According to Roz Ho, general manager of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit [via Bob, via PC Pro, via MacUser], development of Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac has ceased. “OK,” I say. “So what?”
IE5 for the Mac was released some time in early 2000, I believe March or April. Generally speaking, the browser has not changed since its initial release date. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good browser, and it was an important win for the Mac community. Despite that, it has flaws, and the developers have not kept up with existing technologies. Microsoft gave up on this product two years ago. It just took a long time for them to admit it.
Ho claims that Safari pushed them out of the market, as Apple is able to provide more integration with the system than the Microsoft developers. I think this is a complete load of crap. Fix the stupid margin bugs, add tabbed browsing, and your browser is almost top-notch. Too many companies use the “Apple made a competing product” excuse as an easy out. I say, if you’ve got a good product, it’s probably going to succeed. Either that, or Apple will buy the rights to it. (Then you definitely won’t have to compete.)
So, really, what does this annoucement mean? Not much. We still have a choice of browsers, however limited. And it’s not like Internet Explorer is going away any time soon. Hell, many of the people I support at RIT use Netscape Communicator 4.7. Such is life.
Why anyone would use anything other then Opera is beyond me.
But all macs suck so who would use them anyway. d:
j/k, but yea, why not just use Opera you wanker. I wuv me some Opera. Woo woo for Opera!
Mmmmmm, I love my new fan. And hey Justin, I bought some of my very own Arctic Silver (v 3.0!) woo woo. Want to borow it for a year? (:
That’s Karl, in case anybody was curious. =P
Opera for the mac sucks. It’s slow, it takes up too much screen real estate. Pure crappiness
But look at the other browsers for the mac:
Mozilla – gecko based. gonna get faster (hopefully) now that it’s based on pheonix.
Camino – gecko based. cocoa front end (and they have RABID followers)
Safari – khtml based. Standard Apple product. not too complex to use, but has some good featuers (tabs, pop up blocking)
OmniWeb 4.5 – khtml based. Lots of power features (complex ad blocking, autoupdating bookmarks, advanced cookie controls). Finally renders decently, wont be a power player until it has tabs like the rest of the mac browsers.
So baiscally, now there are 4 main browsers for mac os x. all based on opensource renders. I think this fares well for the open source community
There is a lot more going on behind the scenes with IE/Mac than was made public. It was not abandoned by Microsoft.
One thing to think about: it was one major browser than made the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. It was probably one of the first Carbon apps. It shipped with Mac OS X 10.0. That took a lot of commitment at a time when Carbon was not as fleshed out as it is today. (Remember that a lot of vendors didn’t ship Carbon apps until after 10.1.)
Let’s also think about the network stacks they had to build on, and how they were different between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. What kind of effect could this have had, especially on one of IE/Mac’s major current complaints: speed?
And we have yet to see some of the nice features of IE/Mac in Safari, and I don’t know enough about the others besides Camino to really comment on them: in-page keyboard navigation shortcuts, page holder, auction tracker, in-window history, password management, helper app management, security and proxy support, etc.
I’ve used all the browsers. They’re all crap.
Try iCab,it’s small, fast, and gives you more preferences.
Safari is ok,it’s easy to use,but it’s not as customizable.
The new mac comes with Safari, IE/Outlook,Netcape, Aol.
Throw away the last three.
Mac OS X users can install a lot of browsers: Camino, Safari, Opera, Netscape, OmniWeb, IE, iCab, Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla… All of them very good.
The best? Mozilla.
The worst? IE!