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The end of Internet Explorer
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Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) has confirmed that it will no longer actively develop Internet Explorer for Mac, either for Mac OS X or "Classic" Mac OS.
As many of you already know, this past Friday we confirmed that the MacBU would no longer develop future versions of Internet Explorer for Mac. We will, however, continue to support IE 5 and are sharing our compiled understanding of customer requirements with Apple's Safari team, who is working to meet Mac users' future browser needs.
There are minor bug-fix updates coming for the Mac OS X 5.2.x and Mac OS "Classic" 5.1.x versions of IE, but that's it. So IE anywhere but Windows is history.
Combined with recent news that MS will no probably no longer make IE available separately from Windows itself (i.e.—no pun intended— no separate IE 7 installation for Win 98, Me, 2000, XP or other older versions), things should continue to stagnate in the Windows browser world for most people.
The Mac version of Internet Explorer has not been significantly updated in at least a couple of years, since the first Mac OS X version came out, and even that was essentially a direct port of the previous 5.x version from Mac OS 9. While it was innovative and interesting when 5.0 first came out some time before that (back when Netscape 4 was still current), IE Mac has stood still while competing browsers from Netscape and Mozilla, iCab, Opera, Omni, Apple itself, and IE's Windows counterpart (now past version 6) have introduced many useful features, including tabbed browsing, popup blocking, snapback, faster rendering, more customizability, and better standards support.
IE Mac is now just a tolerable browser, one people use more because of inertia or because they have to (as I do in Mac OS 9, since Mozilla uses too much memory for my PowerBook). Just as well it dies quietly now, I guess.
