Microsoft Ends IE for Mac

RandomMacUser writes "A while ago, Microsoft stopped updating IE for Mac, freezing it at version 5. But according to this Microsoft webpage, all support will cease December 31, 2005, and any official distribution with cease January 31, 2006. Also, the webpage suggests 'that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.'"

Wait, is this supposed to help M$?

[Daedius]

Guess that just means more firefox users on Mac now. Now with versions optimized toward their architectures now too. [beatnikpad.com]

It's not just the mac version

[Bert64]

The windows version hasn't seen major updates for years... In many ways the mac version is more up to date than the windows version, at least it has vastly superior CSS support.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[SethJohnson]

Wells Fargo is browser-independent.

Seth

Don't forget Opera..

[the_rajah]

The Mac version of Opera works great, too. I've got four browsers on my old iMac G3-333 that runs Tiger. IE, Safari, Firefox and Opera. My linux boxes have Firefox, Opera and Konqueror. My bank's site gives me a non-supported browser warning when I access their site with Opera, but allows me to proceed and, other than some minor rendering problems, works OK.

Re:Who is really suprised?

[pboulang]

I think you mean you doubt it because they make money off of it. They were not making a dollar off of IE, so it is no surprise as a business decision.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[jonfelder]

And switching banks because of browser compatibility isn't an option for most people.

Why not? Switching banks isn't too hard...it may take a month or two to get your bill payments and deposits sorted out, but you just maintain two accounts at that time.

(was Interesteing Problems)

[shking]

Have you tried spoofing the webserver? (i.e. your browser tells the bank's webserver that it is IE, when it is in fact Safari, Firefox, Opera or whatever). The default .net website sends out custom pages for each type of browser. This is a great temporary workaround and has worked for me many times:

1. from the Terminal command line: defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
2. start Safari
3. select Debug > User Agent and choose a browser

Opera has this capability built in

Firefox and Camino are left as a (trivial) exercise for the reader (a couple minutes searching Google should do it)

Re:Speaking of Safari (Gap.com)

[cmdrbuzz]

He wasn't ever CEO of GAP, however he did sit on the Board of Director's for a while.
The CEO of GAP also sat on Apple's Board as well.

Re:Microsoft admit defeat?

[Total_Wimp]

But the less I.E. the better.

I'm hoping this will provide all sorts of benefits for not only Mac users, but also the web community as a whole.

The IE on the Mac was so significantly different than the current version of Windows IE that it gave a false sense of security to the Mac using community. They thought that since they had IE, their web experience would be the same as their Windows-using friends. They were wrong.

Now that they're being forced to use one of the other browsers, it will become very apparent that a)the other browsers have some nice features and b) the other browsers are ignored by a certain subset of the web community.

Once the Mac Faithful have a better understanding of just how much they've been marginalized over the last few years, hopefully they'll use their vocalness to aid the fight for web content providers to provide standards-compliant, works-on-any-browser web sites. They'll crow about Safari passing the Acid Test and they'll point out that all browsers should pass this test.

Since the Safari-using community will grow overnight and its percentage of users will be added to the likes of Firefox as a large alternate web browsing community, the content providers will (hopefully) increasingly start writing standars-compliant web sites so all of their customers will be able to use their content. After all, it's a lot harder to ignore 20% than 10% of your potential audience.

One more great thing. Mac users love Apple products so they'll use Safari way more than Firefox. This will help keep web browser usage diversified. If we could get as much as 20% web usage as one of these two and 10% of web usage as non-IE mobile browsing then content providers will increasingly find it silly to support IE only, while also finding it silly to support only one of the other browsers. Diversity is a very good thing for everyone.

TW

Re:I see IE all the time on Macs

[agentkhaki]

As of 10.4 (Tiger), IE is no longer included with the OS. However, if you do an upgrade (rather than a clean install), you'll still have IE. For me, this is the final nail in the coffin. No more trying to fudge around with CSS-based sites in hopes of appeasing Mac/IE's "great for its time" (and, in many ways, still better than that of Win/IE 6) rendering engine, which is simply no longer that great. Sure, it's usually not hard to do said fudging, but eventually, we have to draw the line (there are bigger fish to fry). The products has been EOLed, HOPEFULLY, Microsoft will pull the download from their site (if they haven't already), and one user at a time, we'll get rid of the now-pesky thing.

