April 8, 2002

8:53 AM

Hell freezes over.MSN coming to the Mac this summer.
posted by donkeyschlong (20 comments total)

Yeah, I got a Mac just so I can use Microsoft as my ISP.
posted by Fofer at 10:40 AM on April 8, 2002

It'd be nice if they'd just spend some money toward keeping the Mac versions of their applications in line with the PC versions.

- Where's Explorer 6 for Mac?
- Why won't the Entourage/Outlook conduit to Palm OS synchronize email on the Mac?
- Visio.

Just what we (Mac users) don't need is another instance of Microsoft pulling us into their software and then dropping it as soon as we finish reporting all of its bugs. (vis a vis MS Project)
posted by theRegent at 11:05 AM on April 8, 2002

- Explorer 5 for mac is more advanced than 6 for pc, isn't it? (and they're totally different products and dev teams - no shared code - so the the version numbers matching wouldn't mean anything anyway...)

- Porting Visio to mac would be a major undertaking since it was recently 'aquired' from another company and there hasn't been a mac version in development before (unlike the rest of office) - and theres always omni graffle...
posted by sawks at 12:27 PM on April 8, 2002

How about Access for the Mac?
posted by kirkaracha at 12:29 PM on April 8, 2002

Uh attn. mac users, just use icab...icab.de...better than explorerer, currently at least. Icab blocks ads, popups, etc., it puts you in the driver's seat, ironically enough.

Explorer 5 is okay, I love the command-tilde thing to cycle windows, but on os9 and osX there are better options.

Whenever I use anything designed by Microsoft I feel like I'm using the ultra - deluxe version of RealPlayer.

I hope realnetworks continues their commitment to ugly, clunky-ass software.
posted by Settle at 4:08 PM on April 8, 2002

hell hasn't frozen over until microsoft starts porting stuff to *nix, which shouldn't be too far off actually.
posted by physics at 4:37 PM on April 8, 2002

iCab will probably be a nice browser when it's finished, but its CSS and JavaScript support is too immature for the browser to be used as someone's primary browser. Its UI isn't as polished as the alternatives, either.
posted by kindall at 4:49 PM on April 8, 2002

MS apps for Mac are outstanding, while they are pretty awful for PC. Including explorer.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:54 PM on April 8, 2002

IE 5 Mac is not only far better than IE 6 Windows, but it is arguably the best browser on the planet. If only everyone used IE 5 Mac and Mozilla variants, web pages would actually display the way they're supposed to.

While we're on the subject: does anyone else find it infinitely ironic that Tantek developed the box model hack to fix the stupidity of IE 5 Win?
posted by Ptrin at 4:57 PM on April 8, 2002

M$ develops for OS X. OS X *is* Unix.

Also, there's a somewhat orphaned (I think) version of IE for some other *nixes floating around on M$'s servers.
posted by donkeyschlong at 5:53 PM on April 8, 2002

Ptrin, please elaborate as to how IE 6 is not as good as IE 5 when it comes to coding webpages?
The only real difference I know is that IE 6.x requires the DOCTYPE to be the very first line of the code to trigger strict mode. Therefore XHTML documents with the XML declaration as the first line will trigger the quirks mode. Put the DOCTYPE as the first line, and you get the page displayed exactly the same way Mozilla displays it, pixel to pixel (as far as the box model is concerned)
posted by riffola at 6:56 PM on April 8, 2002

Damn forgot that anchor links don't work right with the target attribute.
posted by riffola at 6:57 PM on April 8, 2002

Nevermind I found the differences in the CSS renderings, but still I think IE6 is far far better than IE5.x/Win. :)
posted by riffola at 7:07 PM on April 8, 2002

MS apps for Mac are outstanding, while they are pretty awful for PC. Including explorer.

That's a pretty sweeping statement. It's been my experience that my Macs would run for days and days without a need for restarting were it not for errors, memory drains and freeze-ups courtesy IE and Outlook Express.
posted by Dreama at 7:25 PM on April 8, 2002

I like to sweep!
posted by ParisParamus at 7:45 PM on April 8, 2002

I have evidence that pants and rands are kissing late at night.
posted by Settle at 8:30 PM on April 8, 2002

theRegent :

Try the IE 5.5 beta. It's much more stable than the current 5.1 release. I don't think there's an OS X version available, but I have no problems with 5.1 in OS X.

Now, if they would just make MSN chat work (on the mac) from their own website, I would never have to use Virtual PC.
posted by schlaager at 9:32 PM on April 8, 2002

Warning, bitchfest: Although IE5 for Mac has great CSS support, it sort of is a crappy browser - it locks up machines when it encounters bigbig pages or popups until they're completely loaded. Certain intranet applications I've helped build run so slowly on IE5/Mac, but in Netscape4 they fly. It's unnerving! IE leaks memory like crazy, and having many windows open at the same time makes it completely useless. The memory/locking-up issue has been been a problem since IE4, and unless Microsoft completely digs into the code, it'll be with us to stay.

Windows Media for Mac is probably the most embarrassing piece of software out there, way worse than Realplayer - I've had it hard-crash my Mac so many times on launch (to the point of having to clear PRAM) that Windows Media just isn't an option. It kills me that NPR cut an exclusive deal with Microsoft.

And then there's Outlook, which crashes quite often if you simply lose the connection to the Outlook server. I've had it crash my machine just by receiving an email.

I have to say that Office is pretty good though.
posted by panopticon at 10:44 PM on April 8, 2002

Experiences obviously vary, panopticon; I've been using IE5 for Mac since it came out and I can't recall ever having crashed it. It's quite a nice browser. Or perhaps you mean something different by "locks up" than I would mean by it - yes, it does stall for a moment when a popup opens, but I don't think I've ever seen it lock up truly, requiring a restart.

I'm a pretty solid anti-Microsoft radical, but I have to admit that IE5 for Mac is the best browser I've ever used on any platform.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:38 PM on April 8, 2002

Well, I would side with the MS-MAC team has done good folks. I'm very happy with both Entourage and IE on my OS X machine. I have refused to install Windows Media Player, but have heard nothing but bad things (I also think this is developed/handled completely differently then the other mentioned apps when in comes to MS internals and politics).

IE 5.1.x was my primary browser for a good 6 months then I started using Moz a lot more with recent milestones (I had always used it over IE6 on my PC). It was crashing a bit too often for my liking, and the Mozilla available right now* is both more stable and arguably more standards compliant. (mostly CSS2 stuff like selectors & generated content thats still useless thanks to IE/PC sucking).

* I emphasize available because I have no doubt Tantek & company are hard at work on the next release but compared to mozilla milestones IE updates have been few and far between.
posted by 10sball at 12:07 AM on April 9, 2002