After abandoning development of a standalone Internet Explorer for Windows, Microsoft announced last week that they are also halting development for the Mac version. I guess that this in no big loss for the users and web designers who wanted to be really sure that their pages look decent on IE had to use a windows machine anyway as IE wasn't compatible enough to itself... But this gap will grow as IE will still live in Microsoft's next OS version but not on any other platform.
Very interesting, though, is the reason Microsoft is giving: "Safari is turning into a better answer for (Apple) customers." (though they hint that this is due their lack of "access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete", AFAIK I know this is just spreading FUD).
See also Christian and the comments there on this subject.
Hmm, this reminds me of a old IE for Mac Bug which I had to track down once: There is rare HTTP header "Content-Location" which is set by Apache when you use Content-Negotiation (to display the content in the right language and encoding for example). Then there is a commonly used HTTP header "Location", which - in combination with 302/303 HTTP status codes - initiates a redirect. Strangely enough, IE4 for Mac kept redirecting the user to the actual filename of script, stripping away everything behind the '?' and thus making queries on content-negotiated scripts impossible. Probably, they looked for headers with strstr().
Posted by seefeld at June 14, 2003 12:51