do bussiness with all windows customers. Another portion of Apple's customers are those who do graphics in large fortune1000 companies may have a mac here or there but thats it. Its these companies that have standards like Exchange, outlook, and are fearing anything opensource thanks to SCO.
Don't get me wrong, I love openoffice and its already beta for MacOSX but corporations make up the vast majority of Apple customers.
Microsoft has Apple by the balls since Office took over which is unfortunate. Why couldn't the doj go after them with this instead of IE? Alot more damage was resulted from Office and in my opinion is what really killed OS/2.
http://saveie6.com/
The premise sounds like sour grapes to me: "we couldn't cheat and smash that market into the ground, so we're picking up our marbles and leaving in a huff." So there! Phrrrrp!
FWIW, Exploder for Mac is better (faster, more standard, more secure) than Exploder for MS-Windows. Since Safari can beat that, it follows that Konq on MS-Windows should romp it in against Exploder.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But isn't education philanthropic? I guess that depends on whether the education is directed to enthralling our best and brightest to Microsoft and their software - both students and study venues - or is unencumbered. Guess what? With the exception of court-ordered actions and a sprinkling of cases where the brownie points were more critical than immediate sales points, all of Bill's educational sponsorship is tied to Microsoft software in one way or another. No change there in the last 20 or so years, still the same old over-ridingly desperate egocentricism. (-: Had to laugh, though, at the recipient of one computer centre telling Bill during his inspection tour that the computers in it ran "a variety of software" but omitting to mention that every bit of that variety arrived on RedHat CDs... :-)
I wonder... have I used enough long words to trigger the lameness filters? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That makes sense but I missed the part about AOL killing Mozilla/Netscape. Can you point to that for me or tell me what you mean?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Don't believe what they say about "Safari being a better option" due to better access to the OS. Those comments are pure smokescreens.
.NET. Only people who purchase Longhorn will be able to use those sites then, and Microsoft gets money from both sides of the equation! Over time, the more rampant Microsoft-only web content becomes, the more users will be driven to Windows. And of course we can't forget that Office will be on Mac only up until it's turned into a service, at which time all Office users will have to purchase the newest Windows machines and pay monthly fees to use it.
The end of Mac IE goes along with their plan to halt Windows IE development...free IE, anyways. Microsoft never fails to look out for the worst interests of competitors, while at the same time making the max cash, and the seemingly innocuous end to IE development has devious goals: Make money off of IE, and force people to buy Windows. How to accomplish this? Get e-commerce sites, and over time other service sites, to use
It's not a fast-approaching reality, but it's the reality of Microsoft's dreams, and a reality they are slowly creating behind the average consumers' backs.
Well.. It's very stupid that MS said so.
First they already announced that the IE 6 would be the last stand-alone web browser. It means that they will cease the development of 'stand-alone' IE.
They also didn't update their IE for Mac for long times. There are lots of web sites which requires IE 6. So, the pause of stand alone Mac IE hurts Mac users.
Second, they mentioned that they can't compete with Apple because Apple can access MacOS but MS can't for being competitive.
This is very illogical. Current Safari doesn't seem to have use any feature which requires undocumented API call or something like that. Although MS uses that kind of 'hidden' APIs for their own use, but I don't think Apple does same kind things for that purpose.
I think this announcement as MS's bad intention to transfer the responsibility of stopping of developement of Mac IE to Apple, although it's their own problem.
Probably MS want to take critics eyes away from them.
Shame on the MS!
It might look like the browser war is over on M$ platforms, but the server war is not. Microsoft's only advantage in selling servers is the number of M$ browsers out there. Losing the Mac 5% will hurt them, but they have realized that they've lost anyway. They can't compete on a platform they don't own. Mac users are free to chose a better browser than IE and are doing it.
Adding the Mac share to the free software share, web sites may soon see IE use dip below 90%. That would be a catastrophy for M$ because severs is their only profitable growth market. Investors notice that kind of thing.
