The end of Mac Internet Explorer – Jimmy Grewal and Jorg Brown’s take

Jimmy is a great friend of mine, and we share a lot of the same background (Mac fans, reformed Micro$loth haters) – heck, I even own his HDTV and much of his furniture.

Well, his blog noted today that MacIE is no longer available – he has some great commentary, and there is also some great commentary from Jorg Brown who used to have the office next to mine (and we’d compete to have the loudest music at midnight sometimes.)

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog ? End of an era: Mac Internet Explorer

Jorg and Jimmy no longer work for Microsoft, so they say a lot more than I’d be comfortable with. There’s a lot of other ‘war’ stories that can be told – they’ll come out some day.

My personal experience of working on MacIE was this: I interviewed in November 1999 to work on Mac Outlook Express and Mac Internet Explorer. I got an offer and accepted in December 1999. I attended the launch of IE 5.0 at MacWorld SF 2000 on Microsoft’s dime as a college student. That spring, I heard rumors on the Mac sites that the Internet Explorer team was being disbanded… and when I started on 6/19/2000, I found that to be basically true.

Jimmy understates his accomplishments during that time: he basically kept MacIE development going by himself. More than anyone else, his passion for the product kept some amount of attention paid to it with his relentless championing of it.

There is sort of a MacIE 6 – it’s inside MSN Explorer, and it’s sort of in Entourage in the form of an HTML rendering engine.

That said, in the end it makes perfect sense for Apple to include an HTML rendering engine as part of the OS – heck that’s what Microsoft did (though the reaction was slightly different. )

MacIE is dead. Long live MacIE.