End of Internet Explorer

[SARGE]

http://aumha.org/elist.htm

[Kubie]

Hi Sarge,
When one thinks about it, its not much of a loss.
Mozilla and Opera have so much more to offer.

Carl

[SARGE]

Carl, I've pretty much used Mozilla (Firebird) exclusively lately.

[glc]

Good riddance.

[justtoolate]

Internet Explorer had just too much competition on the Mac side of things, and I don't blame them for stopping development on it.

[Dreamscape]

I think IE for Mac is much better than IE for Windows, ironically. It had the absolute best text completion algorithm, ever. Not that anyone here actually ever used it.

[justtoolate]

Sorry I can't say, I have yet to use a current Mac, I've only used ones from 10+ years ago. But, if I was to buy a Mac, I would definently look at Internet Explorer.

[mairving]

Actually IE for the Mac has really been developed for awhile. It is most like NS 4.7 than IE. Mozilla for the Mac is much better, since it supports CSS and also has better JS support.

[Force Flow]

Here's an article that came in a Sitepoint newsletter I got today:

Over the past few weeks, Microsoft has made a flurry of announcements (both official and not) about where its market-leading browser, Internet Explorer, will not be going next. But the question remains: where is it going?

Because it was so far ahead of its competitors when it was first released, it's easy to forget that Internet Explorer 6 is a two-year-old product! But now, with competing browsers making great strides forward both in features and standards compliance, the market-leading browser is fast becoming a liability to Web developers.

I think I really came to this realization while editing our latest book, which is about achieving page layout with CSS instead of tables. Two years ago, Internet Explorer was on the cutting edge of CSS support, but today you need to tiptoe around a minefield of bugs and holes in that support to achieve what competing browsers like Mozilla and Opera can do almost effortlessly.

If things continue the way they are going, Internet Explorer 6 will become the pain in the backside that Netscape 4 has been over the past 5 years.

But when you stop and think about it, that kind of makes sense. The stagnation of Netscape 4 came about when that browser achieved market dominance without making much real money for the company. When Internet Explorer 4 came along to challenge it, Netscape didn't bother trying to regain the top spot, because they had already been there and didn't have much to show for it the first time.

That certainly explains Microsoft's recent announcement that there will be no new versions of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Even today, Internet Explorer 5.1 for Mac OS X is the most standards-compliant version of Internet Explorer available... but do you know anyone who paid Microsoft to use it?

Microsoft's prior announcement that there will be no more standalone versions of Internet Explorer for Windows makes equal sense in this light. Nobody payed to download Internet Explorer 6 from Microsoft when it was released, but they did pay to buy Windows Me (and Windows XP afterward) that included Internet Explorer 6 and took advantage of its features.

In short, I still bellieve that Internet Explorer 7 is on the horizon, but you'll almost certainly have to buy the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) to get it. And seeing that it isn't due for at least another year, that leaves a lot of time for the Operas and Mozillas of the world to win the hearts and minds of Web developers and end-users alike.

And so the wheel turns...