The route is on. You can try to obfuscate it or call it proper business thinking but you can't hide the fact that fewer people are buying the M$ lock-in. Lock-in was all the M$ ever had, once it's gone, they are gone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm new to macs, starting with Jaguar. I picked up a mac magazine the other day which seemed to repeat a mantra of 'IE is the best IE is the best' which made me boggle. I used it for about 2 minutes, hated it and started looking for alternatives, and luckily I found safari pretty quickly. Camino is good too, but not quite as quick. Maybe I've been using OSS browsers for too long, but to me a better quality browser is more important than the ability to correctly render sites that adhere to Microsofts idea of html instead of the W3C's.
Damn you need to be slapped a few times so that you might wake up from that wet dream you are having.
Slapped how you ask? You decide.
I guess I will have to start posting anonymously when it has to do with Apple...as the Apple supporting moderators are pathetic and instanty tag you as flame bait because you have an opinion or state facts negative about Apple. Pretty sad.
I am using Safari on the Mac and it is only a beta product. They cannot defend themselves against this browser in progress. I personally think that Apple created this browser product after IE on the Mac has lanquished at 5.0-5.2 statis (or should I say stagnation) for the last 3 1/2 years. It wouldn't take a genius to have seen the end of support for IE on the Mac.
Paragraph Tag.
Whatever. Clueless Windows user.
Probably drives a Hyundai and thinks it's nice too.
of MS argument about IE being a part of OS. Their whole argument about giving away IE free was that like printing capabilities, it is a part of the Windows OS and should be free. Well IE on Mac is not part of Windows OS, why was it free? Even worse that that, MS needs to spend additional money on IE Mac because MacOS is so different. The only reason I can think of is pure market domination.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Checking one's work in IE is very important for Mac web developers. Most people don't use Gecko or KHTML based browsers.
No doubt, WinIE is fairly different from Mac IE; however, it sure was nice to have -some- sort of Tasman browser on Mac OS.
Now Mac IE's dead, VPC has an unstable future, and MS is taking the developers of RealPC to court.... eeeeeehhh... this doesn't look like a great time to be a mac web developer
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Targetting developers? To annoy them you mean? :)
Writing a web page for IE is fantastically frustrating. My typical design process goes:
1) Write standards compliant HTML
2) Find out IE doesn't even render CSS1 right on occassion.
3) Spend the next few hours trying to figure out a way of getting the code to render in IE properly, without making it invalid HTML.
I do conceed that the XML interface in IE is very good though, but I'd rather they get a browser that can render HTML properly. To my knowledge IE's only standard's compliant with HTML 3.0. 5% or so of CSS1 gets messed up, and CSS2 support is almost non-existant. It's really annoying when you can't just design a page, instead having to fiddle about with it until IE renders it right.
In other words, XML is all well and good, but for God's sake, they should concentrate on getting the basics right, first!
[rant]Companies that are that stupid and backwards to insist on still using ancient versions of Windows on ancient hardware instead of moving on to Linux don't deserve free software to placate their miserliness,[/rant] but you forgot K-Meleon.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I am glad they finally dumped it. Every 10year old can make better browser then ie 5 on mac...
Don't forget, Konqueror can send anything as the user agent string. It's likely that people are setting it to masquerade as IE5 on W98, because any other configuration is likely to break with poorly-designed web sites such as this one.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You do know that MS predates most of those "Home Computers"?
And that has exactly WHAT to do with any of this?
Hell I got a C64 when I was 6 (1986) and I'm pretty sure (remember its been a good long time) that the operating system on that was Microsoft BASIC V2.
And your Microsoft-fueled myopia fails you there
as well. The OS for the C64 was written by none
other than Commodore themselves. Microsoft did,
however provide their versions of DOS to both
Altair and Apple. Which of course, leads me to
your next point...
Anyway I wouldn't consider Apple or any of the others ground braking considering you were locked into hardware they chose and programmed for.
You are such a shill. Even the hardcore 'dozeheads
know if there were no Apple, the GUI concept
wouldn't be where it is today. (And yes, all of
you "they stole it from PARC" parrots can shut the
fuck up now, we know from whence it originated.)
