Posted by Bruce Grubb on 01/19/74 11:35

In article
<doraymeRIDTHIS-770BCE.07430723122005@news-vip.optusnet.com.au>,
dorayme <doraymeRIDTHIS@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> In article <f92lq1lcvfp8m4e468adl792i7c9t98mpg@4ax.com>,
> Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:30:18 +1100, dorayme
> > <doraymeRIDTHIS@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> >
> > >Have you, over a goodly period of time, actually used this
> > >browser on a Mac?
> >
> > In '99 I bought an iMac just to run it (my first ever Mac). I planned to
> > buy dozens of iMacs to run it, handing them out as freebies to each of
> > our commercial partners in a large "Hang the expense, just get it
> > deployed easily to the computer-illiterate partners" extranet. Mac/IE
> > was so flakey that I scrapped that plan in favour of PCs, even with all
> > their maintenance and support problems.
> >
> > A couple of years ago I worked on a large, complex Mac intranet project,
> > for an office of dedicated Macistas . Not intentionally, but I don't
> > think I even opened up a copy of Mac/IE - no-one had the slightest
> > interest in it any more - it had just ceased to exist as a serious
> > product.
> >
> > A couple of months ago I had to swallow a 1/3rd project over-run, just
> > to get an interweb site working acceptably on Mac/IE (even though there
> > were no users).
> >
> > Great goals maybe, unworkably broken product.
>
> Your experience and interests are different to most people who
> actually used it, as I said, "for a goodly period of time". You
> came, you saw, you judged and you rejected. This is is a very
> different scene from a person just using it, doing their banking,
> making web sites (admittedly with no natural tendencies to put in
> unnecessary blank spaces) and seeing they look ok on IE even if
> they have better browsers to work with initially (like Mozilla,
> even iCab for some features), buying and selling on eBay,
> browsing so many web pages and on and on.
>
> The bits of it that did not work well were obviously super
> important to you. Your eagle eye settled on the pimples and you
> were not ardent enough to see its inherent sexiness. Fair enough.
> It came as a surprise to me a little while back on alt.html
> learning about some white space glitches.
>
> Presumably you were thinking in '99 that an iMac (horribly twee
> things actually) and IE were married in some way? I can think of
> ways but your thoughts are not entirely clear to me. There were
> other browsers, in fact, many Mac users lurved Netscape.

I nave no idea on the logic behind this either. By 1999 there were several
browsers including one I used for a long time until Safari came along:
iCab. My favorite feature of iCab (and on it continues to have) is its
built-in validator which showed every so called 'problem' site had poor
HTML code and was invalid by the standards of the day.

> As for 2 years ago, well, on X, Safari had arrived and there were
> many reasonable alternatives for X.

Personally I would put up front with any HTML design that 'we go by the
standard' which would knock a lot of this nonsense in the head. In fact it
is exactly because HTML authoring tools ARE so bad (seen the way MSWord
does HMTL? SHUDDER) that MSIE has done so well so long.

If the HTML writers had banded together and stuck to the standard rather
than going after every nonstandard toy MS came up with (like BLINK) and
demanded HTML author program do the same we would not be in this mess.

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