That's the headline of one of the news items over at MacUser. It says Microsoft has stopped the further devolopment of Internet Explorer for Mac. Cool, eh?! Apple won this round!
While I think this is great news for Safari, there are a lot of sites out there that still won't accept it over Internet Explorer. Apple will need to make Safari at least be able to emulate IE and get Safari to work better with WMP (some sites insist on using it). Hopefully IE 5 will work with future versions of OS X to ensure any compatibility problems.
Apple shouldn't need to rely on Microsoft for browser support, Safari may be far from perfect but it's still in beta form and IE crashes a lot more than Safari in it's early state.
Well, with MS announcing no more stand-alone versions of IE, their browser development is going to stagnate compared to that of Safari, Mozilla, Opera, etc.
I think MS is putting themselves out of the browser market. Whether that's intentional or not remains to be seen.
Apple adds all features desired by all users to Safari
Apple adds hooks in Mac OS X to better integrate Safari with the Finder
Authors and fans of other browsers complain that Safari's integration gives it an unfair advantage
Apple claims that Safari cannot be separated from Mac OS X
MacRumors members demonstrate how easy it is to disable Safari in Mac OS X
Safari market share for Macs reaches 95%
Microsoft buys the rights to port Safari to Windows
Microsoft announces Safari for Windows
Safari market share for Windows reaches 51%
Microsoft ceases development of Internet Explorer
Steve Jobs appears in court to explain away damaging internal e-mail that clearly shows his goal was to put Internet Explorer out of business; Jury unexplainedly believes everything he says
That's hardly Safari's fault. Safari is far more standards compliant than IE is. Your problems stem from incompetent webdesigners who only design for IE, not for standards. I know because I'm a webdesigner myself.
IE5/Mac was on the right track, I'm sure the next major revision would've improved it a lot. But at the same time I'm not too disappointed since Safari has come along and is now clearly the superior browser on Mac OS X.