Other than Apple, pretty much the only game in
town was MSDOS if you were looking at running a
personal computer. (At least, that was the case
after they fucked over the poor guys that did
DRDOS and convinced IBM that their version wasn't
as good and then cut and ran on OS2 development.)
So, basically, to sum up, if you honestly believe
that MS was the sole innovator of the personal
computer revolution, you're a fucking idiot.
Long live the clone and MS DOS!
Yeah. Ok, sparky...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
so why should there be any sense of panic about this ?
ps. bill gates mama is a borg
The two are mutually exclusive.
My first flamebait post. Drink to that, mate!
Disclaimer: Poster is drunk.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
This is a political, not a technological, matter and it needs a political solution rather than a technological one.
.....
..... then add something else, save again and analyse ..... in other words, a total ball-ache, but it was still better than doing it by hand.
..... and if the only thing they can legally do to stop it is to publish the file formats, then that is what they will have to do.
The political solution as I see it is to mandate full documentation of file formats and suchlike. I don't doubt that MS will squeal at this, but the simple fact is, they have to obey the laws like everyone else.
At the moment, Mac and Linux users have a problem with hardware and software interoperability. HW manufacturers are refusing to release details of how to interface to their hardware, and SW manufacturers {read: Microsoft} are refusing to release details of how to parse and generate their file formats.
My first printer came with a manual filled with code samples and explaining how to use each of the different print effects it was capable of. My last printer came with a manual saying it only worked with Windows {a blatant lie - I remembered enough stuff from the 8-bit days to get text effects and even graphics mode working from DOS} and not detailing anywhere the control code sequences to send for its various effects.
In the past I have successfully obtained printer escape sequences using a combination of a printer with a hex dump mode and an Amiga {only because I had acquired a used printer without the manual, not because anyone was trying to hide anything}. One of the Amiga's cool features was that no matter what printer you were using, you just sent the same escape sequences to the printer driver device and they would be translated by the driver. So you would send ESC [1m for bold, and the printer might see ESC E if it's an Epson, or a bunch of characters with backspaces if it's a Generic Text Only, or something else entirely. Getting text effect ones like bold, underlining and NLQ was easy, graphics were more fun
If it was the law that hardware manufacturers had to publish full documentation enabling a competent person to write code that would talk to their fancy graphics card / scanner / printer / camera / electronic arse wiping device, because these details essentially form part of the operating instructions and are not proprietary secrets, then we wouldn't see the problem where we Linux users have a limited subset of hardware to choose from. I'm not saying it would be in everyone's best interests to receive the full programmer's documentation with the appliance {most users aren't going to need it}, but it should be available to those who request it, for a reasonable fee. And failure to comply should be punished simply by the grant of explicit permission to reverse-engineer any driver code &c. associated with the said appliance.
Likewise for file formats used by software. I've written code to take a PADS-PowerPCB ASCII file and extract useful data from it, so the prod. eng. people didn't have to punch in data by hand that CAD had to extract by hand. That wasn't too bad because it was an ASCII format to begin with, with a known structure - headers, delimiters and so forth. And I've even tried to generate RTFs that would load into MS Word, with varying degrees of success. Again, that was easy, because it is a text-based format. In both cases I had to generate documents with a single known feature and work out how that feature shew up in the save file
Of course, the software companies may feel they have more to lose from widespread reverse engineering
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
???????
What the heck are you talking about?
Darwin, the core of OS X, is open source.
WebCore, the core of Safari, is also open source.
How the heck does OS X not being open source have any relation to the fact that WebCore is? No, he's not mistaken. You're just a troll, and a strange and random one at that.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Why do I have a vision of every Apple employee after hearing that news just give one big collective
*meh*
and continue developing cool products. Seriously... I don't think anyone really cares that MS has dropped IE. It's not like they did enhanced it over the past two years. Safari and Camino on the other hand are making great strides.
Nope. VW Passat..
