70 - The end of IE for Mac

After the news that Microsoft will not be updating standalone IE, comes another addition to the MS &“We 0wnz j00, internet” crowd. MS have announced that they will not be producing another version of IE for Mac. Whilst IE is more like a stasis session than a death, the fate of IE/Mac seems to be just that.

Roz Ho, the general manager of Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit, has confirmed that no future versions of Internet Explorer will be released for the Mac.

How nice of them. IE5/Mac was one of the first mainstream browsers to support CSS and XHTML in a fairly standards adherent way. It also introduced some new features that have improved browsers no end, such as Text Zoom, the Doctype Switch feature and, last but by no means least, alpha transparent PNG support (which IE6 still doesn’t support, to its shame), among other things. All in all a fairly important milestone in web browsers, no matter what your opinions on IE are.

One quote from Zeldman’s site also is more than a little disconcerting:

By its recent actions, Microsoft has also made dupes of its employees who contributed to web standards. In light of recent news, it appears the company tolerated these employees’ activities because they pacified the developer community.

Think on this, and maybe realign you views on MS if you feel it necessary. All this browser cr*p they just dropped certainly has made me see MS in a rather different light.