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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
In other news, the RNC chairperson suggested 'that Republicans migrate to other parties such as the Democratic party', and North Korean leader Kim Jung-Il suggest that 'North Koreans embrace alternative political systems, such as capitalism'...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The next article down the page says: "Find out how Internet Explorer 5 for Mac can show you the Internet in new, exciting ways." ???
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
They dont recomend Firefox? Well I never..
Guess that just means more firefox users on Mac now. Now with versions optimized toward their architectures now too.
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?
>>Internet Explorer 5 for Mac can show you the Internet in new, exciting ways.
Well, getting hacked *IS* exciting. Downloading antispyware updates would be a new experience for most Mac users.
At least they're honest.
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 is most likely due to the upcoming Intel transition. IE is written against the Carbon APIs (and most likely in CodeWarrior), which by all accounts (including Jobs himself) takes substantially more code refactoring to make Intel-compatible than a Cocoa application. IE simply looked at the dev costs of continued maintenance in light of making it Mactel compatible, and said "meh, it's not doing anything for us anyway". And they need those brains working on porting Office:mac, which actually does make MS money. Personally, I haven't launched IE on my Mac in months, so I doubt I'm going to miss it.
Exactly. IE is a free product, but costs Microsoft money to develop (it's not just a port of Windows IE). Office for Mac makes money, but IE only exists to try and "enrich" whatever platform it's on. Back in the day IE was actively developed for the Mac (along with some major cash from Microsoft being pumped into Apple's stock) it was because Apple was down on it's luck.
There was no way Microsoft was going to let it's main "competitor" die off. If Apple disappeared, it would allow enough space in the desktop market for a new, real competitor to enter (like Linux - at the moment Linux has to compete with both Windows *and* OS X, making it much harder to be accepted as a mainstream consumer desktop OS).
A long as Apple is in the picture taking up the number 2 position, Microsoft has a safety against real competition on the desktop, simply because of how certain brand markets tend to operate (Coke vs. Pepsi, Intel vs. AMD, etc). Now that Apple is doing well, there is no reason for Microsoft to pay extra money to keep Apple in the game. They can just sit back and watch Apple act as an albatros in the plans of Linux and any other potential desktop competitor, safe in the knowledge that Apple itself will never actually grow beyond a certain percentage of the market.
Couldn't they have just emailed both people still using IE on the Mac and saved themselves the trouble of a whole press release.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
No, really. If the server does all the work and uses nothing but standard CGI, then the web site will work for everyone. Everyone. If you really stick to basics, sites that deal with numbers can work for such crufty old things as text browsers without a glitch. If you must have images (say, for graphing your banking activities) then sticking to JPEG and GIF will again gather in by far the widest array of users.
Every time some developer chooses client-side processing of any kind, they are locking out users. Which is form over function, and as such, I think is a very poor decision.
It's one thing to be bleeding edge when you're showing off and nothing depends on it; it's entirely another to get the blood from your legitimate clients because you want to use new stuff.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have no idea why Apple let themselves get into this situation where Microsoft can do very serious damage any time they want. What Apple should do is a second Safari -- admit they can't support a complete office suite by themselves and start pushing a version based on NeoOffice/J or OpenOffice. Sooner or later, Bill Gates is going to pull the plug.
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.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It's more "whining" than anything else, you just have to go back a little bit to find it:
Although Microsoft may continue to provide security and performance updates, no major new releases are planned, Microsoft Product Manager Jessica Sommer told CNET News.com. Sommer said that, with the emergence of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
http://news.com.com/2100-1045_3-1017126.html
I call complete and utter whiny bullshit on this. It's not that they CAN'T compete, it's that they don't WANT to compete. OmniWeb dropped their proprietary rendering engine for WebCore/Kit and began focusing even harder on their wonderful UI. Why couldn't Microsoft have done this? Lots of applications have integrated Kit/Core, from third-party Web browser to instant messaging clients. I guess Microsoft doesn't have the resources that some 18-year-old kid with an ADC account does, right?
Irony: "We can't compete because someone else makes the OS and we don't have full access to it." - Microsoft
Call me a fucking waaaaaaaaaaaaaahmbulance, Redmond. You lost on this platform because you couldn't make a good Web browser if you tried, and all you did was blame someone else.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
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.
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:
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)
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
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
LOL! Not only is the WebKit framework available to any developer who can drag and drop in Interface Builder, but WebCore is available under an open source license! Microsoft has access to the freaking source code. Public relations departments are funny.
Now if only they would end IE for Windows.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Politely complaining is actually a very effective tactic, since "they" know that for every complainer, there's a hundred who stay silent and move to a different business. It has worked for me in on-line banking.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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
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.
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.
Maybe they disabled everything except IE for security reasons...
*ducks*
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
Standards are often silent on lots of details, and it's really up to the browser devs on how to do an implementation. For example, is padding included in the width of an element, or not? It depends on whether you're using IE or Mozilla. Go to the microsoft.com home page in IE and Firefox and see how the left nav behaves differently when you hover over an element. Which browser complies with the standards, or do they both? Well, that's anybody's guess.
I hate web sites telling me I can't use the UA of my choice.
And I hate the two guys that use Billy-Bobs-Web-Browser-That-He-Wrote-In-A-Weekend telling me that I should support his browser. Of course it's in our best interest to support the widest possible audience, but you have to weigh that off against the richness of the experience. I don't want to give 100% of the people a crappy UI because 0.001% of my potential market doesn't support a feature.
That being said, we would like to support another browser in the Linux/Mac space if possible. It will keep the Mozilla folks on their toes and get them to fix some really nasty problems like memory leaks.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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.