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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.'"
I use a Mac and love it, but I am concerned about this development, as there are few websites (including my bank) which don't work with Safari (and my bank's web pages don't load correctly on Firefox).
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
Speaking of safari, does anyone know why some websites are locking out safari users?
I got caught in the net to catch them by some messed up code (using Firefox on Linux) as my wife gets the "we don't support safari" error message from gap.com.
Is there something safari doesn't support that gap.com would need? or what reason is there to lock out your userbase?
Changing the user-agent string apparently fixes things, but who wants to order from a company that doesn't allow you as a customer?
Anyone have any answers as to what breaks on the page in safari?
In related news Microsoft today said they were also stopping the development of Windows. They have decided that it is too outdated to continue patching. The VMS-OS2-Win32, UNIX wannabe is dead technology. The company suggested people buy Linux or OSX solutions instead.
Back when the most recent MSN redesign was launched, it didn't initially work in Internet Explorer on the Mac, and that was way back in January. If Microsoft's web developers don't even bother testing in it, then I don't think it's too important to them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It's been easy to hate on since MS stopped updating it in like 2001 anyway. But IE 5 for Mac was the best and most standards compliant browser on any platform the day it was released. Awesome work by the original team. Sad it came from MS. Sadder still that they basically abandoned it once their contractual obligations to Apple were up
...um, don't forget there's no IE for Linux to begin with...
This thread from the ubuntu forums might be of interest to you. I couldn't figure out why I was getting stuck this morning, so I wondered if it was just an ubuntu issue (or all firefox on linux). Apparently someone with FC3 was also locked out, so it seems they've locked out linux users.
"The Mac is a niche market and always will be and Firefox isn't a real threat to IE "
I think you will eat those words in 2 years time.
Damn near all developers are coding on Unix platforms and porting to wintel these day's. With the Mac move to intel processors OSX will become the defacto standard platform that all cross platform applications will work on. Microsoft see's the real threat. Many developers (myself included) only support Unix/Linux and Windows because 3 is just to hard. But with OSX moving to intel it will be a total cake walk...in fact it will probably hurt Linux some. I know my primary development machine will become an Apple with OSX on intel procs.
what?
"Apple, which over the years has been losing support from software and peripheral vendors, and may some day soon wake up and find itself in third place on the desktop, behind Linux"
I would agree except for the fact the Apple is switching to Intel processors which means we will have a BSD unix OS with enough company dollars to add all the polish to the final product. Remember many of us don't mind paying for a good product. The reason I use Linux is because Windows is a horrible platform for developers and Macs are to expensive with obscure hardware (good, but obscure).
Having just used (ok played around with) a friends developer edition Intel Mac I can say that I am sold. We are both Unix developers who port applications to Windows. He does all his development on the Mac side and let me just say I am envious. For the most part he has a solid Unix platform that just plain works. That and combined with some of the developer tools on the Mac like the shark profiler...shit I am sold. I love Linux like a little brother. A naggin little brother that alway's needs tinkering with. When it comes time to for development I don't want to dink around with getting video cards working so my OpenGL app renders correctly on every card (this is a bigger problem than you might expect). I also don't want to test the application on every damned Linux distribution out there. Nope I want to sit down and code to a standard machine (Intel-OSX) and then port it to the other platforms. basically I am a wanna be Mac developer. I can't justify the cost of a Mac right now since they are switching platforms, but soon...ah yes. soon.
However I am a developer and not Joe six pack (Joe doesn't like the same beers as me!!). However I do believe that many developers will be sold on the Mac platform and this will create a large spike in applications running on both Mac and Linux. I personally think the OSX/Linux combo will be the 1-2 punch for Microsoft. Steve just has to get the computers to a reasonable price...still charge a premium but make it affordable for Joe Belgian style six pack.
disclaimer: For the most part I am an idiot...I tried to audition for an idiot role in a film, but did not get the part. I have never slept in a Holiday in Express so you should probably take what I say with a small grain of salt.
Cheers
what?
This is the best news I got this weekend!
:rolleyes:
Working for a certain college in Boston, I have to deal with MacIE for all my web applications. Why? Because of PC users.
On our campus, we have eMacs as kiosks in the halls. Using Fruitmenu, there are three programs in the 'Internet' folder: Safari, Firefox, & MacIE. For the Mac users, they all go for Safari or Firefox. However, PC users will use Internet Explorer. Why? Because that's what they use on the PC, so it must be the same, right?
