Take a quick look at the Internet Explorer for Mac page. Yes, Microsoft has finally killed off IE for Mac. It discontinued development on the browser back in June 2003, but it's now finally killing off support and, come the end of January 2006, downloads of the geriatric app.
In case you missed the reasons why, a News.com article quoted the then Microsoft Product Manager Jessica Sommer who 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.
This, of course, is cobblers. What precise access to the OS does a web browser need? Opera, Firefox, Camino and OmniWeb don't need it. OmniWeb can even access the same rendering libraries that Apple's own browser, Safari, uses. In fact, dozens of apps use WebKit to provide web content within their own interfaces.
Sure, on Windows, IE is quite snuggly tied into the OS, but that's for providing things like ActiveX support and functions that the OS's interface needs – not the other way around. IE on Mac's support for ActiveX died an early death and if MS were ever planning to resuscitate it, I think most Mac users would have offered a polite “No thank you.”
There'll be a few things we'll miss from IE once it's gone – although it's bound to keep on working for a while, given that it still works fine on OS X 10.4, two OS revisions after it was in active development. Auction tracking was a nice feature, as was the ability to switch off images, a function sadly missing from Safari. Nevertheless, there won't be too many Mac users crying tonight.
Technorati Tags: browsers, Internet Explorer, Macs
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