From our good friends at Blogaholics, the great news that Microsoft is discontinuing support for Internet Explorer for the Mac.

There was a time when I would have been horrified at this news. When Microsoft first released IE Mac, the only other browsers around were clunky, buggy, slow and feature-poor. IE changed all that: it was (relatively) snappy, stable and a joy to use.

Suddenly we Mac users weren’t the Internet’s poor cousins any more; in some ways, IE on the Mac outpaced its Windows counterpart. And when Apple rolled out OS X, IE was right there alongside us, completely updated for the new operating system.

But as time went on, it felt more and more sluggish. Rendering bugs plagued users, and holes in the browser’s support for CSS were a growing, glaring problem. When Steve Jobs unveiled Safari at MacWorld in 2003 — a peppy, brand-new browser that ran circles around IE — he also effectively killed Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser’s share of the Macintosh market plunged, and in one of those vicious circles that marks so much of the online world, that made accommodating IE’s CSS quirks less and less worthwhile. For web developers, adding “except for Internet Explorer for OS X” to your list of supported broswers became standard practice. As Safari and then Firefox climbed steadily in features and stability, the case for Internet Explorer crumbled.
So part of me is happy to learn that IE for the Mac will soon no longer be available for download. But another part of me is just a little wistful. Ironically (because it came from Apple’s old nemesis, Microsoft), IE was one of the applications that helped to fuel the Mac’s resurgence in the late 1990s, and kept the momentum going through the shift to OS X. In its own way, IE Mac helped keep choice alive in the computing world.