Stange thing is...

[Hamster Lover]

if you use Safari Enhancer [lordofthecows.com] to alter the user agent setting to "Firefox" or something similar the page displays fine.

Not that it matters as I have moved to Firefox as my default browser. I like Safari but I want the Flashblock and AdBlock plugins for Firefox.

Re:(was Interesteing Problems)

[leenoble_uk]

Additionally, my bank specifically stated that Safari was not supported. I chose to ignore this warning and indeed the initial setup process failed because I needed to download a secure certificate which involved some IE/Moz specific capability apparently. So I used Firefox to get the certificate and then exported it to the desktop and imported it into Keychain Access. Now my bank's website works perfectly well with Safari.

Re:Stange thing is...

[cheesy9999]

You can also enable the debug menu in Safari [macosxhints.com] which easily lets you change the user agent [macosxhints.com]. But use sparingly [macosxhints.com].

Re:A casualty of the Intel transition

[cheesy9999]

Except for the fact that Microsoft had announced they were discontinuing IE for Mac BEFORE Apple announced the switch to Intel.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[urbanRealist]

Try Opera. I've come across sites that will only work in IE and Opera because Opera will lie and say that it's IE.

Re:I'm bummed.

[toddbu]

an excellent browser

Our experience has been that DHTML support on Konqueror is still far behind both Firefox and IE. We'd love to support it, but we spend enough time putting in hacks for the big two browsers that we really don't want to take the time to make Konqueror work right. It's also why we don't support Opera, although Opera seems to work better than Konqueror.

don't forget where Safari comes from

Last I'd read, there wasn't much cooperation between the teams. That makes a bad situation even worse. If we could target Linux/Mac in one step we'd think about supporting Konqueror. Our solution has been to tell our Mac customers to install Firefox and be happy. Most of them thank us for pointing them to a browser that works halfway decently on all sites.

Re:Speaking of Safari (Gap.com)

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an extremely obscure but very serious bug in the DOM in Safari 416. In event handlers added through DOM methods, the target.preventDefault and target.stopPropagation methods fail silently. This can basically make sites go haywire.

A few sites have dealt with the problem by disabling support for Safari through a browser sniffer. Sounds like Gap is one of them.

The problem has already been fixed in WebKit, and if you use a recent nightly build (nightly.webkit.org) you'll be fine. But the fix won't make it into Safari until 10.4.4, which isn't due out for a couple of weeks yet, I think.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[MTO_B.]

Also, do this.
Firefox > Help > Inform about an incompatible website...
Fill the details, send.

Re:Confused

[cb8100]

From the horse's mouth (or is it ass?):

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=293907 [microsoft.com]

Re:I'm bummed.

[leathered]

"Our experience has been that DHTML support on Konqueror is still far behind both Firefox and IE. We'd love to support it, but we spend enough time putting in hacks for the big two browsers that we really don't want to take the time to make Konqueror work right. It's also why we don't support Opera, although Opera seems to work better than Konqueror."

3.5 is very much improved and is said to be one of the most standards compliant browsers out there. It now passes Acid2 unlike FF and IE. Not entirely useful to the user but nice to know nevertheless.

"Last I'd read, there wasn't much cooperation between the teams. That makes a bad situation even worse."

Yes I remember reading about that. Apparantly the teams are working much closer now and the Konq devs have access to the Safari CVS. Version 4 promises to have the best of both browsers. Don't get me wrong, Firefox is excellent but I love the speed (as fast as Opera IMO) and the integration into my KDE desktop that Konqueror provides.

Mac pricing myth

[tepples]

I seem to remember reading a story on Slashdot about a year ago that concluded that a Macintosh computer is not significantly more expensive than a comparable Wintel PC. There's no Mac in the $300 class because Apple doesn't want to associate itself with the bargain-basement $300 Wintel PCs that skimp on parts (no burner, 128 MB RAM, etc) and then nickel-and-dime the buyer for upgrades.

Re:Wait, is this supposed to help M$?

[rdoger6424]

Excuse me while I burst into flames, but Firefox just doesn't work on my Mac Mini. It's inefficient and not (yet) good for the mac. I haven't tried camino yet, so that might be better (Camino's cocoa, right?), but Firefox just doesn't get the job done efficiently.