It wasn't removed due to a bit of bureaucratic mixups and politics. As a web developer, I was breaking one of my rules and using user-agent detection to sniff out MacIE and explicit instructions to use Firefox or Safari on that kiosk.
Now that I can point to Microsoft officially stopping support, it will be a lot easier to get the application removed all together.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
"'all' developers coding on Unix platforms? WTF? The majority have never even used it."
Ok let me refraphse that: Most independant developers...and any developer who has never developed on a Unix platform is bound to be at least a little incompetent.. I have never met a single developer who has NEVER user Unix. I know some that get paid to work in windows shops and they don't tinker much at home. By they all at least have done development in Unix. Most people who truly love to code will argue that Unix is the superior platform. I am arguing that once they are given the chance to work on a platform as polished as OSX with the same tools they love from Linux many will switch..I am one of them.
"OSX just isn't standard enough for cross platform work, btw. the kernel is Unix but the filesystem layout is nonstandard (not to mention the case insensitive filesystem). I also doesn't run X by default so GUI work is out."
Not standard to Linux. Very similar to Irix. I like th eLInux layout better myself, but then I have used Linux almost exclusivly for about 6 years now.
Right and Windows is? Come one. You can set your development environment on OSX however you like...I have a friend who runs his company with all development on OSX and ports to Windows, Linux, Irix, and Sun. Most users are windows users and he would flat out say you have never given it a chance...in fact I argued for quite awhile myself until he walked me throught some of his setups. OSX blows away other Unices for out-of-the-box configuration. A file system hierarchy is irrelvevant. In production code you do your best to get static compiles and filesystem dependancies out anyway. I mean the difference between Windows and Linux is night and Day yet we still manage to do it. OSX moving to Intel platform will open up a lot of doors to developers who need to code very close to the hardward. Me and the guy I mentioned are both scientific coders. It is important to be able to optimize to one instruction set. With all major platforms moving to Intel many of us will start inlining SSE/SSE2 code to gain maximum performance. Yeah most application won't. by scientific code will. Games will. Graphics intesive application will.
So yeah OSX isn't standard. But it works. It has all my developer tools and many that I wish I had. I will pay for that. Porting back to Linux is as easy as setting the PATH, LIBRARY, and a few other application specific environment variables. Windows will alway's be the biggest pain in the ass.
And just to clarify I am not really a Mac fanboy...yet. I don't own one and never have. But I will.
Oh and as far as the cool aid...nah. It is christmas time and the local pub as about 150 new Christmas beers in stock. So yeah I am on the "sauce" but it isn't cool aid!!!
Cheers.
what?
Wells Fargo being a case in point. Gets the job done. Works in pretty much everything. (I've not actually tried it in Lynx.) I make a point of thanking them for this every time I talk to them on the phone or in email.
At the other end of the spectrum: ANZ. A bunch of horrid and highly unnecessary and extremely proprietary JavaScript is required even to log in. I like clientside JS for a lot of things - well enough that I've even written a couple of books about it - but this is a prime example when and how NOT to use it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I used the guide here: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/ and I did get IE working under Fedora Core 4 with WINE installed. A user agent check reported it to be the Windows 98 version of IE6...
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
Mac users should be pissed to see IE go. At the very least, it's a valuable web development tool. Although it is not identical to Win IE, it has similar idiosyncrasies. Microsoft commonly favors lame proprietary implementations of would-be standards. Heck, look at their support for ECMAScript.... "JScript," not to be confused with "JavaScript." Mac developers need access to this stuff.
The loss of IE on the Mac simply increases a Mac web develope'rs need for a secondary Windows box or VPC for testing. Although that need has always existed to some extent, now it REALLY exists.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I don't think so...It is just the first shot in the battle between Apple OS-X and MS Windows Apple is not going to release OS-X or it's successor until it has debugged it totally on the x86 platform, that is what the Intel/OS-X platfor is really about...Once it has been around and is well debugged in a couple of years, Apple will release OS-X (maybe OS-XI?) for all x86 platforms. And it will eat Microsoft's Lunch.
But first, Microsoft has some cards to play...withdraw the most widely used browser for Mac OS-X, then MS-Office, and all other Mac products. Next the rhetoric will start, and they will FUD OS-X on Intel...And it will fail.
ttyl
Farrlel
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
5% for any major website should be enough to convince any PHB worth his salt.
