I’ve always had a lot of trouble with musings from Bill Thompson. In fact I’d probably need a whole blog to rant about the issues and suggestions he makes. But this one is weird to the umpteenth degree.

It’s not bad news that Microsoft are dropping Mac support of Internet Explorer. For something that hasn’t been updated regularly for over four years, it’s a relief to know that its time has come. Make Internet Explorer open-source? What a ghastly thought.

Microsoft have lots of commercial and absent-minded technical reasons for adding browser-specific functionality to its Windows version of Internet Explorer. But my view has always been that if developers use or demand specific technology for a public-facing website it’s their problem, not mine. It looks bad for Microsoft, but it looks even worse for the people that own the site. Frankly, if a public-facing site requires a specific browser or at worse a specific operating system, it never gets a second chance with me.

Historically, ActiveX on web pages came into existence in Internet Explorer because there was a perception that web technology wasn’t rich enough to provide the level of interactivity expected by web users. Java was so ‘out there’ as to be a non-starter for Microsoft, and besides, all they had to do was tweak their pre-existing OLE controls which started life in Windows 3.0. As it turns out now, Ajax and XUL demonstrate that web applications can be sufficiently interactive and cross-platform, without the need for ActiveX components. Microsoft are still unfortunately locked into their own way of thinking, using XAML instead of XUL for Vista. Bah!

So it looks like there will be another fight in the future. Something to which Mac users won’t be invited. It’s obviously time for developers to switch to supporting the standards developed by W3C, ditch Internet Explorer wholesale and use Firefox.

And Safari can go too.. As my friend Mark remarked, Apple did pick a wrong’en.