Microsoft officially ends IE Mac development and support

A single tear runs down my cheek...

"In other news, Microsoft officially announced that they will not support MS-DOS anymore".

i havn't used IE in a year. i kinda forgot about it's existance. This is a good thing. It will only encourage people to use Safari Camino and Firefox and which will encourage developers to fovus on them more YAY

And by "more recent", Microsoft means "better."

I actually think it's a pity there'll be no IE7 for the Mac, but only because it means I've got to use Windows to test out IE7 bugs on websites I'm developing.

And I've still got to use a couple of sites that only work in IE on Windows so the dreams of never having to use Windows again are still a dream.

With IE7 being WindowsXP or later it also looks like I'll have to buy a copy of XP too.

See, this is a bad thing!

Stopped development in June and "no further security or performance updates"? Hasn't IE for Mac gone for years without security or perfomance updates to the software? Didn't the latest 5.2.3 version come out in 2001 or something like that?

Not much of a loss IMHO. What I'd much rather see is an update to Windows Media Player with at least some minimal bugfixes, or some kind of QuickTime plugin for Windows media formats

They rolled IE into MSN I think and it had some updates after 5.2.3.

If you want windows media in Quicktime then just use the flip4mac components...

http://www.flip4mac.com/

It'd be nice though if some official components came out, be it from Microsoft or Apple.

"DING-DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD! THE WITCH IS DEAD! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

IE who ?!? Never downloaded it, never installed it, never used it. I use Camino by Mozilla, have Firefox also by Mozilla, and Shiira who released version 1.2 today . I didn't purchase my iBook with intentions to run M$ stuff on, if I was going to do that, why get the iBook or a Mac in the first place ?

I use FirstDirect as my main bank account, and this will end up causing issues for me. Their Internet Banking Plus service can't be used by Mac users - I quote from their faq:




Ah well, a small price to pay to stay away from a PC and IE.

David

If a bank refuses a significan portion of their customers due to bank coding principles, then I say: doom to that bank! It's time to change that bank. Or drop a threatening letter to the CEO/Director/Whatever.

For the love of me, I can't understand when people use Microsoft-only technologies in something that's important and necessary in a lot of people's lives. I can understand it in online music stores and things like that, but banking?

It puzzles me.

Interesting.

I find Opera,Safari, Firefox more satisfying than IE - I regularly try to install Firefox in my friends computers

On Windows I try and avoid it, although that is nigh impossible wiith Microsoft Windows updates and other tools which specifically demand IE.

I'd tell them that IE and ActiveX unenhances the experience of having a secure computer and that you refuse to use that technology for those reasons. To be honest, I'd switch banks. Internet banking is a great thing, but I'd never use IE especially on a Windows PC to access my bank account.

Switch to Lloyds TSB. Works perfectly with any browser.

[comedy moment]Hey guys!! This calls for a celebration!! Let us sing and dance!! Yaa-hoo!![/comedy moment]

Laughs aside, this really won't affect me in any way. I'm perfectly content to bask in Safari's glow. Gotta love RSS feed detection! So long, I say.

I have to agree with what Gene Clean previously said. Banks shouldn't discriminate like that. I can see VH1 or other music sites doing that with making Windows Media-only streams and files (which they all love to do for some reason ), but banks can't afford to cater to just PC users. Leaving us Mac users in the cold will eventually leave them likewise as well.

hey guys bfd it was dead long ago, ms just got around to announcing it. it's a mess anyway. they killed it to reduce their embarrassment. it was junk always was junk and now they admit it was junk. how many will jump from safari, firefox to vista??? once you taste freedom it's hard to go back.

M$ killed IE for the Mac because it does not generate revenue. This new announcement was really just a reminder of an announcement that Microsoft made about two years ago. When it was first announced, Microsoft planned to kill IE as a standalone app on all platforms. The Windows version of IE was supposed to be rolled into Longhorn. M$ announced that it would develop a new browser to be integrated into the Mac version of its MSN client. Since then, Microsoft's plans have changed somewhat. Owing to the tremendous security problems with IE, Microsoft was forced to unbundle the browser from Longhorn (now Windows Vista) and release a new version early. It has also repurposed MSN. But what has not changed is that Microsoft has not released an IE:mac upgrade to the public since 2003.

Isnt IE the only browser that the US Patent Office will accept?

Planning to patent somethin' soon?

It is a possible possibility

yeah, i don't get this, either. you figure most of their design content is being made on macs, and they've certainly got a budget to AFFORD supporting the mac platform from their respective websites.

also, if you're trying to get people to buy stuff (which, remember, is the whole reason for their existence -- to sell music and adjunct stuff to that music to the masses), wouldn't it make sense to cater to those people who a.) are willing to shell out extra and take a risk on more expensive technology -- i.e. they have the disposable income and the willingness to approach new technology differently and with acceptance -- plus some extra disposable income and b.) the native platform for the hyper-popular ipod?

i mean, really...

Right on, rok! Seriously, Apple has 75% of all MP3 player sales!

They should consider making Quicktime streams and files as well because it's just good business sense. Us Mac users want in, dammit.8)

Last time I looked at streaming server software, Quicktime was also by far the cheapest too, as it's free. On the other side, Microsoft's and Real's solutions weren't.

Perhaps someday they'll open their eyes to the obvious choice. It encodes in H.264 for cryin' out loud!

QuickTime free?

Aegisdesign said it was free for streaming servers. I know where you're coming from though.

IE sucks the nuts off a squirrel, but Safari still has more problems than Firefox. I'm not "in the know" as to why this is, but...

Simple.

Crap web designers.

First they get it working on Internet Explorer on Windows.

Then if someone complains, they tweak it to work on Firefox on Windows.

That's as far as they go usually.

They may even do something silly like put in some javascript to detect the browser and tell you to download IE or 'Netscape' if your browser wasn't one of the small list they used. So called browser sniffing scripts go out of date very quickly and clients will rarely pay you to update it.


Good web designers design for web standards so you design on Firefox/Safari first and get no problems on either. Then you fix the design for IE compatibility. Usually that's less work than the other way around and after a while you know which bits don't work in IE anyway and avoid them through instinct. It's not rocket science but it's still beyond the comprehension of some so called professionals.

And even given all of Firefox's pros, it still isn't fully standards compatible. Safari is the only browser to pass the Acid2 test.

I was flicking through a Linux magazine and caught sight of the face and read the little snippet. They were comparing how different browsers showed the face. IE failing, Firefox not so much, but still failing. For some reason they didn't show how Safari did...

The Acid2 test really isn't very significant to web designers since it's testing mostly how some evilly convoluted CSS fails in an appropriate way. Most of the standards it addresses are future standards that aren't used today. It's become a cause célèbre amongst geeks and web browser developers but it's importance is minimal for designers. It just shows that the developers care about standards more than anything else.

Firefox and Safari are close enough with web standards compliance to almost not bother testing one or the other provided you keep within compliant code. 99.9% of the time a website designed in Safari will be identical in Firefox. And if they aren't identical you know at least you can raise a bugzilla report and have it fixed.

The differences mostly come down to IE compatibility. Both Firefox and Safari are encumbered with the entirely pragmatic approach of having to present pages 'just like IE' in the event they are given badly designed pages and it's there that they differ. They do this because if they didn't, dumb people would just presume the browser was broken, not the website, and go back to using IE. IE did the web a huge disservice by being extremely slack in allowing any old crap to render and now we have to support those old sites that work just fine on IE by introducing the same support for bad sites in other browsers.

However, if you come across a site that doesn't work in Firefox or Safari then please tell the web designer. Some of us do care that our work doesn't work on all browsers.