I had a conversation about this with my boss some time ago, and stated that our e-commerce websites (very non-tech oriented) had gone over the 5%-boundry when it came to firefox users.
His face went pale. 5% of all users means 5% of ad and sale income. Multiplied by the numbers we get, this is a serious enough difference for him to consider: the difference was more than both our salaries combined. He ordered thorough testing on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and full adherence to web standards some time later.
Gotta love capitalism.
This sig is intentionally left blank
"Irony: "We can't compete because someone else makes the OS and we don't have full access to it." - Microsoft"
It makes one wonder, doesn't it? Do they actually have a clue what they look like when they say shit like this? If I were the flak given the task of making this statement I'd either look like I was about to die of embaressment, because I would be, or I wouldnt' be able to stop giggling.
Since I don't know whether to laugh or cry, I guess I'll just do both at once.
KFG
People seem to think that IE for Mac in some way used the same rendering engine that the Windows verison uses. This is far from the truth. The Mac version of IE is much more standards compliant and has none of the quirks that IE for Windows has, which pretty much means that it helps no one on the Mac side view IE specific web pages.
However, the corporate perception of the death of IE is another matter entirely. Though I would hope that the new popularity of FireFox will show IT mamagers that IE is not the only show in town and letting their Mac user use Safari, Shiira, Opera, Camino (my personal favorite) or Firefox is not that bad an option.
I think the Mac platform has far better browser choices than Windows has now. I was really liking K-Meleon there for a while, but I find the UI needs more work.
Check out these wicked effing cute promotional cartoons in an otherwise lame-ass flash based web page that looks optimized for 640x480:
m o/c_ienewlook.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/ie/5/autode
I know IE is generally considered trash, but the Mac product was actually totally different, and for its time, it was pretty great. It had a lot of unnecessary features, but some of them were actually useful, and you could tell that the creative spirit was there.
I have a feeling that if the Mac BU at Microsoft continued developing IE for Mac, it'd be a kick ass product still.
Actually, the latest comprehensive browser stats that I saw show 30% of Mac users still using Internet Explorer (link). My anecdotal personal evidence backs this up -- many Mac users I know still don't use Safari.
I think the reason has to do with the whole OS X upgrade thing. A new version of the OS costs $130, and the only way to upgrade Safari is to upgrade the OS. A lot of OS X users never bother to upgrade from the version that came with their Mac. Consequently, they're stuck on versions that either never came with Safari installed, didn't have it as the default browser, or can't run anything better than 1.0 even if they it wanted to.
As a web developer, I have to say that the standards-compliance of 1.0 is pretty poor and a lot of site layouts will break when using it. For instance, an absolutely positioned element will always take its position from the document origin, rather than that of the parent (relatively positioned) container. This is a huge deal that will cause all manner of breakage on most sites using CSS positioning.
If Apple really want to wean people off their Microsoft dependency, and do the right thing by their users, then they should back-port Safari 2.0 to older versions of OS X and release it as an automatic update. If I.E. 6 for Windows is a 5-year-old browser that runs on 10-year-old operating systems, why can't Apple's 6-month-old browser run on a 5-year-old operating system?
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Coding to standards does not always mean it will display properly on all browsers. Even after writing standard sites, I find that I need to tweak some things to get the site to display well on all browsers that I test with.
This is particularly bad on IE Mac, which is why words cannot express how glad I am that the browser is being discontinued.
MacIE had one of the strangest and saddest histories I've seen, of any product.
MacIE 5 was an awesome release, critically aclaimed and everything, with a good development team and a strong testing team, that included daily performance measurement.
And yet, almost immediately after 5.0 was released, the MacIE team was redeployed to work on a set-top DVR box. The notion at the time was that the team would continue to do MacIE work in their spare time, since IE 5 was the leader among Mac browsers and no longer needed a full-time team.
The problem with that notion was that WebTV, the team's new bosses, had no reason to actually schedule any time for real IE work. So later, when that particular set-top box got cancelled, the IE team got redployed for other WebTV work, and since this was now out of MacBU's control, nothing could really be done.
3 or 4 years went by before enough people in the Mac division wanted to resume work on IE, and when it looked like we might actually need the technology, as a base for MSN-for-Mac, the IE 6 team was formed. It got a firm OS X-only foundation, a new even more complient browser base, and then suddenly it became apparent that Apple was doing their own browser, because, well, there were lots of small clues, but the big clues was that Apple had started calling the old Mac IE team offering them jobs.