Oddly a make of car a lot of Mac users drive. Because they think it's a trendy car and can't afford a BMW.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
This was a big surprise to me when I opened the 10.2 box and found a grey CD marked "Developer Tools" in there along with the Jag install disks.
It was free so I installed it just to see if I'd enjoy programming. Sure enough, it was good fun and I had some simple programs going (with help from the wealth of online sources on the subject).
Thanks to Apple, there'll be one more person willing to contribute to open source software as soon as I learn enough to be useful.
I'm sure there are free ways to develop stuff on windows (I know that MS's own dev tools are not free though), but having that CD in the box with Jaguar was a good way to get me interested enough to actually try some stuff out.
Ok. so my programs unexpectedly quit whenever you click on certain buttons, but I'm improvinf slowly. And come on, who doesn't need an unexpectedly quitting program? It reminds me of my Windows days!
Until Window's file system and the World Wide Web start to resemble one another, I find it absurd it's even being argued the two should be forced through the same interface. As it is, Microsoft merely "integrated" the webbrowser. It didn't change the underlying operating system to be more web-like, and the actual result was that people who run Windows are forced to load entirely unnecessary gunk in order to manage files on their hard drives.
Apple's browser, FWIW, is a standalone program. It's not a Finder replacement and is nowhere near being usable as such a thing. Again, their file system remains a collection of listable objects, not a cross-referenced document environment. The nearest things they'll be doing to what Microsoft did will be to bundle the browser with the OS (which I have no objections to, especially if they do not prevent resellers from bundling other browsers with the package) and providing an API (Webcore/Webkit) in the OS's System area so that third party developers can, if they want, use the functionality.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It might look like the browser war is over on M$ platforms, but the server war is not. Microsoft's only advantage in selling servers is the number of M$ browsers out there.
.NET, or Exchange server, if you delude yourself that Microsoft only wins because they have a browser lead then you really need to reassess your take on the world.
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. What advantage, whatsoever, do IE clients have in selling IIS server boxes? About the only thing that IE does that makes it a better client, or vice versa, in concert with IIS is challenge/response, yet if Microsoft was so focused on utilizing that advantage, wouldn't they have publicized the technology? Mozilla Firebird just added challenge/response, and I believe it's the first. You can imagine whatever altered reality you want, but the reality is that in a lot of showdowns, Microsoft technology simply comes out on top. Whether it's a shop going with SQL Server 2000, or IIS 6 with
Adding the Mac share to the free software share, web sites may soon see IE use dip below 90%.
Indeed, just look at how the IE share is dropping. Oh, right, it isn't. Add that to the fact that Microsoft hasn't noticably updated their browser in some 3 years.
Your whole argument makes absolutely no sense in any case: If Microsoft was so dependent upon their browser lock-in, then wouldn't they put all their forces behind making the best damn browser in the Mac market, instead of just saying "Bah, go make your own. It really doesn't matter to us"? Of course your standard reply will naturally be that they just can't stand the heat, having only been the company that turned ship and dominated the browser market, both technologically and marketwise, virtually overnight. It is that sort of fictitious reality that makes so many misunderstand Microsoft.
I hope this is investigated, though I doubt the Bush administration has any stomach for this.
--- igiveup ---
They are: :).
1. IE for mac was released when Microsoft was trying to kill Netscape. That's finished, they don't need to fight on that front anymore. They don't care about any free browsers now, or AOL's netscape - it became a non-issue since MS doesn't have to fight for browser dominance.
2. Cost cutting measure. Why waste all that money on Mac developent, if it's such a small market share, and even not your primary focus? Besides, you don't earn a dime off Mac IE. Besides, if your competitor can't ofer a product themselves that is up to par, taking away IE will...
3. Just starve apple to death. Stop releasing the apps people are used to, i.g. IE, Office, etc. Killing off a competitor (even a small one) never hurts, right? Apple started relying (to an extent) on Free Software just in time - otherwise things would get real tough for them. By the way, apple, why not invest some more into the development of that software? It'll be paying you back by keeping you in business and keeping your customer-base somewhat intact.
