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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.
As far as i know they didn't port Outlook after Office 97. The new Mailclient/Groupware is called Entourage and it's an Apple-Exclusive. Thank god, because from what Ie heard, this beast seriously sucks.
Are you getting paid for spreading such FUD? Or are you just the biggest M$ fan around? Maybe you should RTFA article first to realize that the statement from M$ that they can't work OS X is crap. Since all they really need to know/see is open source.
:)
I advise you to quit you job in the M$-subtle-propaganda-department. Oh, just before I forget... fsck you
WebCore/KHTML is getting there at a great pace. It has awesome support for most stuff, and as Microsoft says, it's better than IE/Mac.
It has fairly thick CSS support, too:
Woot, link!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Um, basically, they are going to. This little paragraph here:
"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."
That link embedded in the quote leads to Microsoft abandons standalone IE.
Of course, evolving the browser into the WinOS may or may not have significant impact on all those pages that are IE specific. All I can say for sure is that, of the 3 browsers that I use on OS X, (Safari, Netscape,Explorer) Explorer is by far the slowest and buggiest of the lot.
blue
Safari is based on the KHTML engine from KDE. See here.
They kindof did -- IE 6.1 is the last standalone release version of IE for Windows.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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¦
"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?
MS didn't say they were killing off IE on Windows, they just said they weren't going to release any more stand-alone versions. In other words, IE development will continue, but it'll be integrated into Windows.
And another thing - you do realize that IE for Windows and IE for Mac are two separate products, developed by two separate teams at MS?
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.
Sorry, IE for Mac is much more standards-compliant than IE6 for Windows.
In fact, I contend that if you find differences between IE6/Win and IE5/Mac, the issue is that IE6 doesn't follow the standards, but IE5/Mac does.
In fact, IE5/Mac is one of the best browsers at standards compliance. It doesn't share much (any?) code with it's cousin, IE6/Win.
Did they ever bother to port Outlook to OS X?
No, and there won't be a version of Outlook, per se. Microsoft will be releasing (this summer, last I heard) a version of Entourage X that has Exchange connectivity features.
For now, people are making do with running Outlook 2001 in Classic (if they need group calendaring), or running the existing Entourage X with POP/SMTP or IMAP enabled on their Exchange server (if they don't need group calendaring).
I'm no Microsoft fan, but I do use Entourage because it's essentially the OS X-native grandson of Claris Emailer-- developed by the same people, hired by MS after Emailer was killed.
~Philly
The text rendering engine is abstracted by Qt. For whatever reason Apple decided not to pay for Qt developer licenses and created a set of stubs that map Qt onto MacOS, so the font rendering technology will be the Quartz native. The code they use to draw the actual text is completely different.
Does it use undocumented APIs? It wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft has been doing this kind of thing for years. I'd note that it's not always due to nefarious evilness, just freezing APIs takes effort and a certain amount of confidance that you got it right. Until an API is frozen Apple/MS' own stuff may well use it anyway, but it's not been documented/exposed in the headers.
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.
Actually, the low level Quartz calls for drawing, including text rendering, are all documented. Safari uses the public programming interfaces. You can find documentation on Quartz, including tutorials, the programmng guide, and reference manuals at: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/CoreTec hnologies/graphics/Quartz2D/quartz2d.html
Feedback and perrformance tuning that benefit Safari are incorporated into the Quartz portion of Mac OS X, so everyone benefits.
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).
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.
The MS excuse is rubbish because there are plenty of other competitors with Safari, the bulk of it (WebCore) is open source and employed by OmniWeb and Konqueror in various forms. As someone else already said, it's just a PR excuse to let them get out of a market that does't mean anything to them anymore.
My bet is that they intend for future versions of IE to be even more integrated into Windows and don't want to waste programming time on a seperate version for the Mac at a time when the Mac is touting it's Safari program.
No, thats not insightful at all.. IE Mac has been developed by a totally separate team than IE Windows. That's why IE Mac has different features and has different levels of standards compliancy.
That "niche" application Phoenix IS the slimmed down browser part of the bloated Monster that Mozilla has become (maybe making Mozilla into a bloated monster was part of the initial plan, considering the name...)
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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).
