IE5 Mac Unsupported from December 31st 2005

MS suggests using Safari

[encyclo]

As mentioned on Slashdot and elsewhere, Microsoft has confirmed [microsoft.com] the end of all support for IE 5.x for the Mac from the end of 2005.

Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for Mac on December 31st, 2005, and will provide no further security or performance updates (...) It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari.

Time to close the curtain on a quite revolutionary browser: first to support advanced CSS, first to have a quirks/standards switching mode based on doctype, IE Mac was at the time the most advanced browser out there.

[kaled]

It's only a matter of time before MS decides to cease development of IE altogether. IE swallows up a vast amount of manpower, generates volumes of bad publicity and generates no revenue. It was developed primarily to kill netscape and it more or less succeeded but its day has passed.

Eventually, MS will bite the bullet and take the only sensible business decision and drop IE. Somehow, they'll have to make things like html help work with a basic gecko engine and that will be painful but eventually it's a decision that will have to be taken. Don't know what they'll do about ActiveX stuff though.

Kaled.

[Naelphin]

Removing IE would be rather hard, as it is the basis of the core explorer.exe since windows98. The last version of Windows that didn't use IE as its core file browser was Windows 95.

It is very unlikely it'll be ever be dropped, as it is the basis of their entire UI.

[Robin_reala]

Yay! More ammo :)

[graeme_p]

Removing IE would be rather hard, as it is the basis of the core explorer.exe since windows98. The last version of Windows that didn't use IE as its core file browser was Windows 95.

So how hard would it be to re-write the file manager? As for other integration, given how easy it if to integrate Mozilla into KDE ([dot.kde.org ]), surely it can not be impossibly hard to do with Windows? There is work on having switchable HTML rendering engines (KHTML and Gecko) and even XUL (so Mozilla extensions would work with Konqueror, possibly elsewhere in KDE) in KDE. It will make a fantastic desktop once done. What technical difficulty is there with having the same on Windows?

I agree that MS will drop IE as long as it is the dominant browser. Dropping IE would mean less control over Windows desktops and that is what matters to IE.

[anax]

Time to close the curtain on a quite revolutionary browser

Yes indeed. It was head and shoulders above anything else when it first came out. I still use it from time to time - my sites look great in it.

[amygrech]

It's just as well--IE has too many security flaws. Firefox is the best browser, IMHO.

Amy

[Robin_reala]

Amy - it's important to remember that IE on the Mac and IE on Windows are two completely different beasts. IE on the mac has better standards compliance and has proved to have far fewer security issues than IE on windows. It's just more annoying to code for as (as most of us here will probably agree) I've managed to internalise all of the obvious IE/win issues but have to research each and every IE/mac bug I hit.

[Ashley Bowers]

I say good riddens to bad rubbish U am surprised they did not scrap it last year!