6 ms·

IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.

by GigabyteCoin 13y ago

theatrus2 13y ago
It also was the most standards compliant and performant IE of its time, being a totally different code base.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Eg. transparent PNGs.
- duaneb 13y ago
  Possibly because they had to please Apple AND Microsoft?
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)
    - jonny_eh 13y ago
      Wine wouldn't have worked either since OSX was PowerPC based at the time.
      - brokenparser 13y ago
        That and the fact that wine only runs on *nix, so it'd require another compatibility layer to provide POSIX and BSD functionality under classic MacOS. OSX didn't even exist at the time IE for Mac was written. They'd also have to come up with a visual theme layer so they could at least pretend it's a Mac program, long before they introduced one in Windows. All of that still wouldn't get them menu bar support, though. In hindsight, I didn't think it through at all when I mentioned wine. They do have MS-Office ports for Mac, so that product was probably written with much better separation of concerns.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      I guess there's no reason for Microsoft to decouple their browser from their OS, I guess....
dietrichepp 13y ago
For a surprisingly long window of time, IE Mac was the best browser around. Apparently, it did not share a code base with Windows IE, which explains why IE Mac had all the features people were drooling over in 2001 like full PNG transparency and good CSS support. PNG support even included color correction, and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on Windows. I think the Mac version of IE had something like 99% compliance on the first Acid test, before other browsers had robust CSS support. You could even find a copy of the Acid test in an easter egg in the browser. It was a fantastic browser at the time, but didn't align with Microsoft's future interests and the development team was reassigned.
- yuhong 13y ago
  Yea, it was one of the first browsers to implement DOCTYPE switching.
- terhechte 13y ago
  In 2001 I, for the first time in my life, had access to Macs running Mac OS 9. While I didn't like the operating system much (I was using Linux and Windows at home, the idea of having to assign memory to application manually felt so 80s) I instantly fell in love with IE for Mac. Back then, in PC land, Netscape Navigator and IE 5.5 were the dominant browser, and IE for Mac supported all these fantastic CSS properties that I knew about, but that I could not use in NN4 or IE5.5. I spend hours buliding pure CSS websites without images, simply utilizing unicode fonts, and CSS properties. Ah, those were the days.
- iSnow 13y ago
  Unfortunately it had the most annoying bug in that it did not reload CSS files. Back in the day, I developed with a text editor on mac PowerBook and after changing one CSS statement, I had to close the browser and restart it.
  - brokenparser 13y ago
    MacOS had a built-in web server. You could've used that.
derleth 13y ago
There was an IE for UNIX back in the 1990s, which meant Solaris and HP-UX. The last version was IE5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX And before that, MicroSoft was best known for its BASIC implementation that wound up on a whole range of eight-bit microcomputers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC The versions for 6502-based micros shared a codebase: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46 And, in some versions, they had an easter egg hidden in the constants used to implement SIN: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43

IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.

theatrus2 13y ago

It also was the most standards compliant and performant IE of its time, being a totally different code base.

yuhong 13y ago
Eg. transparent PNGs.
duaneb 13y ago
Possibly because they had to please Apple AND Microsoft?
- brokenparser 13y ago
  No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)
  - jonny_eh 13y ago
    Wine wouldn't have worked either since OSX was PowerPC based at the time.
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      That and the fact that wine only runs on *nix, so it'd require another compatibility layer to provide POSIX and BSD functionality under classic MacOS. OSX didn't even exist at the time IE for Mac was written. They'd also have to come up with a visual theme layer so they could at least pretend it's a Mac program, long before they introduced one in Windows. All of that still wouldn't get them menu bar support, though. In hindsight, I didn't think it through at all when I mentioned wine. They do have MS-Office ports for Mac, so that product was probably written with much better separation of concerns.
  - duaneb 13y ago
    I guess there's no reason for Microsoft to decouple their browser from their OS, I guess....

dietrichepp 13y ago

For a surprisingly long window of time, IE Mac was the best browser around. Apparently, it did not share a code base with Windows IE, which explains why IE Mac had all the features people were drooling over in 2001 like full PNG transparency and good CSS support. PNG support even included color correction, and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on Windows. I think the Mac version of IE had something like 99% compliance on the first Acid test, before other browsers had robust CSS support. You could even find a copy of the Acid test in an easter egg in the browser. It was a fantastic browser at the time, but didn't align with Microsoft's future interests and the development team was reassigned.

yuhong 13y ago
Yea, it was one of the first browsers to implement DOCTYPE switching.
terhechte 13y ago
In 2001 I, for the first time in my life, had access to Macs running Mac OS 9. While I didn't like the operating system much (I was using Linux and Windows at home, the idea of having to assign memory to application manually felt so 80s) I instantly fell in love with IE for Mac. Back then, in PC land, Netscape Navigator and IE 5.5 were the dominant browser, and IE for Mac supported all these fantastic CSS properties that I knew about, but that I could not use in NN4 or IE5.5. I spend hours buliding pure CSS websites without images, simply utilizing unicode fonts, and CSS properties. Ah, those were the days.
iSnow 13y ago
Unfortunately it had the most annoying bug in that it did not reload CSS files. Back in the day, I developed with a text editor on mac PowerBook and after changing one CSS statement, I had to close the browser and restart it.
- brokenparser 13y ago
  MacOS had a built-in web server. You could've used that.

derleth 13y ago

There was an IE for UNIX back in the 1990s, which meant Solaris and HP-UX. The last version was IE5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX And before that, MicroSoft was best known for its BASIC implementation that wound up on a whole range of eight-bit microcomputers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC The versions for 6502-based micros shared a codebase: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46 And, in some versions, they had an easter egg hidden in the constants used to implement SIN: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43