Who copied who?

arbernautarbernaut
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I t occurred to me that the Mac OS9 version of Internet Explorer 5.x and Mac OS X were very similar in their interfaces: the dividers, the method of changing the toolbar icons, the toolbar options, the transparent drop-downs, the » icon to indicate more icons, etc.



What I'm curious to know is Did MS get a sneaky preview of OSX and decide to base their interface on it, or did Apple look at Internet Explorer and plunder it for OSX?



I know what I'd like to believe, but what are your thoughts?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    I personally think that Apple took some of their ideas for Aqua from IE 5, but I doubt we'll ever know the real sequence of events that led to both interfaces. You know what Picasso said: "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." That's why I try not to jump into the "Microsoft steals Apple's ideas" threads.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    IE 5 and Aqua both appeared right around the same time. In fact our first glimpse of IE 5 was when Jobs demo'd OS X w/Aqua for the very first time at MacWorld SF 2000. Aqua had obviously been in development for quite some time as it is much harder to create an entire set of widgets for an OS rather then having only the need to make one look for a button bar/address bar in IE 5. Everything else in IE 5 was pure platinum.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    emaneman Posts: 7,204member
    You actually think Apple would copy IE?
  • Reply 4 of 8
    arbernautarbernaut Posts: 182member
    it's interesting to speculate on exactly who copied who and whether it was friendly or not. I suspect the IE team copied OSX as I'm sure OSX has been in development longer than IE5. I remember on some other forum the head of IE development at MS say that the simalarities were coincidental, but I think its fair to say that's a hell of a coincidence!
  • Reply 5 of 8
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    For whatever reason, I recalled that IE 5 showed up some time before Aqua was premiered, but when I did a quick search, all the reviews for it are around March, 2000. So it seems they did show up around the same time, as Eugene said. Funny how that's not how I remembered it, but anyway dems da facts.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    stevesteve Posts: 523member
    Apple had been using pinstripes in its displays for quite some time. Not to mention, they used Aqua-ish buttons on the Apple Store for things like iMac purchases.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
  • Reply 8 of 8
    thunderpoitthunderpoit Posts: 709member
    but if you remember correctly, steve was using IE as a demonstration for how well carbon compliant apps worked in OS X and Aqua. he said that the IE team had never seen aqua prior to MW and was using the fact that everything looked right and worked well with aqua as proof that if you have a carbon app that runs great in 9, there should be no problem running it in X
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