IE on the Mac: Bubbye

News on Monday that Microsoft plans to discontinue support and development of its Internet Explorer Web browser on the Macintosh hardly came as a surprise.

The company telegraphed the move nearly two and a half years ago, citing competition from Apple Computer's Safari browser as the primary reason for the decision.

Mac loyalists aren't shedding any tears. Why? Many point to what they say is IE's lack of standards conformity which make development and support more difficult.

Blog community response:

"Thanks Microsoft! The Internet Explorer for Mac will disappear in the near future. According to this page Microsoft will stop support for IE Mac with the end of this year. As of 31.01.2006 its distribution will be stopped completely. Before Apple's development of Safari the IE was the standard browser on each Mac and got so widely distributed. Since the IE never impressed with its standard-conformity it seems that web developers can leave some problems unsolved when IE Mac is no longer (spread) in the wild. Now only IE Win remains to be stripped...and the web would be somehow nicer."
--On every brand new day

"Today, I'm going to send an e-mail to the web developer team of the company that required me to use Internet Explorer to login into their site the importance of designing web with web standards. Hopefully they will listen so I can use Safari or Mozilla Firefox to login into the webpage."
--William Computer Blog

"The best feature of Mac IE 5 never shipped. We had to remove it from the product 2 days before releasing it. For many months there were two builds of MacIE 5, one with this feature and one without. That was also true for the new Mac IE "chrome" which was a guarded secret, till, well, Apple also happened to have the same idea and they called theirs Aqua. Those were strange times."
--shahine.com/omar/