Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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IE/Mac

753 words

Man and dog are commenting on the upcoming demise of Internet Explorer for the Mac. Reactions seem to focus around the poles of good riddance and uh-oh, trouble for Mac surfers ahead with a focus on the will Safari be able to cope? question.

While I can see where these reactions come from and I understand the reasoning leading to them, I do find them a bit hysterical. Points I'd like to add are the following:

1. IE/Mac [all following occurrences of IE will refer to the Mac version only, of course] is not a bad browser: When version 5 of Internet Explorer was released for the Mac, it was a tiny revolution. Finally there was a browser that was fairly standards compliant (very standards compliant even, at that time), reasonably fast and having a sleek look. Even worse, it was from Microsoft and made even decidedly non-Microsoft people like me use one of their products.

While the Gecko engine has overtaken IE's in terms of standards compliance and speed by now, IE's still isn't bad. It's probably only CSS weenies who actually realise that there are shortcomings of that engine. In addition, IE provided a neat user experience, featuring relatively good bookmark management, the neat minimised toolbar setting which only leaves the vertical sidebar thingy, the scrapbook, drag and drop, a working implementation of browsing with a hidden location bar (both Camino and Safari still fail to provide this) &c. While that user experience may look not quite as polished as Safari's these days, it certainly hasn't gone bad suddenly. The only thing missing, is popup-blocking.

2. This doesn't exactly come as a surprise: Everybody is keen to stress that Microsoft is in business for the money and monopolies. With the browser war 'won', the common opinion seems to be that no more major improvements are to be expected for IE on any platform unless there is significant market share of another product that may reduce Microsoft's grip on the market. To me it seems like having a good version of IE on the Mac only made sense for Microsoft as another step towards crushing Netscape. Netscape is mostly gone, so why should Microsoft continue developing a browser for the Mac that's given away for free?

3. IE won't stop working: The obvious fear of IE vanishing is caused by the many websites that are 'IE only' and Safari not being up to the job of coping with all those moronic sites thrown at it. Considering the long ways so-called 'web-designers' go to keep browsers other than IE out of their sites even though other browsers would be perfectly able to cope, this is a valid fear. While it would be cool if the Safari team found ways to detect exclusion by stupid web sites and find a way around it, the good news is: IE won't stop working right away. Most likely people can surf on with it for a few years without even noticing that Gecko or KHTML even happened.

This means that for the time being we are still sorted as far as accessing screwed-up sites in concerned. Certainly not being able to access certain sites is the largest threat and Apple will have to make sure that Safari is up to it. (Although my experience is that all sites I really need run in pretty much every browser [*] and I've come to assume that sites that don't simply don't want my business. I can imagine, though, that people working in less no-nonsense fields, are subject to worse websites.)

4. That's one less rendering engine on the Mac: True and sad. However, let's keep in mind that the remaining two 'big' rendering engines, Gecko and KHTML, we've got left are both powerful and, more importantly, dedicated to be standards compliant. That is, more future-proof than the engines we had when the market was run by the 'web-domination-strategies' of Netscape and Microsoft. So while it may be sad to see IE fade away, we are still better off than we were not too long ago and we're far from being doomed.

My conclusion is: While it's not great to see IE go – thanks to the recent development of web browsers on the Mac, this is not quite as bad as many people make it look.

[*] Ahem, for the current beta of Safari, I am lying at this, as the AMS' website actually is the only one I know to outrightly crash the program.

June 16, 2003, 17:42

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