A Microsoft Catch-22

For you people- who have had huge issues with MSN and Mac IE- Well looks like MSN heard the users and just put out a fix. They tried to drop support for the browser but it looks like too many people still use Mac IE. So here you go -MSN looks ok in Mac IE again.

Thank you Damien for your helpful post. I wasted an hour reloading IE 5.2 (there are some sites that require IE) twice until I thought to Google "IE 5.2 Mac 10.4" and found your explanation and fix.

Hey Damien, I contend that if Apple had done same thing with Safari and Apple.com you would have (rightly) had kittens. And so would 90% of TUAW readers. This was a glaringly egregious error, even for Microsoft. There's no excuse, love 'em or hate 'em.

www.msn.com opens fine (except for some javascript errors) with IE 5.2 on my Powerbook with 10.4.3. Though, I have Privoxy in between. You should just figure out what's causing the crash (probably javascript) and filter it with Privoxy or Squid if you can't remove IE from their systems.

It crashed here using Mac OS X 10.4.2 and Exploder 5.2.2...

There's another point to remember about Mac IE bugs -- they aren't going to get fixed. Period. The entire MacBU browser team -- product managers, programmers and testers -- was disbanded shortly after Safari 1.0 shipped. Some of them went to the Entourage team, and the rest moved out of the MacBU entirely. (The truly untalented ones, as so often happens at Microsoft, went to MSN.) The official word at the time was that the MacBU was putting MacIE on permanent low-maintenance status because 1) MacBU couldn't hope to match the resources and obvious strong desire that Apple was putting into Safari and 2) it would free up badly-needed resources for the Mac MSN client project that was then getting started. Before those of you who haven't a good word to say about Microsoft employees get started, I want to say that the MacIE team included some truly talented people. Their main problem was that Microsoft upper management at the time thought they owned the Internet and all browser development within the company had been put on a restricted cash diet. No funding, no chance to make up for past mistakes, and then no browser jobs at all. As for why this recent change at MSN was allowed to slip through, your guess is as good as mine. They may well have not bothered to check with the MacBU about the change. As for the larger question of how a company with umpty-billion in cash reserves, who daily loses a couple hundred bucks a throw on each XBox sold, can continually force its Mac unit to fend for itself financially.... Well, SOMEBODY has to make up for the XBox deficit, don't they?

I delete it from all users harddrive. If you're worried your users need IE, then turn safari's user agent to IE6 if you have to for them, but get rid of that browser! You're continuing to feed the problem by allowing it. And, as a web designer, by all means code by standards, but don't worry about IE for mac anymore. We support standards, and support them seeing the content (I'd never block a user out, cough, GAP.com), but that doesn't mean you have to cater to it. IE 5 is the new, well PC IE 5 or NN 4. Just say no.

Oh, c'mon folks. MacIE 5 hasn't seen any real development since they pulled the plug on it in March 2000. It had a little bit of crash fixing for OSX, but nothing more. It's not a piece of shit - it was a fabulous browser for OS9 turned out by a tiny and dedicated team... HALF A DECADE AGO. It's likely that MSN doesn't test with it at all. People running obsolete software aren't the sort of folks who affect your profit margin, you know? How's Apple doing in supporting iTunes for OS9? That came out years after MacIE 5. If you want to bitch about anything, it's only that Microsoft doesn't care about Macintoshes. Well, duh. That's like Kanye saying Dubya doesn't care about black people.

So what, MS can't make a mistake, is that it? They have to be 100% perfect, all the time? And don't forget: you're taking out on the entire company what's most likely the fault of one person, their webmaster.

I keep 2 computers for that very reason. I have a Dell notebook w/ all my business stuff on it, and I keep my Macintosh Microsoft-free (and use it for graphics, music etc.)