4. Show the court during any anti-trust trial that they are not really striving for total dominance. Just a 90% one
It really boils down to the fact that IE and office for Mac came out during the war for desktop and browser dominance. Now neither of the competitors (Netscape, Mac) are a threat, so the Mac versions of MS software are simply not necessary. Especially the ones that don't earn money. But even the ones that do (e.g. Office) will probably go next.
Jobs? Which jobs?
truth is that no one likes IE . funny Camio (mozilla based) hasn't had this problem and has a very competitive browser. infact i believe Safari devs looked at it for alot of the features they have decided to include. were was MS ? you going to tell me that Mozilla Project has special access to underlying code? MS has not listened to what users want, they have continued to release the same old IE , no popup blocks, no tabs, no inovation, and that damned pop up dialog everytime you launch it, "IE isn't your default browser, would you like to make it the default now? " user clicks no, and dont show this again and bam! it kindly ignores you and continues to pop up. get over it MS, you will not be getting anymore good ideas to steal from apple with access to more code, time you start learning to do your own damn homework. hard to compete with open source projects isn't MS? for the people, by the people, instead of for you, by you, maybe its time you THINK DIFFERENT.
You mean what did Microsoft do wrong?
/System/Frameworks (well, it will), but before they put it there, it's lived a whole lifetime as KHTML, in Konqeror, and several versions of beta Safari; I am hoping when it gets transplanted into a system framework, it will be rock solid.
For one thing, they didn't develop IE into a fully independent, standalone, tested, and trusted container *before* integrating it into Explorer, Outlook, Outlook Express, Media Player, and exposing it so that others could integrate it, ala winamp. From a development standpoint, they had 5 versions to battle-test IE, and it wasn't hardened sufficiently.
Once it's a solid, dependable, reliable object, then integrate it and offer it via APIs to be integrated by third parties, and then freeze it. They've announced IE 6 will not be stand alone, which means it is NO longer a independent module, which is bad from a development standpoint, because testing and verification of independent loosely coupled objects is much more robust than simultaneously testing of two tightly coupled objects (Windows and IE).
They also didn't do their homework with regards to scripting; ActiveX, ECMA, Javascript, etc, despite 5 versions of IE.
Apple, on the other hand, has had AppleScript since Mac OS 7, so there exists the hope that they have hardened and secured it. So far so good, but we'll see as WebCore gets integrated into OS X.
WebCore does pass the test as a independent object; it's a Framework that sits in
GPL Deconstructed
Moderators sure are smart, they just proved his point by moderating his comment down.
You do not like what he has to say != mod down.
Sure, this is technically off topic since it doesn't have much to do with MSIE on Mac specifically. However, I think this is still a valid point and the moderators are just trying to stifle it because they don't like what he has to say. Also from a different perspective this comment is on topic since several of his other posts have been modded flamebait unfairly just because there was some name-calling. Now, I'm not trying to justify the name-calling, but you have to have some balance here, the majority of his comments are quite intelligent and informed even if they do have a bit of a bitter aftertaste.
This I ponder much. Much much much.
The whole role of events with Microsoft in the past month or two has been very fascinating.
1) MS licenses UNIX crap from SCO
2) SCO goes nutty with lawsuits
3) MS buys Virtual PC from Connectix
4) MS makes deal with AOL about Netscape
5) MS buys European anti-virus company
6) MS ditches Linux support of said anti-virus company
7) MS says they are doing away with stand-alone IE
8) MS says they are done with IE for Mac (which I kind of figured when they made the stand-alone announcement)
Still, one has to wonder, what is brewing?
As far as the whole browser mess...and we all know it's a mess...what is happening? Most coders currently code just for IE and don't give a flyin' F about Netscape. Ok. But what about all the sites coded for IE in Mac. Does this mean the entire Mac market is shot to hell? Will sites that rely on IE-based code say "screw this...I'm not going to code for Safari"?