Re:Interesteing Problems

[gizmonic]

How long ago was that? I've been banking online for the past 3 or 4 years with Bank One (ever since they bought First Chicago) and now Chase. I've *never* had a problem using Firefox from my Mac or my PC on thier site. Just curious if this was some time ago as my experience in this century has been that there have been no issues at all. I'm wondering if they saw the light a while back...

Re:Interesteing Problems

[eweu]

Hey, I know what I'll do! I'll tweak this compiled library, which I don't have source code to, by running this Perl script I found on the Internet! The library only controls unimportant things for which I need no guarantees of connectness, like my online banking. Gosh, I'm so glad there have never been any viruses or security holes in software ever.

You don't have the source code? I do [apple.com].

Re: This highlights the actual problem, which is..

[Antique Geekmeister]

I agree. Moreover, sites that stick to basics and use straightforward HTML and CGI load faster, work on far more configurations of even the approved browser, are easier to fix, and don't get created by vaporware consultants who promise the stars and the moon to their clients but then charge New York taxi rates for the trip there.

I've actually told a consultant that I wouldn't pay them if they kept insisting on JavaScript pop-ups instead of a plain old clickable link, which they insisted on doing even after I introduced them to the vision impaired company lawyer who hates these things because they screw up the text->speech software that lawyer uses.

Re:Stange thing is...

[pomo monster]

Similar plugins exist for Safari. I use SafariStand to give me "click to play Flash" and SafariBlock for general adblocking.

Re:(was Interesteing Problems)

[Sithgunner]

You really don't want to go the unsupported way in the risk of messing around with your own bank account...

If you're despearete use Remote Desktop to Windows and be done with it, I hate to have malfunctioning JavaScript make errors and not even show if there was an error because of unsupported function or different behaviour with the spoofed browser of your choice.

It's not like you want to send money twice because the last JS didn't show you the 'transfer completed' screen...

Good, but...

[dghcasp]

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of Mac/OS 9.x computers out there, and IE is about the only browser available for them. Safari needs OSX. Camino needs OSX.

Someone else made an (admittidly funny) remark about "just email those two users." In reality, for the place I work, our server logs show 6% of all accesses come from IE 5.x on MacOS 9.x systems.

I'll be very happy when IE 5 finally goes away, but on the other hand, I still see the occasional hit by Netscape 4.x in the logs...

Re:IE only is not always due to incompetence

[gerardrj]

The problem is that HTML is not supposed to dictate exactly what the browser shows. Browsers are supposed to let the end user decide what elements to render, in what order and in what fashion. I am supposed to be able to choose my own CSS definitions that should override those provided by the web site.

HTML is not PDF or PostScript, it's a markup language that contains suggestions of how things should be handled. If you need a web site that must align things pixel perfect then you should not be using HTML/CSS for the layout, but some other technology instead (image maps, Flash, clients/server app, etc).

Re:I'm bummed.

[smallpaul]

For example, is padding included in the width of an element, or not? It depends on whether you're using IE or Mozilla. ... Which browser complies with the standards, or do they both? Well, that's anybody's guess.

No: you could just read the standards or documents written about them:

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/box.html : "In the W3C box model, the width of an element gives the width of the content of the box, excluding padding and border."..."Mozilla, Konqueror/Safari and Opera 6 and lower follow W3C's standards."

Re:Javascript vs. Jscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, JavaScript is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, not Netscape. :)

Re:I'm bummed.

[Dolda2000]

Standards are often silent on lots of details, and it's really up to the browser devs on how to do an implementation. For example, is padding included in the width of an element, or not? It depends on whether you're using IE or Mozilla.

Actually, from CSS 2.1, 8.1:

content edge or inner edge

The content edge surrounds the rectangle given by the width and height of the box, which often depend on the element's rendered content.

padding edge

The padding edge surrounds the box padding. If the padding has 0 width, the padding edge is the same as the content edge.

border edge

The border edge surrounds the box's border. If the border has 0 width, the border edge is the same as the padding edge.

margin edge or outer edge

The margin edge surrounds the box margin. If the margin has 0 width, the margin edge is the same as the border edge.

As you can see, the width of the padding is not included in the width of an element. This is even one of the things that Microsoft will fix in IE 7. Microsoft may not deserve all the flak it gets, but they most certainly deserve this -- not following the box model is one of the most notorious bugs in IE's CSS implementation. You may actually want to read the standards before you blame Microsoft's mistakes (or the mistakes of any other web browser implementor, for that matter -- I just couldn't think of any others that make any significant mistakes) on them the next time.