IE5 for Mac was better than IE6 for Windows when they were both current... It still has better CSS support and better support for PNG.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
They've already won: http://www.macdailynews.com/opinion_comments.php?i d=P1240_0_2_0_C
WebCore != WebKit. WebCore is a low-level API, an Objective-C wrapper around KHTML. WebKit is a high-level API. WebCore is open source. WebKit will not be open source, but it will be released when Safari goes to 1.0, presumably this summer sometime. When WebKit comes out, anybody will be able to build their own browser by wiring a few Objective C objects together in Interface Builder and implementing a couple of delegate methods. But WebKit will not be open source.
Omni Group has taken a lot of shit from Apple for trying to use WebCore. Basically nobody is supposed to use WebCore. They're supposed to call WebKit. But Omni rushed into the breach anyway. Good for them, I guess, but I think they're going to have to tear out a ton of unnecessary code and replace it with proper API calls come this fall.
A laurel is a plant, mostly used for food.
The romans rewarded people with a laurel crown as a distinction sign. So to rest on one's laurel means doing nothing (rest) once you've made an achievement (received a laurel crown)
They cite competition from Safari as the reason for this decision.
:)
e xplorer.unix.
So what's their excuse for dropping IE for Solaris and HP-UX? Competition from HotJava? Hahaha -- that silly little "browser" has been EOL'd (end-of-life'd) by Sun. Or maybe it's the mighty Netscape 7, or Mozilla (both of which are a.k.a. "Solaris-crasher")? No, folks, the answer is . . . Opera! They are afraid of Opera. Or Lynx. One or the other.
Funny, in that IE UNIX link above, they left the original meta tags from the release in the page, so a search engine snippet might mislead someone into thinking IE Solaris and HP-UX were just released. Google shows: "Internet Explorer 5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft Outlook Express are now available on both Solaris and HP-UX.", but once you click through the full page says:
Internet Explorer for UNIX
We sincerely apologize, but Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX are no longer available for download. Visit the Internet Explorer Web site for more information on Internet Explorer.
For Support options, visit the Internet Explorer for UNIX newsgroups at news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.inet
Note: Microsoft employees do not monitor these public newsgroups.
Or, search the Microsoft Knowledge base.
everything in moderation
Funny - Clinton was the only President who stepped forward and actually called for repealing it.
:)
That was about a two weeks ago. Here's the cached google link
But don't let little things like facts get into the way of your petty partisanic and ignorant rantings.
Have a nice day
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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
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
Why do people keep saying most web developers use Mac/IE? I know at least a dozen web developers. One uses Mac/Mozilla. The only reason she uses Mac is because her school financial aid paid for it. The rest use Windows/Mozilla.
I believe the reason you see big corp web sites IE only is because they don't want someone with a v2 browser coming along and complaining about their website not working. Next time you come along an 'IE only' website, make it think you run IE (various browsers can do this, look it up) and see if it works fine. Unless it uses some stupid ActiveX plugin, I bet it will.
If you turn on the Debug menu, one of its options is a list of alternate User Agents. Thanks to MacOS X Hints for a refresher (defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1).
Since KHTML is both the foundation for Konqueror and for Apple's Safari you can't really say that it's just for Linux, can you?
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)
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.
OSX No, but a little story about Outlook Pre-OSX
They started devlopment of Outlook for the Mac in 96. I was at Cal State Fullerton at the time, and they had a rule that all software installed on the Windows Computers had to be installed on the Mac. As very big customers of MS they sent us thier pre-beta version of Outlook for Mac. It never even made beta until Office 2001. They could not even use the system time correctly, it was always a few hours off in time stamping. Not to mention crashing the computer at the drop of a hat, looking at it funny, or typing a keystroke which gave our Mac users the true MS experience our NT4 users got.
Yes you can get Outlook for mac 8.6 or higher at
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/outlook
Additionally, Darwin also has almost the whole "standard" array of system calls. Keep in mind that the kernel has both a Mach and BSD personality, so Mach IPC is mainly an additional way to communicate with the kernel. And although the Darwin kernel is based on the Mach kernel, it runs in one address space like the Linux kernel. That doesn't make it a monolithic kernel, of course.
