I was curious and looked up iWoz, and it seems to be a little mixed-up on the dates of things since it talks about using iCab two years before it was available:

I was curious and looked up iWoz, and it seems to be a little mixed-up on the dates of things since it talks about using iCab two years before it was available: https://datassette.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/livros/iwoz.pdf#page=307 https://datassette.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/livros/iw... (Book page 296) "That first day I used iCab instead of IE, I had no crashes. Not a single one. Hmm." "I could never convince Apple. This was such a big lament for me at the time. I couldn’t convince anyone that it wasn’t the Mac OS that was at fault. Then one day Gil Amelio told me that Apple—in addition to avoiding excess production and inventory and keeping expenses down—was going to buy a new operating system." The NeXT merger was publicly announced in February 1997, so that private conversation with Amelio about their intent most likely would have been some time in 1996: https://www.tech-insider.org/mac/research/1997/0207.html https://www.tech-insider.org/mac/research/1997/0207.html iCab, on the other hand, didn't ship until February 1999 as a time-bombed beta: https://web.archive.org/web/20020305110041/http://advergence.com/newspage/1999/19990224_icab.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20020305110041/http://advergence... I wonder if he was experiencing instability due to Code Fragment Manager instead of IE itself? Mac IE was even late shipping for 68K Macs due to problems with CFM-68K. "Finally, Internet Explorer has been hit by the CFM-68K bug. Microsoft was on the cutting edge in adopting the Code Fragment Manager for 68K Macs, and due to the well-known bug in CFM support on 68K Macs, Internet Explorer is currently only available for PowerPC-based Macs. Apple should have this bug fixed soon, though, and Microsoft plans on releasing a 68K version at that time." — https://www.macobserver.com/reviews/ie3.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/reviews/ie3.shtml CFM-68K was infamously unstable until version 4.0 shipped in April 1997, and even the PowerPC-native version saw a bunch of improvements around that time, so this lines up with a 1996/1997 timeframe in iWoz if one ignores the anachronistic iCab story: "A revised Code Fragment Manager that helps some large, PowerPC-native applications launch faster and enables some applications to launch in low memory situations" — https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-releases-system-7-5-5/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-releases-syste... (September 1996) "In late November 1996, Apple announced a bug in the CFM-68K Runtime Enabler extension. This bug could cause random crashes and hangs, resulting in application instability and potential loss of data. Because of the potential seriousness of these problems, Apple recommended that customers disable the extension. Also, Mac OS 7.6 would prevent the extension from loading. Mac OS 7.6 does support the the 4.0 version of the extension." — https://macgui.com/kb/article/502 https://macgui.com/kb/article/502 (May 1997)