Internet Explorer Caught on Safari	SIGPC Vol. 7, No. 6 June 29, 2003

by Scott Tilley

On Friday, June 13, Microsoft announced that they would cease development of Internet Explorer for the Mac. On Monday, June 23 at the WWDC 2003 event, Apple released Version 1.0 of their own browser, Safari. These two events are inextricably linked. Is the safarization of office applications underway? Should Steve Jobs be happy or worried?

In SIGPC V7N3, “The Safarization of Office” (www.sigpc.net/v7/n3), we wrote that Apple was playing a potentially dangerous game by developing their own versions of common office applications. For example, Mail competes with Outlook, Keynote competes with PowerPoint, and Safari competes with Internet Explorer. Well, it did until recently. With the recent announcement by Microsoft that they are abandoning the Mac platform for the Internet Explorer Web browser, it seems they have given the nod to Apple. Should Steve Jobs be happy or worried?

Microsoft is not the only company to back out of the Mac browser battles. Opera did so as well, shortly after Safari entered public beta about six months ago. They have since changed their mind, but who knows for how long and how much effort they will put into the product. The court settlement between Microsoft and AOL a few weeks ago essentially put the last nail in the coffin for Netscape, since AOL agreed to use Internet Explorer as their default browser for several years to come. That leave just Mozilla and a few other open source browsers left, along with Safari, on the Mac. Again, should Steve Jobs be happy or worried?

If it's true, the reason Microsoft gave for leaving the Mac platform to Apple is ironic. Microsoft said that Apple had sole access to the OS X source code, and therefore they had a competitive advantage. Considering that this is the same argument used by Microsoft’s competitors against Internet Explorer and other products on the Windows platform just a few years ago, it’s quite amazing. As a political argument, this is all terribly amusing.

Microsoft has recently stated that future versions of the Internet Explorer browser will no longer be available as a stand-alone product on Windows; they will instead be deeply integrated into the operating system. This may be due in part to fundamental changes to the file structure in the next version of Windows, code named Longhorn and due sometime in 2005. It may also be due to increased emphasis on security issues, which Microsoft has publicly committed to improving. Due to these changes, the core browser code may need to be rewritten such that it is much more tightly connected to Windows, and not to alien operating systems like OS X. As a technical argument, this is more convincing--but only slightly. 

On a related note, OpenOffice Version 1.0 for OS X (X11) went gold this week as well. With all the news coming out of WWDC 2003, this announcement was somewhat lost in the shuffle. The reason this is interesting is that OpenOffice does provide an alternative to Microsoft Office for common office applications. But as we've said in SIGPC before, considerable work remains to be done before this still-immature product is ready for most Mac users’ desktops. Unless they prefer working with non-Aquafied X11 programs with poor font scaling and complicated installation routines.

However, this is just Version 1. If OpenOffice hopes to switch users from Microsoft Office, they should get the product into Mac shape by Version 3. After all, that’s what Microsoft has always done. And it’s almost always worked. Should Steve Jobs be happy or worried?