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.
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
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
The next verison of Entourage, due this summer, is supposed to have Exchange support.
Conglom-O: We Own You (TM).
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.
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
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!
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!