For a long time the world was stuck into a non-topic: the „right browser“. If we may believe the news, there won‘t be any new Internet Explorer – for the Macintosh. Seems like Microsoft is just doing the right thing and is no longer polluting the Mac space with it‘s dirt.

But wait! Internet Explorer for the Mac wasn‘t that disgusting. Actually it worked a lot better than Netscape 4 which was a very dirty bastard. And it is still faster and much better integrated than Mozilla. And surprisingly it even had a much better standards support than its Windows counterpart (at least it was able to display transparent PNGs, which the Windows version still can‘t).

But I do not shed a tear now: Mac IE 5 is buggy as well and Microsoft is famous for not doing much on the feature front once the product has been released. Only security fixes have been released in response to or in fear of bad press. Now they are complaining that they couldn‘t integrate with OSX as much as Apple can. Huh, bad style! Didn‘t they deny that was the case with windows in the infamous IE/Netscape „war“? And what about OmniWeb? Their integration has been pretty fine so far…

The good thing now is: if MSIE will be gone on the Mac, web standards organizations and evangelists get new ammo. Safari is much better on web standards than Internet Explorer and Apple does not need Internet Explorer to survive. They have good browser now and in terms of usablity it is setting new standards. And the Mac space is crowded with good browsers these days: Camino, Mozilla, FireBird and wKiosk all share the Gecko foundation. Safari and OmniWeb base on KHTML.

Of course, the Mac still represents 3% of the overall market. But it is certainly still the platform of choice for designers, creatives and other pros. No IE on the Mac: probably the most promising news since Mozilla 1.0.