And is Safari really THAT big of a threat? I know I use Safari for most everything, but I still need IE to visit some sites. I'm actually a bit concerned about the future. What happens now?
1) Companies continue coding for IE only, thus the Mac market is SOL if they need to do online banking or have other functions that were specifically coded for IE.
2) The people developing Safari have to give in to IE's loose standards in order to render those IE coded pages.
This is tough...really tough. And only time will tell.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Surfing the web without IE is like
going to war without the French.
That sounds just to likely. After following business movements for a while you start to see that "maximising profit" means fighting to the last cent for every advantage - a rapacious business can crush the others and feel happy because they have "maximised profit".
I'm praying that something happens to change this possibility... what has happened to our OS landscape?
Some people are complaining that some browsers don't display correctly (including my new favorite Safari).
I think that's party, if not mostly, the fault of web developers who do not stay within WC3 defined web standards and creating these "cutting edge" sites that rely on proprietary tags, plug-ins, and features built into non standard browsers.
If your website requires the use of a certain browser, then you've not done your job. The original concept of the web was to remove these boundaries. Maybe I'm just old school, but people are losing sight of the whole reason we have the WC3 and standards--universal usability.
If Safari isn't cutting it, remember it's still Beta!--report the problem, but look at the code, too. Download, clean out all the Dreamweaver and FrontPage garbage, and see if it still has problems.
But what do I know....
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I think you meant "on", not "behind".
Do not touch -Willie
IE 5 came out in 1998... they make it sound like they've been hard at work on IE 6 for 5 years and that Apple pulled the rug out from underneath them. They didn't intend on doing anything with IE for Mac for a long time already.
The only difference is that, as far as I know, you need an MSN subscription to use the Apple port, but not for the native Windows one.
Well, I've had an OSX system for 2 months and in that time the only application to crash has been MS IE. My other experience in this area was when I installed MusicMatch on Windows XP. It crashed three times trying to install. Then, when I finally plugged my iPod in, it erased all the data on the iPod and converted it to a "Windows" iPod. "Thanks, no, really". I've sworn never to let my iPod touch another Windows system, and apart from Mac Office (which on the whole has been pretty good), I'll endevour to avoid MS Apps on OSX at all costs.
Contribute to the online videogame encyclopedia: GamerWiki
Microsoft's propriatory crap is why M$ needs the clients boxes. Propriatory is the only way M$ ever has an advantage over anyone. They can't build it into the server unless it exists on the client. That's how they plan to extend their awful desktop monopoly. Why else would they develop junk like activeX and all that?
If Microsoft was so dependent upon their browser lock-in, then wouldn't they put all their forces behind making the best damn browser in the Mac market ...?
Yes and no. They tried and failed and are again abandoning the rebellious Mac 5% (and growing).
When people really have a choice, they don't chose M$. I have not used M$ anywhere for months and I could not be happier.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You are missing an important distinction. The Desktop is not the OS.
Failure to make that distinction leads to systems that cannot be administered in any automated fashion because certain functions / controls are only available via the desktop. Apple is certainly guilty of providing skimpy documentation on how to administer your mac using only the command line.
If you don't view the Desktop as a GUI frontend to the OS the answers become very different. Once seperated from the OS, what does the Desktop do? It's a display system and it browses the file system.
And what does a Browser do?
Insisting that the Browser is inherently different from the Desktop amounts to saying that files not stored on your local system are not really files. It's one way to think of things, but it isn't necessarily the best way.
Now argumenets can be made that Browsing should be modular and distinct from the windowing system. But that should apply for local as well as remote files.
