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QotD: Death of Mac IE

Question: The fact that official support for IE 5 on the Mac will end on December 31 has been talked about ad nauseum in the Mac blogosphere so far today. My question is simply this: do you care?

My Answer: Hell no.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

5 Responses to "QotD: Death of Mac IE"

  1. I support several clients who use IE as their company-wide browser, as web sites they have to access do not work properly in other browsers. I would love to move them all to Safari, but can't yet. Also, some managers do not like the fact that staff could turn on Private Browsing and there would be a reduced trail of any inappropriate browsing during working hours. In fact, I have to seriously consider Firefox instead of Safari for these clients because of this.

  2. Eric, private browsing is only for the immediate computer's hard drive. If a company really wants to track their user's traffic, all they have to do is watch what each IP address requests on the company network. If a user takes home a work computer on their own connection, then the company should not have a right to care.

  3. I care since I'm a web developer and making it less accessible is good for the general public. I still do test things in IE/Mac .. but just to fix the low hanging fruit. There are times (most times in fact) when somethings just won't work in IE/Mac and the feature is either too nice or doing a work around too messy and thus oh well.

    So yeah I care, but it's not like I used it for anything other than testing.

  4. As Eric says, anyone who has to support cross browser is affected by IE for mac 🙁 I work at a company that does software for school boards, which means we have to support everything from IE on OS8 to the various incarnations of safari, not all of which work as nicely as the latest version, as well as mozilla / IE on windows. Much as I'd love to be able to say you must use safari 2.0 or mozilla latest or IE on windows latest, it's pretty hard to tell a client with hundreds or thousands of machines all of which have osx 10.0 or os9 that they have to upgrade all their machines because we can't/won't work around stupid IE bugs....

    Personally if IE for mac suddenly dissapeared I'd be much happier, because it'd be so much easier to develop and support clients. I've ranted about this before: http://www.arcterex.net/blog/archives/2004/12/22/ie_why_do_you_hate_the_internet.html

  5. nope.

    but why stop letting people download it? does bandwidth cost that much?

    I think there needs to be a huge library of discontinued software for older computers / OSes / tastes offering free downloads. really.