End of the road for Mac IE while a new highway for Microsoft & Mozilla

End of the road for Mac IE while a new highway for Microsoft & Mozilla

Two interesting developments, the first that rivals Microsoft & Mozilla surprised everyone with what is invariably their first act of cooperation, the second on the other hand is that Microsoft has declared that it will stop working on the IE platform of Mac from December 31st.

Though change or transfer of money is not in the offing in the informal understanding between Microsoft and Mozilla, the arrangement stipulates that Microsoft can use the symbol Firefox does for alerting subscribers of web pages to the extra bit streams of information called the RSS feed.

The development still shook the technology world, since this is seen as an indication of further co-operation between the two quite opposite camps, with Mozilla Corporation distributing the open-source Firefox browser and an active promoter of open-source softwares as competition to the high-priced softwares from Microsoft and other companies.

The report is significant since both Microsoft and Mozilla have not ruled out cooperation in other issues.

Microsoft will start using Mozilla's orange icon in a few softwares slated for release in 2006, including it's e-mail client Outlook which will be it's 12th avatar and the seventh version of the IE browser.

In another significant development Microsoft has decided to stop working on Internet Explorer's Mac OS X version from 31st December.

It is however pointed out by analysts that at the ground level this will not make much change since Mac OS users already have an option of choosing between the Safari, Camino and Firefox browsers already available free to them. Despite it's significance the move has not surprised many as this has been planned since 2003.

However the greatest sufferers are slated to be those websites which have been specifically designed only to work with IE.