Donate free food here
Ya, go ahead, call him up... Explain to him how Apple's new browser is is based on WebCore, which is open source (as is a majority of the OS X). Be sure to explain that this has nothing to do with Microsoft's decision to stop development of standalone versions versions of IE for its own OS. If he asks... This decision had nothing to do with this either.
Go get em' moron!
Umm, why would MS cutting off Office make Apple release OS X for x86? They wouldn't gain much by it, they'd likely end up fucking themselves over. Or, do you think that magically, OS X for x86 would take over all the Windows installations? As if. Most people would stick with Windows. Because idiots like what they're used to.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
What about Chimera and Omniweb? I think both are better than Mozilla, Opera and Netscape on the Mac.
As far as the original post goes... it's not like Microsoft have updated IE for the Mac in forever anyway. Not to mention I believe they intentionally crippled it on the Mac to make it s.l.o.w.e.r than the Windows version in order to show "how much faster Windows is" (when in reality Safari is just as fast as IE on Windows, so obviously MS was crippling the Mac version of IE).
In summation, I think this will receive a collective yawn from 99% of Macintosh users. Safari stomps on IE on the Mac in every way, and it's just a beta version! Good riddance IE!
I'm nearly 100% Microsoft-free on my OS X box and I have a lot more productivity and STABILITY to show for it!
Now if only Apple would make Appleworks (Document?) a full featured MS Office killer we'd have something (with full support for the horrible, proprietary Office formats of course, to ween people from that horrible MS Office crap).
Oh well, in lieu of this I intend on using OpenOffice.org for my word processing in the future anyway. With Apple's latest software ventures and OS X and open source/source forge/fink, Microsoft is becoming more and more irrelevant every day.
The future is so bright I gotta wear shades!
No they are not complaining about the lack of test macs in Redmond. The MacBU has the 2nd largest mac test facility in the country, second only to Apple's.
And realistically, they're saying that it simply isn't a good priority to fight the web browser battle on the mac. What does MS get out of funding IE for mac? Answer: nothing. What does Apple get out of Safari? Answer: nothing through direct monetary terms, but definitely a greater appeal when it comes time for mom and dad to plunk down a thousand bucks for junior's new computer. MS gets a lot out of Office: mac. Messenger is more of an AOL stalking horse; although the MacBU does not directly make money from it, it means that Passport and the Messenger network is not an exclusively Windows market.
Another possible issue: Safari was developed in Cocoa. IE is/was Carbon-based. Chances are, pitting the best Cocoa developers against the best Carbon developers, the Cocoa developers would probably do a better job (in terms of time, or whatever). Carbon is mostly a migration path, but it's a bitch to develop in when compared to Cocoa.
Better doesn't always win in the marketplace. In fact, in rarely does. Especially in communication tools, there is a lot of value in being "the one that everybody else is using" because of compatibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but isn't integrating IE into windows exactly what they got in trouble for all those many years ago?? Wasn't there some kind of _legal_ decision stopping them from doing that? Wow...if that's what laws are like in the U.S. I'm comin over and buyin a gun. "Yes I robbed that bank officer...but it was 2 years ago...and no one really remembers, so it doesn't count...think I'll go rob one again"
Actually that is usually the site's problem, not the browser's. Looking at the site there are two main situations on those sites: 1. They are checking specifically for IE/Win and outright refusing anything else, even if they would work just fine. (This is actually the most common I find.) 2. They depend on IE/Win's proprietary 'extensions' to HTML. Extensions that have never been fully documented and are usually version-specific to one version of IE/Win. Extensions that mostly duplicate the already exsisting standards.
Whenever I run into one of those sites I want to run whoever decided it should go out of its way to break for non-IE/Win users and drop them off in the middle of mongolia.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I see, because that $30,000 Microsoft donated to Bush
Microsoft's Donations by Year by Party (according to opensecrets.org):
2000 - $4,711,103 Dems: 46% Reps: 53%
2002 - $4,140,048 Dems: 41% Reps: 59%
This works out to a bit more than the "typical" $30,000 that you (let's be honest here) pulled out of your buttocks.
The 2000 $ went mostly to presidential races while the 2002 $ went mostly to senate and house races (I have no stats to back that up, but we can safely assume > $30,000.)
2004-Anything but Bush.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
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!
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!