IE Mac, Re: more on internet explorer safety: plenty of press, but do people listen?

[dave () farber net]

___

Dave Farber  +1 412 726 9889



...... Forwarded Message .......
From: Stanton McCandlish <mech () well com>
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:15:47 -0700
Subj: IE Mac, Re: [IP] more on internet explorer safety: plenty of press, 
but do people listen?

> >  There are only two choices left with IE: Either don't browse the web
> > with it, or don't use it for financial transactions.
>
> The first choice includes the second. There's a gathering news roll
> suggesting avoidance for IE (on Windows; on the Mac it's pretty safe).

It may be less prone to exploits, but it's becoming less and less
useful.  No new version has been put out in a year or longer, not even
a maintenance release, and it is riddled with bugs. Microsoft allegedly
no longer supports Internet Explorer, for either MacOS Classic or MacOS
X, in any way, according to some developers I've talked to.  MS appears
to have abandoned it.

I find this rather strange. MSIE/Mac was at one time clearly the
most-used browser on MacOS.  Yes, Apple does ship it's own browser,
Safari, with OS X these days, but why would MS just abandon a product
(albeit a free one) that had more than 50% market share?  At very least
it kept the Microsoft name in front of Mac users, even more effectively
than MS Office.

It is definitely aging poorly, though.  MSIE/Mac badly malfunctions in
obvious and not-so-obvious ways with many modern websites, including
those of the US Postal Service and the popular social network Orkut,
leaving serious users little choice but to switch to something else.
In some ways this is a shame, since IE has some features, like web page
"subscriptions" with page update alerts, that at least most other
browsers don't offer (I have not reviewed every feature of every known
browser for OS X, so I can't say for sure whether such a feature
remains a MSIE exclusive at this date.  I've yet to see it elsewhere,
though.)

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