Microsoft Ends IE for Mac

RandomMacUser writes "A while ago, Microsoft stopped updating IE for Mac, freezing it at version 5. But according to this Microsoft webpage, all support will cease December 31, 2005, and any official distribution with cease January 31, 2006. Also, the webpage suggests 'that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.'"

Comments

Wait, is this supposed to help M$?

[Daedius]

Guess that just means more firefox users on Mac now. Now with versions optimized toward their architectures now too.

It's not just the mac version

[Bert64]

The windows version hasn't seen major updates for years... In many ways the mac version is more up to date than the windows version, at least it has vastly superior CSS support.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[SethJohnson]

Wells Fargo is browser-independent.

Seth

Don't forget Opera..

[the_rajah]

The Mac version of Opera works great, too. I've got four browsers on my old iMac G3-333 that runs Tiger. IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera. My linux boxes have Firefox, Opera and Konqueror. My bank's site gives me a non-supported browser warning when I access their site with Opera, but allows me to proceed and, other than some minor rendering problems, works OK.

Re:Who is really suprised?

[pboulang]

I think you mean you doubt it because they make money off of it. They were not making a dollar off of IE, so it is no surprise as a business decision.

(was Interesteing Problems)

[shking]

Have you tried spoofing the webserver? (i.e. your browser tells the bank's webserver that it is IE, when it is in fact Safari, Firefox, Opera or whatever). The default .net website sends out custom pages for each type of browser. This is a great temporary workaround and has worked for me many times:

1. from the Terminal command line: defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
2. start Safari
3. select Debug > User Agent and choose a browser

Opera has this capability built in

Firefox and Camino are left as a (trivial) exercise for the reader (a couple minutes searching Google should do it)

Re:(was Interesteing Problems)

[leenoble_uk]

Additionally, my bank specifically stated that Safari was not supported. I chose to ignore this warning and indeed the initial setup process failed because I needed to download a secure certificate which involved some IE/Moz specific capability apparently. So I used Firefox to get the certificate and then exported it to the desktop and imported it into Keychain Access. Now my bank's website works perfectly well with Safari.

Re:Microsoft admit defeat?

[Total_Wimp]

But the less I.E. the better.

I'm hoping this will provide all sorts of benefits for not only Mac users, but also the web community as a whole.

The IE on the Mac was so significantly different than the current version of Windows IE that it gave a false sense of security to the Mac using community. They thought that since they had IE, their web experience would be the same as their Windows-using friends. They were wrong.

Now that they're being forced to use one of the other browsers, it will become very apparent that a)the other browsers have some nice features and b) the other browsers are ignored by a certain subset of the web community.

Once the Mac Faithful have a better understanding of just how much they've been marginalized over the last few years, hopefully they'll use their vocalness to aid the fight for web content providers to provide standards-compliant, works-on-any-browser web sites. They'll crow about Safari passing the Acid Test and they'll point out that all browsers should pass this test.

Since the Safari-using community will grow overnight and its percentage of users will be added to the likes of Firefox as a large alternate web browsing community, the content providers will (hopefully) increasingly start writing standars-compliant web sites so all of their customers will be able to use their content. After all, it's a lot harder to ignore 20% than 10% of your potential audience.

One more great thing. Mac users love Apple products so they'll use Safari way more than Firefox. This will help keep web browser usage diversified. If we could get as much as 20% web usage as one of these two and 10% of web usage as non-IE mobile browsing then content providers will increasingly find it silly to support IE only, while also finding it silly to support only one of the other browsers. Diversity is a very good thing for everyone.

TW

Stange thing is...

[Hamster Lover]

if you use Safari Enhancer to alter the user agent setting to "Firefox" or something similar the page displays fine.

Not that it matters as I have moved to Firefox as my default browser. I like Safari but I want the Flashblock and AdBlock plugins for Firefox.

Re:I'm bummed.

[toddbu]

an excellent browser

Our experience has been that DHTML support on Konqueror is still far behind both Firefox and IE. We'd love to support it, but we spend enough time putting in hacks for the big two browsers that we really don't want to take the time to make Konqueror work right. It's also why we don't support Opera, although Opera seems to work better than Konqueror.

don't forget where Safari comes from

Last I'd read, there wasn't much cooperation between the teams. That makes a bad situation even worse. If we could target Linux/Mac in one step we'd think about supporting Konqueror. Our solution has been to tell our Mac customers to install Firefox and be happy. Most of them thank us for pointing them to a browser that works halfway decently on all sites.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[MTO_B.]

Also, do this.
Firefox > Help > Inform about an incompatible website...
Fill the details, send.

Re:I'm bummed.

