MS IE 5 on Mac OS X

Analysis and Evaluation

 

Adoption

 
Analysis of Mac Platform Browser Usage statistics

Safari is the most used browser on the Mac platform. However, many Mac users are still using MSIE as it was installed by default. Presumably, they would not know that Microsoft had dropped support, and that security updates and such are not available. Perhaps others are using MSIE because of familiarity after making the platform switch, or because early on many sites would not render well with Safari. As MSIE is no longer included in Mac OS X releases, we can presume that the trend away from IE will continue. Those seeking alternates from Safari, would probably tend toward Firefox in the future, with the availability of MSIE going away. If anything, these results should encourage us to communicate with our community about which browsers they should be using from a security standpoint. 

Application Future

 
Microsoft is completely dropping support for Internet Explorer on the Macintosh on Dec 31, 2005.  However, as you can see from the Microsoft lifecycle chart below, they haven't released a service pack in two years.

Product Name	General Availability Date	Service Pack Support Retired
Internet Explorer 5.1 for Macintosh 5.1.7	10-Jul-2003	31-Dec-2005 See Note 13
Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh	17-Sep-2002	Not Applicable
Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh 5.2.3	16-Jul-2003	31-Dec-2005 See Note 13

Note 13.  Hotfix support is not available.

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps#Macintosh_Products

You can see that the browser never made it to the 5.5 release, let alone version 6 which many websites now require. 

Security

 
As you can see above, there have not been any new releases of IE for the Mac in 2 years.  Nor have their been any security updates, as no hot fixes are being released.  This factor alone should be cause for us to abandon its use.

Standards Compliance

 
For its time, IE 5 on the Macintosh was compliant with most of the widely used standards at that time.  In fact, its is said that IE was not simply a port of the Windows version but a complete re-write, contracted to an outside company.  However, it now lags quite far behind because it was abandoned by Microsoft.

One other item of note is that IE for Macintosh did not support many of the Microsoft proprietary standards which are supported on the Windows platform.  Users often expected to be able to make use Active X or other Visual Basic driven applications specified to work with Internet Explorer.  However, as most of these features are tied into Windows itself, they were never available on the Mac platform.  This greatly reduces any benefit of using Internet Explorer for "cross-platform" compatibility reasons.  It may as well have been re-branded, as it did not meet the same standards as the Windows product. 

Supportability

 
Areas of concern here are the results of the lifecycle concern above.  With no bug fixes, or new releases, there is no guarantee it will even continue to run on newer versions of Mac OS.  New advances in ease of use, or even the ability to render many modern web pages will be severely lacking, if that is not already the case.  Extensibility will become a problem as well, perhaps with commonly used plugins no longer being available.  Ultimately, supporting this browser will be completely outside of any help from Microsoft after Dec 31, 2005.

Ultimately, IE on the Macintosh is no longer supportable.