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Comment by ankurpatel | Hacker News Reader

"We love the Internet Explorer browser very much" - Steve (6:58 minutes)

So much so that IE for Mac shipped as the default web browser for Mac OS from 1998 onward until Safari was announced in 2003.

This may have been back when apple needed ie mac as web sites weren't working well on mac.

For a while sadly it really was the best web browser for mac.

For a while, it was the best web browser, period, on any platform (including Solaris and HP-UX). Netscape kinda blew.

He was at NeXT, not Apple in 1996.

By that time, NeXT's core product line had morphed from being a series of Unix workstations to being an implementation of the NeXT APIs that ran on top of several platforms, including Windows.

Considering Cyberdog was the only thing Apple had at the time, that's not surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

- said no apple employee ever.

I am not entirely sure about this.

While I don't have personal experience, from what I've read, IE on Mac was a fair bit different from IE on Windows. IE 5 for Mac, released in 2000, used something called the Tasman engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29

> At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS.

Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...:

> The Macintosh Edition introduced a new rendering engine called Tasman that was designed to be more compliant with emerging W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS Level 1, DOM Level 1, and ECMAScript.

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that back while IE for Windows was giving web developers prematurely grey hair, IE for Mac was a much nicer browser and much more comfortable to support as a development target. I think it ended up getting less time/thought/effort from Microsoft eventually. Also, Safari was released in 2003 (beta in January, default browser in OS X 10.3 Panther, in October).

IE for Mac was actually fairly nice, especially in the early days of OSX. I kinda miss that candy blue icon in my dock.

IE on Mac was really good, back in the day. More standards compliant than the Windows version and a different codebase.

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

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