[leathered]

"Our experience has been that DHTML support on Konqueror is still far behind both Firefox and IE. We'd love to support it, but we spend enough time putting in hacks for the big two browsers that we really don't want to take the time to make Konqueror work right. It's also why we don't support Opera, although Opera seems to work better than Konqueror."

3.5 is very much improved and is said to be one of the most standards compliant browsers out there. It now passes Acid2 unlike FF and IE. Not entirely useful to the user but nice to know nevertheless.

"Last I'd read, there wasn't much cooperation between the teams. That makes a bad situation even worse."

Yes I remember reading about that. Apparantly the teams are working much closer now and the Konq devs have access to the Safari CVS. Version 4 promises to have the best of both browsers. Don't get me wrong, Firefox is excellent but I love the speed (as fast as Opera IMO) and the integration into my KDE desktop that Konqueror provides.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[gizmonic]

How long ago was that? I've been banking online for the past 3 or 4 years with Bank One (ever since they bought First Chicago) and now Chase. I've *never* had a problem using Firefox from my Mac or my PC on thier site. Just curious if this was some time ago as my experience in this century has been that there have been no issues at all. I'm wondering if they saw the light a while back...

Re:I'm bummed.

[smallpaul]

For example, is padding included in the width of an element, or not? It depends on whether you're using IE or Mozilla. ... Which browser complies with the standards, or do they both? Well, that's anybody's guess.

No: you could just read the standards or documents written about them:

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/box.html : "In the W3C box model, the width of an element gives the width of the content of the box, excluding padding and border."..."Mozilla, Konqueror/Safari and Opera 6 and lower follow W3C's standards."

Re:I was on the MacIE 6 team when it got canned...

[jbx]

Jimmy Grewal posted a follow-up to this on his blog, which covers some extra points:

http://www.jimmygrewal.com/?p=187

A lot of what he says is true; but the story is more complex than this and there were many other factors that came into play. Issues which he doesn't cover...primarily because he wasn't working on the product much until the last few months of development:

        * - Mac IE was the first real browser running on Mac OS X. We had it running on Developer Preview 2 and it shipped on the Public Beta CD-ROM. That was a great engineering achievement but it came at a very high price. Developing for OS X in those early days was a nightmare and we spent so much time struggling with OS bugs and changing APIs that precious time that could have been used to improve the product was wasted just trying to maintain compatibility with each new beta release of OS X.
        * - Apple was a pain in the ass sometimes. For a company with such great PR, they really were very unprofessional and treated developers poorly. I know that the OS X transition was tough, but there are so many stories I could tell of stupidity at Apple and policies which made no sense...but I won't. I'll just say that Apple had a lot more involvement in the development of Mac IE and it's eventual end than Jorg ["jbx"] gives them credit for. There were times during the last two years of working at Microsoft that I really hated Apple's management...which was very difficult for me being such a loyal fan of their products and having so many friends who worked there.
        * - No clear direction from our management was the last major factor which Jorg touched upon but is important to mention again. Towards the end, we had some major changes in management at the MacBU and the new team was inexperienced both with the products they were managing and how to deal with Apple. They were further handicapped by lack of clear direction by our execs who were too busy worrying about AOL, the DOJ, and our stock price.

Anyway, enough about the history. Mac IE is dead, and it's up to Apple and the Mozilla team to continue to innovate for us Mac users. Sadly, there are still many very useful features in Mac IE that neither company has replicated in their browsers and there are still too many sites which don't look right in Safari. I remember calling up CNN and ESPN and getting them to fix problems in their websites...it worked and I hope Apple has a group of people doing the same thing.

Since Microsoft will no longer be offering Mac IE 5 for download on their website, I'm going to provide a community service by linking to it here. It has not been totally replaced and at least I need a place to be able to download it from for my own personal use...but you'll have to know what to click on to download it. ;-)

If you ever want to know who the people behind Mac IE 5 were, just type "about:tasman" in the address bar of Mac IE and you'll get a list of the people who put their heart and soul into making it such a remarkable and successful product.

I have to laugh (and cry) a bit at Jimmy's comment concerning Apple's management. Apple has screwed over developers time and time again, even while at the same time giving them lots of lip service and spending lots of time and money on developer programs. The tip of the iceberg: no Mac program written prior to 1999 will run - at all - on the new Intel-based Macs. In fact, most 2001 programs won't either. (By contrast, many 1984 apps *do* run on today's machines) More to the point: A Mac developer from 1998 who was 100% up-to-date on Apple's technologies will find today that those technologies have all been either deprecated (in favor of Cocoa or Intel) or outright eliminated (intelligent memory management through Handles, trap-patching, MixedMode expertise). It's all part of Steve Jobs' "they have no respect for the status quo" - a nice quote until you discover yourself at the receiving end of it.