IE for mac

Andrew Pratt · Aug 28th, 2007, 11:31 PM

The company my wife works for has an online site for booking hours etc that seems to work only with IE. I've tried Firefox and Opera and neither works so unless they update the software to stop using proprietary IE code we're stuck using IE for that purpose. She's presently still using a Dell PC but sooner or later we'll switch that over to a Mac laptop but we're going to need a solution for that issue. I know we could run IE virtually in parallels but I wondered if IE was functional in OS X ? I found a copy online so we'll see if it even works for her.

Winter Sorbeck · Aug 28th, 2007, 11:47 PM

I just launched Explorer 5.2 on my Intel iMac and it started up without a hitch. Tried out a few sites and it worked too though a bit slow compared to Firefox and Safari. Hopefully the site you need to access will be compatible.

Amiga2000HD · Aug 29th, 2007, 12:04 AM

One thing you might consider is enabling the Debug menu in Safari, and then selecting Mac MSIE 5.22 or Windows MSIE 6.0 from the User Agent submenu. This causes Safari to pretend to be either of those versions of Internet Explorer as far as that website can tell, and your wife would be able to use it.

That said, if you go that route, she'll have to try out everything she needs to do on the website to make sure it actually works with Safari. Faking IE with the debug menu just fools the website into letting you use it with Safari. It won't fix anything that inherently won't work with Safari though, so you need to be mindful of that.

madgunde · Aug 29th, 2007, 01:21 AM

Sometimes the web site just refuses to work with Firefox or Safari because the web developers just don't feel like having to support those browsers, in which case Amiga2000HD's suggestion might work, but more often than not, the site just isn't compatible with the Mac because it uses Microsoft ActiveX or .Net frameworks for scripting, which is only compatible with Windows. In that case, even IE for Mac won't help since IE for Mac doesn't support ActiveX or .Net either.

There are very few websites out there that I run into that don't support Safari, and I haven't run into one for a long time, but if you are unlucky enough to be in the situation where you HAVE to use such a site, running IE for Windows may be your only solution. If possible, try to use an alternate site, say from a competitor, and be sure to send the website's support people a kind email letting them know you have switched to their competitor because of their poor support for internet standards. If they get enough people complaining, they may just change their web development strategy to include non-Microsoft browsers and OSes.