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Microsoft will cease support for the Mac version of Internet Explorer from December 31 and stop development of the program, the company says on its website.

No further security or enhancement updates will be provided.

The initial announcement was made in June 2003.

Microsoft said it would also stop offering downloads of IE for the Mac from its Mactopia site on January 31, 2006.

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Sydney Morning Herald article

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Does this mean I will no longer be babbling?

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Originally posted by Lard tunderin' jeesus:
Intel isn't based in Redmond, it's in Santa Clara, CA. Intel and Microsoft are two separate companies, each suffering from their own forms of megalomania.

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Well, at present I am stuck using a PowerMac 7200 with a 8.6 OS, and my browser is IE 3.01 (quit laughing -- I can't afford to get my laptop fixed). I am already at the point where my Yahoo email won't work properly with IE 3.01, and I am forced to use a different browser (Netscape Communicator 4.76) in oder to read and send my e-mail.

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That is indeed very old!

If you're primarily using your computer at home, you can pick up a used Pentium III class desktop PC for under $150 these days that'll run circles around your old Mac...and if you can't stand Windows you can install Linux on it...and have the same level of security you had on your Mac...if not more.

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If you're primarily using your computer at home, you can pick up a used Pentium III class desktop PC for under $150 these days that'll run circles around your old Mac...and if you can't stand Windows you can install Linux on it...and have the same level of security you had on your Mac...if not more.

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Originally posted by Lard tunderin' jeesus:
A PIII chokes on an OS higher than Win98 - which is a primitive piece of shit. He's better off with Mac8.6, unless he's will to tackle Linux - which I believe (no real hands-on, but I've seen it used) is a real alternative; it's almost ready for prime time now.

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Absolutely untrue. I don't know where you get this idea. If it's from some particular experience with one more likely than not you needed more RAM, not a higher clock rate. 2K and XP will run just fine for conventional (i.e., web/mail/word processing) purposes on anything all the way down to a P3-500 given sufficient (at this point, paltry and cheap as dirt) RAM. And the P3 line ranges all the way up to 1GHz.

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Originally posted by RookieActivist:
Hooray! Safari and Firefox forever!

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IE and Netscape, however....

[ 20 December 2005: Message edited by: Transplant ]

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Originally posted by Hephaestion:
Short term: I'm stuck with it. *sigh*

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But even a Pentium II which you could easily pick up for $50 and could run a somewhat more "modern" operating system would "outrun" it.

[ 22 December 2005: Message edited by: angrymonkey ]

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Originally posted by angrymonkey:

Opera should work on 8.6

opera 6.03

I just upgraded from my old powermac running 9.

THANKS! I will give it a try, then!

And if any of you mac babblers are in need of a scsi cd burner(not dvd) I've got one that i can't use anymore.

Are you serious?! I would LOVE that! Send me a PM!

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[ 22 December 2005: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

Dear x86,

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There is nothing inherently "better" about the Pentium processor; they just have a slicker advertising campaign.

-- Steve Dotto, Dotto's Data Cafe, BC's "Knowledge Network" TV

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Originally posted by jrootham:
x86 architecture is pretty awful. Intel, on the other hand, is pretty good at producing chips (although they have been charging for the Intel brand name in their pricing for a while now).

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x86 has won and Intel has failed. And it was Intel who tried to kill the last dregs of x86 this generation, not anybody else. Intel introduced IA-64 to be the new architecture to supplant everything that had come before, and they have been beaten in every meaningful respect for virtually all purposes by a hybrid backwards compatible architecture from AMD which has the advantages of a next generation 64 bit instruction set together with full support for conventional 32 bit instructions (and for free, rather amusingly but pointlessly, it'll even emulate 16 bit Real Mode if you want it to).

The great deception here is that old well-favoured and dearly held engineer's belief that to innovate, you always have to tell developers and current users to screw themselves, at least for a little while. Too many hardware manufacturers have made this mistake and paid for it. It's the companies who manage to innovate while making forward development a smooth and productive process who survive in the long run. You can't sell an architecture no one wants to write for. The various architectures which have taken the moniker x86 have survived, when they have survived (and, indeed, some did not) because they made progress painless.

"x86" in the year 2005 shares precious little with the various x86s of days gone by. Actually, it shares more with its competitors which disavow the x86 name than it does with its previous incarnations. Which is why no one refers to "x86" as a meaningful category of CPU architecture in CPU discussion any more, and hasn't for years. What is a multicore AMD64 with its pile of SIMD instructions and 64 bit registers? Is it an "x86 CPU"? And if so, what exactly is x86, besides a set of legacy instructions that are still sitting around in the mix? If x86 connotes 'CISC' as it has quite a bit in the past, that's flat out wrong. Current AMD and Intel CPUs are a mixed bag of CISC and RISC instructions, some from days of yore, some on the cutting edge, which are continuously expanded by a never ending influx of SIMD instructions sets that get added with each generation. Some old instructions get thrown by the way side when they're no longer used by much of anyone anymore, and a big pile of new ones are introduced.