By that time the Mac division had formally committed to MSN-for-Mac-OSX, so it's not like we were completely going to stop work. But a meeting was held internally, the outcome of which was that it didn't make sense to build our own browser if Apple was going to bundle one, because the marketshare and mindshare of the distant-second-place browser, on the distant-second-place platform, wasn't worth pursuing. A week later we had a meeting with high-up people at Apple, where they told us they were doing a browser. And the week after that, after confirming it with Bill Gates, who was reportedly sad but understanding of the decision, MacIE was officially shut down.
MSN-for-MacOSX went ahead, and was also critically acclaimed, but once released, indications were that the number of users was about the same as the number of developers. After that, MacBU concentrated once again on the next Office release, and MacIE has been well and truly and permanently dead ever since.
Over the whole sad journey, the single most surprising thing I ever discovered was from a small conversation that went:
Me: "Look, if it makes sense to devote dozens of people to WinIE, then surely it makes sense to devote half a dozen to MacIE!"
Higher-up: <confused look> "There aren't dozens of people on WinIE. WinIE had some great people on it! We need those great people on products that make money!"
Me: "Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that the DOJ would sue us?"
Higher-up: <confused look>
Some day I hope to get a proper answer on our motivation to do WinIE and MacIE in the first place. It seems to be that we were scared of not having control of the HTML standard. And indeed, now that Firefox is gaining traction, Microsoft has added more people to WinIE again.
Epilogue: All of this made it a lot more easy for me to quit and go work at Google
Reminder: I may or may not be leaving some parts out for NDA reasons.
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)
Both are implementations of an ECMA standard, and Microsoft's is perfectly good. They can't call it Javascript because that (was/is) a Netscape trademark, but it doesn't really matter, because Javascript is a TERRIBLE name for that language. It really has nothing to do at all with Java except for some similar, C style, syntax. Now, perhaps Firefox has added some functionality to Javascript and Microsoft needs to catch up a little, but fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with their implementation.
Hi all,
I keep hearing "my bank doesn't support firefox", or "The Gap doesn't support firefox". Which bank? Which banks in particular? What other retailers in particular? I want an online list I can refer to!
Where is a webpage I can go to see the list of all the major corporations who develop IE-only websites? This way I can avoid patronizing them with my business altogether. It would save me the time of switching to other competitors (who do "get it") later. It would be nice if each entry in this online db also had a link beside it to where I (and others like me who "get it") can file my complaint about non-conformance to W3C strandards.
If such a page existed and became common knowledge, no corporation in their right mind would want to be on such a list. This public badge of shame would prompt them to hire some real web developers, not loser IE-monopoly-developers who are impersonating real web developers.
Sounds like you never heared of the CSS code to make things work..
You can write the following CSS:
This is indeed a hack, but it's relatively safe. The "* html" selector only works in MSIE, it's valid CSS. MSIE believes there is another element above the html tag. The w\idth is valid CSS too, hexacedimal/special characters can be escaped. This is something MSIE 6 supports, so it reads the correct width too. As of MSIE7, it supports the correct model and they've fixed the "* html" selector bug, so your code continues to work in the future too.
And voila, the site works in all browsers.. Remember to put the following at the top of the page, so it triggers the same rending mode [strict mode] in all browsers:
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
I don't agree with your post much, although it is clear that the reason MSFT put 100 million into Apple a few years back was to prevent them becoming a total monopoly.
I think classing Apple as a desktop OS company is ignoring developments of the past 3-4 years.
I also think that people wanting to use Linux on the desktop won't use Apple. Most Apple users are individuals/small work groups and home users (like me), so you're not going to get the hundreds of corporate desktops you need to challenge Microsoft by replacing them (hint: start with the system integrators who have the 000's of outsourced desktop maintenance contracts with large corporates).
I also don't believe that if Apple did not exist there would be hordes of developers lining up for a desktop Linux product. Most open source projects are understaffed anyway, to expect loads of people to fall out of the woodwork and start working on improving a desktop (as well really understanding user interfaces and *shudder* marketing) is IM-Not-So-HO fanciful.
I think that you receiving 5 insightful for your post is damn impressive, but that's just my opinion.
29 mpg. YMMV.