Here is the Scenario. MS buys Connectix... MS discontinues IE. Sites requiring IE continue to evolve until the 5.x Mac IE version simply won't work and Safari won't either. There is an outcry (or at least they claim there is one) from Mac Users that they need IE to function on bank and other high security sites. Meanwhile MS has been quietly making VPC from a separate Virtual Machine into an integrated Win API where Software for Windows runs along side Mac OS X software in the dock rather than encapsulated. MS releases IE 7 (or 8) for Windows on Mac using their new API. Why do this? They could then say to their developers: "Hey license our new Windows API for Mac software and you don't have to redevelop a Mac version to get a piece of that small market. That niche market is not worth the cost and effort of a full blown release anyway. Look we did it with IE and if you can do it with a browser where you need so much underlying OS knowledge ( as we argued in court wink wink nudge nudge) *your* program should be a piece of cake." End result (from MS's perspective.): Fewer and fewer Mac developers and less and less reason to use/buy and develop specifically for the Mac. That way MS can claim they are good guys because at least *they* are still developing something for the Mac (even if it leads to crumby emulated software.) My 2Â....
Most laurels (rhododendrons) are poisonous. We don't eat them at our house.
The herb "bay leaf" is a laurel, so you may eat them at your house.
Bay Leaf
Laurus nobilis
Fam: Lauraceae
The bay tree is indigenous to Asia Minor, from where it spread to the Mediterranean and then to other countries with similar climates. According to legend the Delphi oracle chewed bay leaves, or sniffed the smoke of burning leaves to promote her visionary trances. Bay, or laurel, was famed in ancient Greece and Rome. Emperors, heroes and poets wore wreaths of laurel leaves. The Greek word for laurel is dhafni, named for the myth of the nymph Daphne, who was changed into a laurel tree by Gaea, who transformed her to help her escape Apolloâ(TM)s attempted rape. Apollo made the tree sacred and thus it became a symbol of honour. The association with honour and glory continue today; we have poet laureates (Apollo was the God of poets), and bacca-laureate means "laurel berries" which signifies the completion of a bachelor degree. Doctors were also crowned with laurel, which was considered a cure-all. Triumphant athletes of ancient Greece were awarded laurel garlands and was given to winners at Olympic games since 776 BC Today, grand prix winners are bedecked with laurel wreaths. It was also believed that the laurel provided safety from the deities responsible for thunder and lightning. The Emperor Tiberius always wore a laurel wreath during thunderstorms.
For more, see http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/bay.html.
Heck, I might just go make my own browser now. Its key features will be integrated fish-cam browser window and a complete lack of a "back" button. Anybody in?
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
I don't understand what people are so worked up about here, other than looking for reasons to hate Microsoft. Obviously, the whole point of Safari is to compete with Internet Explorer, right? Microsoft currently gets Internet Explorer installed as the default browser on new Macs, which has been the case for five years now (since the famous "$150 million handshake"). Apple releases Safari. MS can see the writing on the wall: in 10.3, Safari will be the default browser. IE might not even be on the box. What's in it for them to keep updating it? Apple releases Safari, Microsoft goes "we quit." Hooray! Isn't this a good thing? Note that this is a different situation than if MS pulled Office tomorrow -- Mac users need Office, because of the need for document interchange. IE has no such concerns -- and Mac users have no serious alternative to Office right now. If they pulled Office, it would be anticompetitive. If Apple releases a pro-level office suite with good MS compatibility, and then MS killed Office, it might be justified.
About Microsoft now having access to information about the underlying operating system, Isn't the underlying operating system open source now?
Where I work IE is the "corporate standard{tm]", which only means your website should work for IE but not that other browsers are forbidden.
I had flammy interchanges of emails with bozos that designed internal websites for MS only and that even kick you out if you are using something different.
When I mention that a W3C complaint site will run on IE and protect the company against obsolesence and migration pains I just get excuses.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a mere fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I'll stick with Maya Complete for OS X.
Maya Complete is available for Windows® 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Mac® OS X, SGI IRIX® and Red Hat Linux® operating systems.
I did say it would be useful to those debugging the code. But most people wouldn't debug it and would simply submit a bug report detailing the problems. The contributions back to Apple in this area would be small, and Apples contribution would be enormous if they opened up Quartz. It makes no economic sense, and as we all know, economics drive business decisions.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Funny timing, Mac OSX IE 5.2.3 was released today â¦
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/DOWNLOAD/IE/ie5_osx.a sp
Even if IE 6 never comes out for the Mac, we may in time see IE 5.9.9.
