[Ti] [OT] Microsoft to quit web browsers for Mac

[Tarik Bilgin]

On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 03:56  am, Michael Bigley wrote:

> IE was first out of the gate to support OSX (and of course Omniweb), 
> but Camino and now Safari  have completely outpaced IE development. 
> This is not a loss for Apple; keeping their mac browser current was 
> part of the lawsuit settlement. Once that time limit was up it made 
> little sense for M$ to keep engineering a free product.

I agree with you strongly Mike.

The only loss is that there are still some .asp websites out there 
which will not work on any browser but Internet Explorer on the Mac. IE 
is looking like a very old browser and is the slowest on my system, but 
I still keep it installed for the cases where I need to view one of 
these IE only sites for my work (I develop websites).

The silver lining is that I can use Camino for 99.9% of all the 
websites I need to view, and often Safari can manage the 0.1% 
remaining. Safari is still Alphaware as far as I am concerned, and I 
don't use it as my main browser as it frequently fails to render pages 
correctly. The perennial problem is that web coders do not write to 
HTML standards, and if you use a MS tool to develop your web pages, it 
makes use of the proprietary tags that MS implemented and bullied into 
the web "standard" without them actually being accepted into the true 
standards. ( http://w3c.org )

This is probably a good thing in the long run. Apple just need to speed 
up development on Safari

On a side I hope that Apple is developing products to beat/match Word 
and Excel.

After using word for 10 years, it's still the awful application that 
can't produce a decently formatted document without hours of wrestling 
with its "Styles" system. This one should be easy.

Excel is the one MS product that I am fearful will leave the Mac "out 
in the cold".

It is used across industries, and many people rely on the VBA macro 
features to create powerful applications out of spreadsheets. I 
recently did some Excel development, and was disappointed to find that 
the macros i wrote were not Mac compatible. There _are_ ways to make 
sure your code works cross-platform, but MS does not document them. You 
need to consult with an Excel MVP type expert to get the answers to 
those problems.

Access is the poorest excuse I have seen for a database there is,  so 
that is really no loss. And with ODBC/JDBC you can use a legacy Access 
database for the back-end if you want to.

--
Tarik Bilgin
Opalblue
tarik at opalblue.com