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Microsoft Kills Off Mac IE, Blames Safari

Posted by jamie on from the convenient-excuse-wanders-by dept.

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.

8 of 1,128 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't this a good thing for all of us? by Mikey-San · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)
  2. Re:One down, one to go... by bluesangria · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. more commentary from M$ ... by scientistguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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¦

  4. Uhhhhmmmm, okay: by SwissMike · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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? ;-)

  5. Re:Misleading very misleading by BJH · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  6. Re:It was bound to happen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Limited access to OS by mpaque · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Limited access to OS...I dun think so by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).