Forum Moderators: travelin cat
As of January 31st, the ability to download Mac IE will also cease, as detailed on the Mac IE [microsoft.com] page.
I for one won't be sad to see the back of it.
R.
[edited by: pmkpmk at 3:02 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2005]
Safari is followed in usage by Mozilla and Firefox, with Opera, Camino, and several others also in the running.
What will Mac useres use. I don't know anything about macs.
Most of the other Mac browsers are quite compliant, so hopefully, we should see more Safari, Camino, Opera or FireFox users; at least, for those who use OSX anyway.
Users of the older Mac OS are more limited; chances are they'll carry on using their existing version of IE, an older version of Opera or similar.
What will Mac useres use.
I'd love to see better info on this, but my current guesses based on NetApplications's October browser usage data are that:
- 66% of Mac users use Safari.
- Most of the remainder (25-30%?) use FireFox.
- A few Netscape holdouts use Netscape 7 (I don't believe Netscape 8 has been release of OS X)
- Usage share of Opera, Camino, etc. on the Mac side are basically equivalent to their usage on Windows or Linux. (Not high and mostly by "geeks like us" who install browsers for fun and profit.)
Again, these are all guesses and I'd love to see stats on specifically Mac browser usage.
so what does a person do that is browsing with his Mac and comes upon a site that says 'your browser is not supported, use IE"
He fills in a contact form to complain, and then makes his purchase from a standards-compliant website....
It doesn't take many of that sort of complaint for the webmaster to strip out the MS-specific dross from his pages....
DerekH
so what does a person do that is browsing with his Mac and comes upon a site that says 'your browser is not supported, use IE"
Mostly when that happens I just tell Mozilla to send the user-agent string for MSIE and the site works just fine. My banking site is always warning me to use IE, but Mozilla on my Mac has had no trouble whatsoever with any of the functionality on the site.
Darn idiot webmasters who put up such notices even when the site works fine in other browsers!
I don't like those warnings either, but it's quite difficult to test for different browsers on different platforms. I'm glad we own one (ONE!) old iMac. After some hassle we just installed OSX the other week, and now it's sitting in the corner, equipped with VNC and Safari/IE5/Opera so my team can test our sites with it. But not a lot of PC-webmaster have this opportunity.
You don't have to test for anything *except* IE for Windows if you develop properly.
Develop a site using web standards and you know it will work in all the other browsers as they are standards based.
Only then should you open Internet Explorer for Windows and add in the CSS hacks required to make a site function in the crud that is IE.
Any *good* PC-Webmaster will know this.
And thanks for the compliments :-)
so what does a person do that is browsing with his Mac and comes upon a site that says 'your browser is not supported, use IE"
And when push comes to shove, once a month or so I run into a site soooo dominated by single minded coding ;), I have to use Virtual PC application and start Windows XP up as the plugin that it is and then, finally use the site to order my fancy frilly widgets at 10% off with free shipping.
Sigh.
To this day I have thought it was sooo funny for any mac user to use a Mac IE screenshot to get a point across (bonus points for advertising firms that do this). In my mind its like using a Model T to haul veggies to the market. A pretty picture of days gone by but not exactly showing that your up to speed with "modern" features.
so what does a person do that is browsing with his Mac and comes upon a site that says 'your browser is not supported, use IE"He fills in a contact form to complain, and then makes his purchase from a standards-compliant website....
It doesn't take many of that sort of complaint for the webmaster to strip out the MS-specific dross from his pages....
Actually it would take more than 50 such complaints a day right now (our busy season) to make us even think about noticing. Even though we don't have MS-specific dross on our site.
Mac = insignificant to us. If we can go about our daily work and they can still access us, great, otherwise, who cares. I'm not saying this to offend, I'm saying this because it is actual policy dictated to me by the owner (who happens to have a Mac and PC on his desk as does everyone in his department).
We had some issues way back when (several years ago) and when he realized that it would mean holding back improved site features to 99% of our customers to make life better for 1% (less actually), he came up with the "we don't care about Macs around here" policy.
The vast vast majority of sites that are inaccessible to Macs are that way purely because the developer/programmer/coder was too lazy or ignorant to conform to establish standards and chose instead to use proprietary MS junk.
Techstyles, it's entirely possible that Mac users would constitute more than 1% of your customer base if your site were more accessible to them. What happens is, when we get that "you must use MSIE" crap, we go away and we spend our money somewhere else.
I spend lots of money on the Internet -- I live out in a pretty rural area without much shopping anywhere around. Probably more than 90 percent of my non-grocery spending is over the Internet. This year alone I've spent several thousand dollars on purchases made over the Internet. And I use a Mac. If a site isn't willing or able to make their site accessible to my Mac, I click the "back" button and go spend that money somewhere that does.
We had some issues way back when (several years ago) and when he realized that it would mean holding back improved site features to 99% of our customers to make life better for 1% (less actually), he came up with the "we don't care about Macs around here" policy.
A policy from several years ago regarding web development is still in effect? That's interesting. Most folks I talk to in this business consider change to be more rapid.
