Internet Exlorer Mac OS X

Steve first showed a new build of Mac OS X which had a new user interface called Aqua.

This was both the most important release of Internet Explorer for the Mac and the last.

It was also the first large third-party Mac application to ship for Mac OS X, and the first mainstream web browser to embrace standards compliant web content.

I was 22 years old and I was thrown into the deep end of the browser wars, the Microsoft anti-trust trial, and the lovehate relationship between Microsoft and Apple.

I dont want to delve into the details of what made MacIE 5 special because my friend Tantek elik has already documented that on his blog.

Rather I want to focus on the inside story of how and why it was developed, and some of the people and personalities that shaped its success and eventual demise.

This was both the most important release of Internet Explorer for the Mac, and the last release.

Here are some anecdotes and thoughts from an insiders perspective.

TLiloQX0DU.

This history has been compiled by Maf Vosburgh, the developer who conceived and executed the implementation of this major UI redesign.

I was supposed to go work for Apple in Cupertino, but the Apple recruiter screwed up my offer paperwork, and Microsoft snapped me up.

Internet Exlorer Code And Never

MMC started off using tools like HyperCard supplemented by our custom plug-ins, but by the mid-90s we had switched to native code and never looked back.

Everything was the MacOS platinum style, shades of gray like cement, with a horde of tiny 16 by 16 pixel toolbar icons (in 4-bit color with a 1 bit mask) most of which had obviously been designed by engineers in a pixel editor like ResEdit.

Eventually the whole Mac range had this same vivid design style, and the gray drab interface of MacOS 8, which we matched, seemed left behind.

Apples demos at the time of their future OS would (which came to be Mac OS X) also used this same gray look.

We were building a state-of-the-art new HTML engine for IE 5 (Tasman) and I wanted the chrome to be as modern.

If your Macs bezel was Bondi blue, wed make our UI Bondi blue.

That way our frame around the web page would match the bezel and so would be seen as part of the background and be distinct from the content.

By being more vivid we would paradoxically blend into the background, and look more at home.

We had no graphic artists in our little office in San Jose and I suggested we hire a company called Nykris back in London.

Nykris was a digital design company founded by two artists Id previously worked with at MMC, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior (their first names combined to make the company name) and they had other great people on staff who I trusted, like Graham Bartram.

Shiny simple button shapes, pinstripes (a 3 pixel repeat made the pattern fine enough to not hurt readability, although it was inconvenient to code).

This gained back lots of vertical screen estate, valuable on the small screens of the day.

The new tab code was all custom and everything had to be drawn anti-aliased (lines and text).

Internet Exlorer For Mac