Another rant about BBC Technology news - this time, I found an article posted on 2005-12-23 entitled 'Give Mac Explorer to the people'. Strap line - "As Microsoft drops the Mac version of Internet Explorer, technology commentator Bill Thompson offers a modest proposal."
Ok - first things first - Microsoft officially dropped Mac Internet Exploiter several years ago (2003 actually), the only thing they have said recently is that "you've had your chance to move to something else since 2003 when we told you to do that, you've done that... good, don't ask us about support for Internet Explorer on the Mac ever again". This is nothing new.
Second, to address the points raised in Bill's personal opinion posted on a Journalistic news website -
1) ActiveX is a Windows PC based technology - and so IE on a PC has it. Mac IE has never had it, though this is inferred in the article.
2) Mac IE was never the same as PC IE - sites designed for IE on the PC did not immediately work on Mac IE - this was because Microsoft built it differently. The version number of Mac IE did not mean that it had similar functionality and support as a PC IE with the same version number. For example - Mac IE version 5 was very different from PC IE version 5.
3) Root Certificates - for security all major browsers have information about the root signing authorities of SSL certificates - this allows your browser to 'go secure' (little padlock, or the like) and use HTTPS to encrypt your communications. This is for ecommerce applications like eBay, Amazon, British Airways, EasyJet... and every other selling online. Now, Mac IE had a serious problem with this - first having a serious Root Certificate bug a few years ago (I can't remember the date of that bug, but I can certainly look it up) - causing users of Mac IE to be unable to 'go secure'. Two things from this - many users looked to alternative browsers like Mozilla (at that time Firefox wasn't around) and Netscape. I found many Mac users using Netscape - as it was pre-installed on their Mac next to IE. Since the days of the Root Certificates bug the security and stability of IE hasn't been very good as Microsoft stopped delivering upgrades, merely serious bug fixes. Mac IE stagnated years ago! Also - any open source version of Mac IE would have to negotiate with those root signing authorities to embed their signatures - I have no idea how that would be perceived if only a handful of developers and users were actually using this Mac IE open source.
4) The DOM is broken in Mac IE. Always has been. This, plus a list of other problems (including a major memory leak bug, when using dHTML to re-write the HTML of pages, that can't be fixed by simple patching) really says that Mac IE should be killed off. Mac IE doesn't come anywhere near to supporting the web standards we all shout about these days. An open source development of Mac IE would clear take some time (maybe years) to get the Engine inside it sorted out to bring it to the standards support of Gecko or Konqueror? (Yes, PC IE too - ok, I'll give you that... it's a hundred times better than the Mac IE ever was)
5) Another browser? Look - how many different browsers, with different quirks, do you want? We've got IE (PC only), Gecko based browsers (I class them as one because they use the same underlying layout engines - so that includes Mozilla, Firefox, etc), Opera and Konqueror based browsers (that includes Safari, OmniWeb, etc). That's enough surely? Apart from the current itteration of IE on the PC, the standards support is great... but throwing a new Open Source Mac IE browser into the mix would destabalise things - who in their right mind is going to build a site that works on it when it doesn't support the standards?
Goodbye Mac IE, and good riddence.
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3 comments:
So why not have the source code handed over to those who can use it to enable a better degree of cross-compatibility? I know you don't think my article - it's a column, by the way, and not a report, so I'm allowed to express my views - was convincing, but my main point is that if Microsoft are going to encourage people to build IE-specific sites (and they are) then something needs to be done to ensure that Mac users (and I am one, among other platforms) can access them too. Surely you'd agree that this was a desirable goal?
As I said - even if it was handed over to a developer community, it would take them some time to enable cross-compatibility... and also, they would never make it work in the same way as IE on the PC... it would never fully implement ActiveX (even the ActiveX plugin that is kicking around for the Mozilla, and now Firefox, browser doesn't fully implement the full spec, or work in the same way as, ActiveX on the PC - it just can't, because of the differences between the OS X and Windows operating systems). ActiveX exposes the underlying operating system functions on the PC, obviously any 3rd party ActiveX plugin would have to exposes them in the same way - now, given that Windows PCs operate very differently from other operating systems I'd place a bet that this would never be perfect and ActiveX Controls that play within the plugin act differently from the same ActiveX Controls on the PC platform. Anyway - do you really think things like the Microsoft Office Web components (a set of ActiveX Controls popularly used in office-based Web Apps) will work in a 3rd party plugin? (for further info - please read the Mozilla ActiveX plugin's FAQ)
Microsoft tried to get us to make IE-specific sites and had moderate success by offering tasty looking non-standard non-cross-platform technologies, but several years ago developers of sites realised this was a really bad idea - accessibility being a big reason (e.g. making your site IE specific didn't go hand in hand with the ability to to see it on a Symbian browser, or a screen reader, or...) You just have to look at the decision last year from HP who publically acknowledged the fact that making their site IE-specific wasn't desireable and cited Firefox and cross platform as two of the reasons.
Remember - IE only worked on PC properly - what about the rest of us using Mac, Unix, Linux? Netscape was built 'cross-platform' so many people on those platforms used it - it was around before IE on Mac.
What's being done, as you ask, is that developers aren't building IE-specific websites any more... at least not the developers that have moved on from those days. You don't see much, if anything, IE-specific on Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC Online, ...? In fact I can't think of a public website that uses something IE-PC specific like an ActiveX control. Any ideas?
I only ever see PC IE-specific technologies (like ActiveX or RDS) being used in office based Web Applications where the target browser is controlled - recently, though, I've seen a couple of Web Applications built on the Gecko and the GTK toolkit.
So, in summary - no, I wouldn't agree that making a piece of software to support IE-specific websites was a desireable goal... as many developers are avoiding making IE-specific websites as they understand the pitfalls of doing so now.
Would you not agree that supporting the 'standards' is better than allowing a legacy piece of software that doesn't, and will never, emulate it's PC version exactly to survive? It's a museum piece, let it sleep.
In terms of your 'column' - I'm fine with expressions of opinion, but your 'column' appears under the heading 'BBC News' with no other explanation or disclaimer. Perhaps the BBC should think about adding a strap line like 'Feature' or 'Opinion' or something to these sort of things.
The only ActiveX site I can think of is the bank Egg's Money Manager option, which uses some ActiveX contrrol to securely store your passwords on your host computer.
I've seen other uses - eg in content management systems - but these are not really public.
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