On 08 Feb 2005, at 7:48 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 8 Feb 2005 at 12:59, Phil Daley wrote:
The point was, MS has not improved the browser in several years. If they do improve the browser, I am sure they will port the changes to the Mac.
Ha!
They aren't even going to port the changes to their earlier versions of Windows, so why in the hell would they port them to the Mac?
In any event, IE for Mac is not the same program as IE for Windows in the first place. It doesn't work the same, it doesn't render the same, and it's not produced from the same code base. Therefore, creating an IE for Mac that is at parity with the Longhorn version of IE would be a huge amount of work, and work that would get MS very little in return.
When Apple made IE the default browser, there wasn't much choice in browsers for Mac. It was a great improvement for Mac users. But Apple was smart and copied from Microsoft for a change, and created their own browser to ship with the OS. MS wrote the book on including a browser with the OS, so I doubt they will be foolish enough to spend time and effort on trying to dislodge Safari. To do so would be ignoring the principles they used to kill Netscape in the first place.
Microsoft stays in the Office Suite space on the Mac because they own the market, with no significant competition. Also, people pay $$$ for an Office suite.
Browsers are free and MS has lots of competition, Safari being pre- installed as default browser on all installations of OS X, so I think it extraordinarily unlikely that MS will invest any resources in a Mac version of IE.
And considering that they aren't going to port the Longhorn version of IE to WinXP or Win2K, both of which will have vastly more users at the time Longhorn is released than the Mac does, it makes even less sense to speculate that MS will waste any of its time on IE for the Mac.
Here, at least, is one topic on which David and I can emphatically agree. [grin]
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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