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One of the most painful aspects of being a web designer (in case you didn’t know that’s what I do for a crust) is dealing with all the browsers.

Amongst the plethora of projects I’m working on at the moment a little emergency job cropped up last week. Content was all ready, there was a game plan, client is really nice - so I took it on. Everything worked out well, job done in a few hours...... until a complaint came in.

It wouldn’t work in Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Mac. This week has been spent trying to determine the error and fix it.

But it can’t be fixed. The issue is that IE for Mac is just too damn old. It’s a mess.

So finally it’s come to the time that I am not going to support it. No longer will I tear my hair out trying to make things work for this dog of a browser. No designs, no coding. Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac - you are dead to me.

I’ve wrestled with this for some time. It’s been important to me to accommodate a whole range of people on the sites I build. But just like Netscape 4, it’s time to lay this browser to rest. It was good to us back in - gosh - 1999, but it’s reeking like a month old cucumber left in the back of the fridge.

It’s 2006. And there are a lot of other fabulous options out there. For free! Even on the Mac when you pull it out of the box!

Some of you may even think I’m insane for even needing to make a statement about this. But - against all stereotypes - many, many Japanese Mac users still use IE.

wtf? I hear you cry! There is a dirty little-known secret in the Land of the Rising Sun. It is known as the Font-Issue-that-won’t-let-MacOS9-die. You see the reason for the lag in changing over from even OS9 to OSX here has been because Japanese fonts have not caught up. This means that several designers are still booting into OS9 to do work - as many fonts can’t (still) yet be used in a pure OSX environment. To further shock you - many printers here are still insisting on files to be in Illustrator 8.

Still regardless there are Japanese fonts that work fine on the net - mainly Osaka and MS Gothic - so there really isn’t an excuse to be using an outdated browser that didn’t work that well to begin with.

Anyway the support page on the Microsoft Mac IE support page says it all - “Use Apple’s Safari”. (Here is the direct link in case you need it.)

• I hear your pain.  We (Mozilla) are trying to get the word out about alternatives to IE on the Mac but Japanese users seem wedded to IE, even on the Mac.  I’m open to any suggestions for how to change this behavior.

  Gen Kanai
  06/11/26 08:52 PM