For the record, I'm not a Mac user (at least, we have one 68k OS 7 Mac for games like Bubble Trouble, and one early PPC Mac as a Linux (YDL) thin client on another (Mandrake) Linux workstation, zero Windows boxen).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
IE for Mac - Great in OS 9; so slow that it was almost unusable in OS X. In comparison to other browsers it felt more like a beta release.
Obviously you've already blacked OS X 10.0 out of your head, where IE was pretty much the only application that didn't seem like it hadn't made it out of alpha testing just just. And yes, I did use OmniWeb then. There was a reason OmniWeb was so popular for a while; it was the only non-MS browser we could even consider using (admittedly its spellchecking textareas is pretty cool). Heck, it was nearly the only non-MS application that was reasonably usable and OS X native, Mail.app included.
Regardless, MS software for the Mac has always been top rate in my experience. IE Mac was leaps and bounds better than anything else on OS 9, and was even more standards compliant than the contemporary IE 5 on Windows! IE for OS X still handles many sites better than Safari, and I occasionally go back when all else fails. Outlook Express is still my favorite mail handler I've used short of Em@iler. Office on the Mac has also been a top rate product for years.
Hey, it's fun to bash Windows. It's arguably an unfair, predatory monopoly. But the MacBU really does do great work for our "other OS". I'm sorry to see IE go, strangely enough.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Does anyone really think Microsoft killed IE for OS X because of Safari? That's backwards. Safari was created in large part to make IE unessential. It's a smart move by Apple, and all MS has done is make the obvious official.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
In time, I think that Microsloth's Mac unit will produce only one product: VirtualPC. Then, if you want Office for the Mac, you buy Office for Windoze plus VPC, and the same for all other M$ products. It's much cheaper for M$ to maintain just the Windoze code base plus VPC.
Alun
Jobs wouldn't release OS information to 3rd party developers and paid a HUGE price for it.
It can go both ways here.
TEXtures, while pricey, is also sweet.
Brett -
Your messages often contain some very valid points, but what really does you in is that at the end of your message you call the posters a moron, or tell them they spend all their time surfing for Pr0n [sic].
If you have a valid point, just make it. There's been plenty of posts on this board modded up even though they're anti-Apple. But those posts invariably come across as intelligent.
I mean, geez, even in this post of yours, you use the words "pathetic" and "sad". Can't you make a point without cutting someone down?
jbx
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
Well,
This works to our advantage in my opinion. While losing IE looks bad on the surface (and perhaps it is) this MIGHT actually work to the advantage of the opensource community and/or for third party browsers. Convinve people that mac support is IMPORTANT and NECESSARY. If possible, make sure that when offering mac support that you also try to include linux and other unixen like operating systems.
The most important things are to a.) discourage the use of internet-explorer only features or windows only featurs, especially those built in to dotNET server. b.) port your plugins to other operating systems, the reason? Those people will need to browse your website to! You don't want to alienate this large group of customers! c.) While historically I am against this, reccomend PARTICULAR browsers for your website, i.e. 'best viewed in Mozilla, download for free!' Remember when we used to have 'designed for Netscape' or 'designed for Internet Explorer'?
Remember, you don't HAVE to make your plugin opensource (although it would be nice) if you want it to run on an opensource operating system. In my opinion this is less of an open-source/closed source argument and more of a microsoft attempting to force out competition of all sorts argument. Microsoft has been planning to create new features for IIS servers which only work with Internet Explorer based browsers. Fight the use of these! Convince management it's a bad idea, tell them you are alienating a customer base (you are). Make sure your page looks the same in ALL browsers, and reccomend endorsing open-source bowsers (i.e. mozilla) or cross-platform browsers (i.e. opera) in the work place on ALL systems!
Use what Microsoft is rubbing in our face against them!
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Ok Joe Barr. You're still a moron. You freaking MS zealot. Your just angry because you suck at programming