And I hate the two guys that use Billy-Bobs-Web-Browser-That-He-Wrote-In-A-Weekend telling me that I should support his browser.

And noone is telling you to (at least, if they are, you are in your full right to apply a clue stick to them). All you have to do is make sure that your site complies with the W3C's standards, and it will be Billy Bob's fault if his web browser doesn't render your site correctly.

I don't want to give 100% of the people a crappy UI because 0.001% of my potential market doesn't support a feature.

I would argue that if you try to use a hypertext media (such as the WWW) as a "user interface", you're already doing something wrong, but I can save that for another discussion.

Yeah, No Kidding

[Greyfox]

I recently discovered that CSS handling in IE is functionally retarded. Apparently a lot of people (particularly web developers) are aware of the problem. Microsoft for the most part insists that the worst bits of it are "features." No web 2.0 for you, IE users. If Microsoft would just discontinue the browser, we could move forward without wasting endless hours trying to come up with workaround's for the one thing Microsoft's always been good at putting out -- bugs!

Re:I was on the MacIE 6 team when it got canned...

[jbx]

Jimmy Grewal posted a follow-up to this on his blog, which covers some extra points:

http://www.jimmygrewal.com/?p=187 [jimmygrewal.com]

A lot of what he says is true; but the story is more complex than this and there were many other factors that came into play. Issues which he doesn't cover...primarily because he wasn't working on the product much until the last few months of development:

        * - Mac IE was the first real browser running on Mac OS X. We had it running on Developer Preview 2 and it shipped on the Public Beta CD-ROM. That was a great engineering achievement but it came at a very high price. Developing for OS X in those early days was a nightmare and we spent so much time struggling with OS bugs and changing APIs that precious time that could have been used to improve the product was wasted just trying to maintain compatibility with each new beta release of OS X.
        * - Apple was a pain in the ass sometimes. For a company with such great PR, they really were very unprofessional and treated developers poorly. I know that the OS X transition was tough, but there are so many stories I could tell of stupidity at Apple and policies which made no sense...but I won't. I'll just say that Apple had a lot more involvement in the development of Mac IE and it's eventual end than Jorg ["jbx"] gives them credit for. There were times during the last two years of working at Microsoft that I really hated Apple's management...which was very difficult for me being such a loyal fan of their products and having so many friends who worked there.
        * - No clear direction from our management was the last major factor which Jorg touched upon but is important to mention again. Towards the end, we had some major changes in management at the MacBU and the new team was inexperienced both with the products they were managing and how to deal with Apple. They were further handicapped by lack of clear direction by our execs who were too busy worrying about AOL, the DOJ, and our stock price.

Anyway, enough about the history. Mac IE is dead, and it's up to Apple and the Mozilla team to continue to innovate for us Mac users. Sadly, there are still many very useful features in Mac IE that neither company has replicated in their browsers and there are still too many sites which don't look right in Safari. I remember calling up CNN and ESPN and getting them to fix problems in their websites...it worked and I hope Apple has a group of people doing the same thing.

Since Microsoft will no longer be offering Mac IE 5 for download on their website, I'm going to provide a community service by linking to it here. It has not been totally replaced and at least I need a place to be able to download it from for my own personal use...but you'll have to know what to click on to download it. ;-)

If you ever want to know who the people behind Mac IE 5 were, just type "about:tasman" in the address bar of Mac IE and you'll get a list of the people who put their heart and soul into making it such a remarkable and successful product.

I have to laugh (and cry) a bit at Jimmy's comment concerning Apple's management. Apple has screwed over developers time and time again, even while at the same time giving them lots of lip service and spending lots of time and money on developer programs. The tip of the iceberg: no Mac program written prior to 1999 will run - at all - on the new Intel-based Macs. In fact, most 2001 programs won't either. (By contrast, many 1984 apps *do* run on today's machines) More to the point: A Mac developer from 1998 who was 100% up-to-date on Apple's technologies will find today that those technologies have all been either deprecated (in favor of Cocoa or Intel) or outright eliminated (intelligent memory management through Handles, trap-patching, MixedMode expertise). It's all part of Steve Jobs' "they have no respect for the status quo" - a nice quote until you discover yourself at the receiving end of it.