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Two discontinued browsers
The writing has been on the wall for some time, but now it's official:
Internet Explorer on the OS X platform will go unsupported at the end
of 2005. This browser has seen no active development since 2003, but its
users were at least provided with security updates. No more; IE for the
Mac is at a dead end.
There is little that OS X users can do about this decision. IE is very much a closed-source application, so there is no way for anybody to take over its maintenance after Microsoft walks away. This browser is dead, and its users have no choice but to seek alternatives; fortunately, a number of good alternatives exist. But anybody who was truly dependent on this piece of software is out of luck. It is always this way with proprietary software; it can disappear out from under you at its owner's whim. Earlier this year, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it was discontinuing support for the Mozilla browser suite. The Foundation saw its future in the independent Firefox and Thunderbird applications, and felt that the time had come to move past its one-time flagship suite. Mozilla users, of whom there are many, had little say in this decision; the Foundation makes its own decisions on how best to pursue its goals. But Mozilla is free software. So a group of dedicated users came together to continue the maintenance and development of the Mozilla suite, using the old SeaMonkey name. Mozilla/SeaMonkey is a large body of code, not something to be taken on lightly. But the SeaMonkey hackers thought that they could handle it. On December 19, these hackers announced the availability of SeaMonkey 1.0 Beta. The release includes a number of new features, including drag-and-drop tabs, SVG support, "blazingly fast back," and much more. It provides the full suite of tools: web browser, email client, HTML editor, IRC chat tool, DOM inspector, and two varieties of kitchen sink. This is the full suite, updated with the latest work from Firefox and elsewhere. The SeaMonkey hackers would appear to be up to the job. And, yes, it works on OS X. It would be hard to come up with a better example of why free software matters. There are a great many Mozilla users who will never look at the code, but they will still benefit from the freedom of that code. As long as there is a sufficient interest in the community, Mozilla, in the form of SeaMonkey, will live on. No proprietary software has such a bright future. (Log in to post comments)
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 2:16 UTC (Thu) by fwenzel (guest, #33783) [Link] Honestly, IE on Mac was outdated since a long time already. (It is on windows, too, but thats a different topic).
Therefore it's a great opportunity for people to start using a browser that is "state of the art".
The only problem I see is with OS 9 users. There are still quite a few of them out there and they might have the biggest problems with the discontinuation of IE.
*Mac* OS 9? Posted Dec 22, 2005 23:49 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] Surely the Macintosh port of Mozilla will run on Mac OS 9? Or are you referring to the original OS-9?
*Mac* OS 9? Posted Dec 23, 2005 15:14 UTC (Fri) by thomask (guest, #17985) [Link] I occasionally used to use a Mozilla port on MacOS 9, and it quite often caused hard system freezes. Such are the joys of non-segmented systems.
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 7:49 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] I guess one positive side is that IE-only sites can't claim to support Macs anymore. Places like banks have always been willing to write off Linux desktops as fringe elements. But to exclude Macs aswell might just be to much to swallow.
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 8:54 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] Does Tiger even ship with IE these days ?I think the writing has been on the wall for IE sites and Macs for some time now..
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 8:43 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] IE has long been irrelevant on modern OS X. It was outdated already in 1993. The news items on this are far overblown IMO.
I also see that web sites explicitly support Safari nowadays (at least that is built on open source code in parts).
The real reason not to worry is Firefox, of course. It works. There is no need for IE on OS X.
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 10:05 UTC (Thu) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link] Did MacOSX or IE exist in 1993? What do you mean?
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 10:27 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] Ouch, 2003; Freudian typo?
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 11:14 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Safari has been available for quite some time and it is quite good. Just check out Konqueror in KDE 3.5. It has become a really nice browser.
Two discontinued browsers Posted Dec 22, 2005 15:28 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] Yes... the first thing I did after installing KDE 3.5 was google for"acid2 test". That was a cool feeling :)
IE is discontiuned on *windows* too... Posted Dec 23, 2005 13:35 UTC (Fri) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link] If you do not use windows XP then IE 6.5 is the last version avialable. IE 7 came out for windows XP only (although the binary might work on windows 2000). Given the insecurity of IE 6.5 you might suggest that M$ is leaving a lot of people the lurch, hoping that the path of least resistance is to upgrade to XP (and increase microsoft's profits in the process).
Incidently mozilla, firefox, seamonkey, etc are still the only browsers to support multipart/replace-media (aka server push). You *can* implement progress meters with client pull (I have) but it much harder and less reliable.
Hopefully the number of people that can use IE will dwindle to something small enough that IE only website design is unsustainable. M$ can fail: active X controls got absolutely not market share whatsoever, modulo applications like billing your credit card.
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