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MacUser UK: no more IE developement from MS

updated 01:00 pm EDT, Fri June 13, 2003

Roz Ho, the general manager of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, has confirmed that will be released for the Mac, according to PC Pro: "Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she explained. 'As part of the OS (operating system), IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 [for Windows] is the final standalone installation,' Microsoft's Brian Countryman said in a recent interview."

 
Previous Comments

Wooohooo!

06/13, 01:05pm reply

Stick a fork in it, it's done!

Good riddance.

From a development standpoint, this is good news. It's becoming easier to delineate between browsers based on the OS the client is running.

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hmmm

06/13, 01:05pm reply

"Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own Safari browser. 'Some of the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close development between the browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,"

That sounds familiar...

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bye

06/13, 01:10pm reply

good riddance indeed.

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Lies, lies, lies

06/13, 01:13pm reply

And more lies. Although I won't lament the passing of this piece of garbage, it's clear that they're taking this opportunity to bang in a few nails in the coffin of the monopoly suit. There are so many areas in which their crappy browser could have been improved, beginning with performance, without requiring insider OS information.

One way Apple could s**** them royally would be to make Safari open source. Fat chance of that...

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TTFN

06/13, 01:16pm reply

H&G (Hi and Goodbye) from sleepless in redmond, ...uh Seatle

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It *IS* Open Source!

06/13, 01:17pm reply

Get a clue - Safari is based on the KHTML rendering engine, which *IS* open source, and they are returning all enhancements they make back to to the Konqueror project.

So, anyone else could use the same core, and develop it from there. In fact, even Microsoft could grab it, and get a great browser in return -- why dobn't they? "not-invented-here" syndrome.

Cognitive dissonance at its very best.

Agreed with everyone, though -- good riddance to a pretty crappy and badly coded product. Overall, between Camino and Safari, there was no space left for IE anyway.

-Harry

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Interesting

06/13, 01:18pm reply

You wonder how long Apple has known this. Did Safari make them can IE or did Safai come about because Apple knew (or suspected) this would be the case?

Either way, IE does have some nice features that I miss in Safari (auto complete--not autofill, keyboard navigation in forms, better download manager, pixel dimensions of images opened in a new window, etc.). Hopefully, Apple can/will fold those features into Safari soon. It would have been interesting to see M$ use Web Core like OmniWeb has.

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this is a terrible news..

06/13, 01:20pm reply

as a web designer, i'm in trouble. i use ie for my web development. safari look great on a mac, but i had a few bad surprises when i looked at the site on ie after.

so i imagine that if there is no version on the mac, my boss will have to get me a pc next time, and that is a good decision since everybody looking at our site use ie for windows and i can't check on my mac. and slow emulation is not an answer.

nope, this is not a good news at all

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Terrible? Huh?

06/13, 01:25pm reply

You'll have the same final version of IE as your clients do. They're not outlawing it - only freezing it.

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agreed...bad news

06/13, 01:25pm reply

You can't forget that too many developers develop exclusively for IE, and let's face it those sites just plain don't work on Safari or Camino right now. You know the kinds of sites I'm talking about, where you have to fire up IE just to use some Web application, or make an online purchase... the list goes on and on.

I use Safari 99% of the time, but there are still sites out there that break under Safari. This is bad news.

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