I just spent another $200+ online today, at a site that works just fine with my Mac. Needless to say, I won't be spending anything at sites that don't.
what really pisses me off is a "new" site that ONLY works in MSIE or Firefox, but if you try to access it with the latest version of Safari, it checks the user agent and sends you to an error page and tells you to download Firefox.
If I change the user-agent in Safari, I can access the site without the error although the frames overlap slightly.
This is a real estate website and my wife will email the link to her clients (there is account info embedded in the URL).
If they are using Web-based email (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc) and they are using Safari, they don't know what to do once they download Firefox.
Now they have to figure out how to check their mail with Firefox
It's a huge PITA for them. And for my wife.
She has to play Tech Support for them and she doesn't do that well.
You'd be surprised how many people do not know what a "browser" is or that you can have several different ones.
You'd also be surprise how many people cannot "cut and paste" and once they figure it out, they don't know what window to "paste" into.
Even my wife types a URL into Google to get there.... *sigh*
/ end rant, going to bed
Remember the Mac SE? Real cool and compact than any(IBM)PC.
Now MSN did not get AOL either...So Apple will get their share on miny handheld units with internet access more than ever.
What's Gooooogle going to do?
At least we're not blasted by spyware/viruses on IE Mac. My husband doesn't like me using IE on his WinXP when I'm checking out how websites look on windows machines because just turning on IE brings in Spyware.
This is making the rounds as news now because we're approaching the date at which all support for it ceases, including the fact that MacIE will no longer be available for download from Microsoft.
As many of you know, switching the user-agent string in Firefox or Opera doesn't do any good for developers, as the rendering engine is still Gecko/Opera. However it does get around the warnings, and let you see what happens in the real world.
I recall several banking sites switched over to IE-only a year or so ago, and with them the user-agent trick does no good.
Any EOL policy is primarily designed to do two things, and MS is no different:
1. Free up resources to work on current products, and
2. Prod users to migrate to the current products.
How many serious web developers will need to get access to an MS machine in order to test their work? Well, now ALL of them will, if they hadn't before. (Mac IE is a bit different from Win IE, anyway, so most serious developers already run some kind of Win box.)
Sadly, Win-based developers really have little reason to worry about the fortunes of Mac users, not because Mac users aren't cool ... but because they really are a very small percentage of potential customers ... really and profoundly sadly. (In our server's case, we've had more hits from Netscape 5 users than Safari users, this month. Each of them representing less than 1% of our total visitors. We simply can't justify doing anything special for that segment, as much as we may love the customers, so we try to keep all of our code validated, and hope the browser mfrs do the right thing.)
The good news is that the IE share has been dropping radically, so, hopefully, this will be a non-issue in about 3 years ... ;)
Sadly, Win-based developers really have little reason to worry about the fortunes of Mac users,
Win-based developers have little to worry about Safari users as long as they are developing for any other standards-compliance seeking browser (like Firefox).
So long as competing rendering engines abound, it is the developer that specifically chooses to only develop for one browser product who has reason to worry. To be a "web developer" you have to pick at least two browsers for compatibility testing. Otherwise, by definition, you would be a "Browser X developer," not a "web developer."
How many serious web developers will need to get access to an MS machine in order to test their work? Well, now ALL of them will
To clarify for others, a mac can run Windows and multiple versions of MSIE if you are running Virtual PC. So, I probably just misunderstood, but there is still no need to have an entire machine dedicated to MS for any web developer. (Regardless of how "serious" your web development affliction.)
Mac IE is a bit different from Win IE
From a practical point of view as a web developer only, I've found the two products mostly share only an icon.
Basically, all we can really do is program to the standards and hope the rendering engine programmers do standards-based work with their products.
After that, it's geegaws and hoohaws regarding the funky stuff, and little
if/elseThere are few reasons why pages should not render identically on every browser ... and most all of those reasons are in the control of the engine developers.
BTW, VirtualPC or OrangePC or any other virtual environment will work as long as your hardware is standard ... that means no Mac-only monitors with their elliptical dots and 'oddball' resolutions ...
(If it makes you feel any better, I've been a Linux nut for about ten years and use it exclusively for my work. I test using the Linux environment and several browsers, a Win98 box and several browsers and a WinXP Pro box and several browsers. I develop for Firefox (was a Gecko build for awhile) in Linux and then check the rest. The only major differences between these when encountering standards-compliant code is with WinIE rendering ... always. Adjust a line break here, some padding there. A pain all around.)
Sadly, Win-based developers really have little reason to worry about the fortunes of Mac users, not because Mac users aren't cool ... but because they really are a very small percentage of potential customers
The percentage of users is not necessarily the most relevant factor here--the percentage of sales is. Developers who don't worry about Mac users may do serious harm to their clients' businesses--and for relatively little cost savings if (as has already been so frequently mentioned in this thread) they develop according to current standards.
BTW, VirtualPC or OrangePC or any other virtual environment will work as long as your hardware is standard ... that means no Mac-only monitors with their elliptical dots and 'oddball' resolutions ...
I think this opinion is pretty dated (OrangePC?!) VPC at least works on any newer hardware--I've had it running on g3/g4/laptop/tower/imac with no problems...
-B
