Hacker News Reader

Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.

For a surprisingly long window of time, IE Mac was the best browser around. Apparently, it did not share a code base with Windows IE, which explains why IE Mac had all the features people were drooling over in 2001 like full PNG transparency and good CSS support. PNG support even included color correction, and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on Windows.

I think the Mac version of IE had something like 99% compliance on the first Acid test, before other browsers had robust CSS support. You could even find a copy of the Acid test in an easter egg in the browser.

It was a fantastic browser at the time, but didn't align with Microsoft's future interests and the development team was reassigned.

Yea, it was one of the first browsers to implement DOCTYPE switching.

In 2001 I, for the first time in my life, had access to Macs running Mac OS 9. While I didn't like the operating system much (I was using Linux and Windows at home, the idea of having to assign memory to application manually felt so 80s) I instantly fell in love with IE for Mac. Back then, in PC land, Netscape Navigator and IE 5.5 were the dominant browser, and IE for Mac supported all these fantastic CSS properties that I knew about, but that I could not use in NN4 or IE5.5. I spend hours buliding pure CSS websites without images, simply utilizing unicode fonts, and CSS properties. Ah, those were the days.

Unfortunately it had the most annoying bug in that it did not reload CSS files. Back in the day, I developed with a text editor on mac PowerBook and after changing one CSS statement, I had to close the browser and restart it.

MacOS had a built-in web server. You could've used that.

> and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on Windows.

Nope. Just the box model bug that affected all the CSS 2 compliant browsers. ;)

It was indeed a pretty good browser for its time, though.

For all the woe brought upon the web by Internet Explorer 6, the "box model bug" is indeed the one thing it did right. It took far too long for everyone else to admit the error and move ahead with the box-sizing CSS spec.

You mean IE5?

Ehh, IE5:Mac may have been better than IE5:Win, and yes, its CSS and PNG support were ahead of its time, but it was still IE5.

IE5:Mac didn't have support for a lot of things IE6 had that we now consider standard, like :hover for links, for..in, Array.prototype.splice, XmlHttpRequest, contentEditable...

It also was the most standards compliant and performant IE of its time, being a totally different code base.

Eg. transparent PNGs.

Possibly because they had to please Apple AND Microsoft?

No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)

Wine wouldn't have worked either since OSX was PowerPC based at the time.

That and the fact that wine only runs on *nix, so it'd require another compatibility layer to provide POSIX and BSD functionality under classic MacOS. OSX didn't even exist at the time IE for Mac was written. They'd also have to come up with a visual theme layer so they could at least pretend it's a Mac program, long before they introduced one in Windows. All of that still wouldn't get them menu bar support, though. In hindsight, I didn't think it through at all when I mentioned wine.

They do have MS-Office ports for Mac, so that product was probably written with much better separation of concerns.

I guess there's no reason for Microsoft to decouple their browser from their OS, I guess....

There was an IE for UNIX back in the 1990s, which meant Solaris and HP-UX. The last version was IE5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

And before that, MicroSoft was best known for its BASIC implementation that wound up on a whole range of eight-bit microcomputers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC

The versions for 6502-based micros shared a codebase:

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=46

And, in some versions, they had an easter egg hidden in the constants used to implement SIN:

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43

Reply on news.ycombinator.com