internet explorer for mac operating system

It’s ironic that the browser choice wars have concluded before the office suite choice wars have even started. OE of course lives on as Entourage:Mac in the latest versions of Office, and that’s the real battleground now. What was at the time a very important consideration is not so much now, with most developers now trying their best to adhere to w3c specs and adapt only as required to the “different” ways that IE and older Navigator versions do things. Having IE on the Mac was always a bit of a symbolic gesture, because the rendering engine was different than that of IE on Windows and they never did both have the same capabilities. And with IE 5 not being included in the Tiger install, and now this, the last nails are being driven into the coffin.

Safari was its’ death knell, as Apple moved to counter one of the main Windows user migration complaints about having only slow browsers to choose from. IE 5 was one of the first applications to try to capitalise on the “Aqua” look and feel (even though it was an OS 8/9 application initially), but started losing out badly after Mac OS X came out when put next to browsers like OmniWeb that showed up its’ “faux” nativeness. Ahh, the heady days of the browser wars… bad for standards, but good for nostalgia 😉 Netscape’s losses were Microsoft’s gains, as they offered IE/OE for Mac version 4 that were faster, lighter, and after a few point releases better.

Communicator started out as a well-integrated, well-designed package, that got worse with each passing point release. Internet Explorer for Mac OS X (also referred to as Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, Internet Explorer:mac or IE:mac) is a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform to browse web pages. Now is an opportune time for Microsoft to finally put it to bed.Īlso, this marks the end of an era… sort of. I suspect that in practice, its’ probably been well over a year since there was any sort of support or patching requirement for IE:Mac. Because in theory IE:Mac was in active maintenance (and is until the end of the month) meaning that support calls for it would be accepted by Microsoft and any urgently required patches developed and issued.

Internet explorer for mac operating system