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addersljMany of you know that, at home, I'm a keen Mac user. Part of this is an aesthetic decision: I like the industrial design of Apple machine far more than the beige boxes prevalent in the Windows world or, far worse, the horrible attempts some of the manufacturers have made to produce "trendy" computers. Let's not even talk about Dell's black bricks, either. I also find Mac OS X to be a more conducive and productive working environment than any flavour of Windows.
However, there's also a philosophical element to my decision, in that I'm adamant that one company should not be allowed to completely dominate something as important to modern life as computers and the internet. This article does a rather good job of explaining what the significance of the announcement that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, and the IE version won't be upgraded until Longhorn, the next version of Windows, ships. Oh, and it'll be built into the OS, so forget getting it stand alone for Windows XP or earlier.
Essentially, they've won the browser wars, got away with monopolistic behaviour in the US courts, and now they're stifling internet innovation until they can make a buck out of it by charging you for a systems upgrade. This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser. That, my friends, is going to be the current version of IE for a few years to come. Welcome to the stifled web.
However, there's also a philosophical element to my decision, in that I'm adamant that one company should not be allowed to completely dominate something as important to modern life as computers and the internet. This article does a rather good job of explaining what the significance of the announcement that Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, and the IE version won't be upgraded until Longhorn, the next version of Windows, ships. Oh, and it'll be built into the OS, so forget getting it stand alone for Windows XP or earlier.
Essentially, they've won the browser wars, got away with monopolistic behaviour in the US courts, and now they're stifling internet innovation until they can make a buck out of it by charging you for a systems upgrade. This is going to affect even those of us who don't use IE (I use Apple's Safari pretty much full-time now) because no web developer is going to use any new innovation in web standards that isn't supported by the prevalent browser. That, my friends, is going to be the current version of IE for a few years to come. Welcome to the stifled web.
