No one has been covering the Internet Explorer from a web author's perspective as well as Zeldman.
2005? Are they kidding?: “Scoble says Longhorn will be available in 2005. Which is another way of saying IE/Win won't change for at least two years. It is not good enough to stay as it is. ...Can anyone tell us how two more years of flawed standards support is supposed to be a good thing?”
RIP:
...Our friends there [at Microsoft], we knew, were working on improvements, particularly in the areas of CSS and DOM support. Yet no significantly new browser version ever came of their activity. IE6/Win still had trouble with parts of CSS1, still did not support true native PNG transparency, and still did not incorporate Text Zoom...
Over the past weeks, the stories we and others have been covering (including the unavailability of an improved version of IE5/Mac outside the subscription-based MSN pay service, and the news that IE/Win was dead as a standalone product) painted a picture of a product on its way out. And now we know that that is the case.
We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers...
From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if 85% of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.
OK, enough quoting. Go read the articles. It‘s getting late, but I’ll comment on one thing. I’ll do it even though it requires another quote.
IE5/Mac, with its Tasman rendering engine, was the first browser to deliver meaningful standards compliance to the market, arriving in March, 2000, a few months ahead of Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6... IE5/Mac introduced innovations like DOCTYPE switching and Text Zoom that soon found their way into comparably compliant browsers like Navigator, Konqueror, and Safari. And all but Text Zoom eventually made it into IE6/Win...
Add to that feature list the printer equivalent of Text Zoom: interactive fit-to-page controls in the print preview window. A very useful solution for a problem I saw users on other browsers and platforms (including IE/Win) struggle with frequently.
The reason IE 5/Mac was good was because it had to be. It was fighting against a large installed base of Netscape 4 on its merits, and Microsoft couldn’t fall back on their Windows franchise to push it. It was designed to be better than Netscape 4, and it succeeded at that. (Also helping its market share was Microsoft’s public threat to pull Office for Mac, which resulted in Apple shipping IE as their default browser.) Still, the competition made Microsoft produce some of its best work.
Soon after, with the game won (or at least, with everyone but Microsoft having lost sufficiently) Microsoft has gone home. They may have even done that years ago, quietly.
IE 6/Win wasn’t much of an upgrade. (A CNET review: “Just about the only reason we can figure that IE 6 even deserves the full 6 version number is its release in conjunction with Windows XP. For those of you not upgrading to Windows XP, whether you run IE 5.x or Netscape 6.x, there's no need to rush for this download.”)
Which brings up a question: when was this decision made? It was made public only recently, but could have been in the air in the Microsoft executive suite for much longer. They have the money to keep the development teams going regardless of the outcome. (According to a Think Secret article, IE 6/Mac was largely finished last year, but according to a former developer “We were told by upper management to hold it back until they gave it the green light.”) Aside from a 2001 update just to keep up with the release of Mac OS X, there haven't been any real feature upgrades to Internet Explorer for either Mac or Windows for the past three years. Both of them might as well have been cancelled then.
We’ve been using a dead product all this time and didn’t even know it!