Internet Explorer for Mac

» see microsoft.com/mac/products/internetexplorer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Internet Explorer for Mac shipped on April 23 1996 as version 2.0, based on the Spyglass Mosaic codebase that the Windows version also started from. By the time the product reached version 5 in March 2000, it had a completely separate rendering engine called Tasman, developed inside Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. Tasman was the better engine. It supported CSS Level 1 more completely than the contemporary Windows version, and the Mac team treated standards compliance as a feature instead of a slogan.

The browser became the default on Mac OS 8.1 in 1997, under the agreement Steve Jobs announced at Macworld Boston that summer when Microsoft committed to keep Office on the Mac. IE for Mac sat on Apple's installer through OS 9 and into the early Mac OS X releases. The last meaningful update was version 5.2.3 in June 2003. On June 13 of that year, Microsoft told the press it was ending development. The official download stayed available for two more years out of inertia, then disappeared from microsoft.com on January 31 2006.

Mac users used IE for Mac. That was not my crowd. i was on Internet Explorer on Windows 98 over a 33.6k modem in the late 90s, then on TTNet dial-up on the same OS, then on a series of Windows machines through university. The Mac side of the browser wars happened in a building i never walked into. By the time i did get curious about what Tasman was, the rendering engine was a Wikipedia page about a project Microsoft had already filed away.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the 1997 deal ~

The Apple-Microsoft agreement is the part most people remember. Bill Gates appearing on a giant screen at Macworld Boston while Steve Jobs explained to a booing audience why Microsoft was now investing 150 million dollars into Apple and committing to keep Office for Mac alive for five years. Part of that deal was that IE would ship as the default browser on the Mac. Apple did not have to use Microsoft as its default browser vendor forever, just for the term of the agreement. Apple held up its end, then started building Safari the moment it could.

~ tasman ~

Tasman is the part of the IE for Mac story that engineers still bring up. Jon Hicks, Tantek Çelik and the rest of the Mac BU rendering team were treating W3C standards as the product they were shipping. CSS, the box model, font handling. Tasman ended up being more correct than the Trident engine on the Windows side for years. The cruel part of the story is that the work landed on a platform Microsoft was about to walk away from. The Tasman code briefly powered the Windows Office 2008 web preview features and pieces of MSN for Mac OS X, then it stopped getting touched.

~ what got buried with it ~

Safari shipped in January 2003 as part of Mac OS X Panther. From that point on, Microsoft had a hard time justifying continued investment in a browser Apple was actively replacing in its own OS. The June 2003 development cessation was a formality. The January 2006 download removal was a cleanup. What got buried with the brand was a Microsoft team that understood the open web better than the rest of the company did at the time, working on a browser most Microsoft customers never saw, on a platform Microsoft was about to lose the default slot on.

~ the long tail ~

Microsoft did not ship a Mac browser again until Edge in 2019, by which point Edge was a Chromium reskin and the standards-compliance argument had been settled by the rest of the industry. The Mac BU itself kept going, kept shipping Office for Mac, and the people who worked on Tasman went on to influence web standards in other places. The browser itself is a download you can find on archive.org if you want to see what early-2000s Microsoft looked like when it was trying.

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