Can't she get some IE?

February 19, 2006 5:45 PM

Can we really never download IE for Mac?

My finace bought a Mac laptop today, but she is having some problems. A class she is taking requires using a specific web tool that only works with Internet Explorer (v5 or higher). Of course, Microsoft has recently stopped offering IE to Mac users (and I swear this thing won't work with Firefox or Safari).

So what is she to do? There has to be somewhere on the web to download IE, but to us it all looks like a crazy sea of flashing fonts. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

posted by Ignatius J. Reilly to computers & internet (14 comments total)

IE for Mac is a pretty different animal to IE on Windows anyway, so there's no guarantee if it 'needs Internet Explorer' that it'll work on the Mac one anyway.

That said, if you can find someone who has it on their machine and can put it in a DMG file, it would probably work if they sent it to you.
posted by wackybrit at 5:51 PM on February 19, 2006

If it only works with IE, it might only work with IE on PC. And have you looked into Firefox with the extension that makes it look like IE?

Otherwise, somebody might be able to send it over to you.
posted by Brainy at 5:53 PM on February 19, 2006

IE for the Mac was never the same as IE for the PC. In particular, IE for Mac can't run ActiveX controls. She should consider returning the mac and getting a PC (if she will need to do PC specific things like this a lot), or attempting to run IE within virtual PC. Unless she got a MacBook Pro, virtual PC is going to be very painful on her new laptop.
posted by b1tr0t at 5:53 PM on February 19, 2006

I have 5.2.3 sitting unused in a folder on my iBook. I don't know if Internet Explorer installed extra files and folders when installed or if it was just a "drag install"; if the latter, I could email you the app (23.6MB) if you add your email address to your profile (or email me).
posted by blueberry at 5:54 PM on February 19, 2006

Evolt browser archive.
posted by nikzhowz at 5:59 PM on February 19, 2006

From much personal experience: many websites/tools that "only work with IE" work 95-100% fine in a variety of modern browsers spoofing as IE. Sometimes these even perform better than IE5/Mac (for some of the reasons already mentioned). If she has any trouble with the real IE/Mac, these can spoof as IE/Mac or IE/Win:

• Firefox + Chris Pederick's User Agent Switcher extension
• Safari with debug mode turned on
• Opera
• Camino + CamiTools preference pane

(P.S. A second way to get IE/Mac is Pacifist + an old set of Jaguar or Panther install disks.)
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 6:20 PM on February 19, 2006

Have you considered Darwine and Windows IE6? I haven't tried it myself but I use regular Wine/winIE for my work's abominable VBScripe/ActiveX/whatever ticketing system and it runs perfectly.
posted by moift at 6:42 PM on February 19, 2006

You may also want to send off a note to the school's compliance department, asking why one of their classes us requiring the use of IE. But I also suggest trying any one of the tools listed above to trick the web server into thinking you're running a different user-agent.
posted by camworld at 7:12 PM on February 19, 2006

Darwine is only (slightly) useful on Apple's new x86 hardware. It won't help if the new machine is a PPC device, because Darwine-PPC doesn't run Windows executables.

If it's an Intel Mac, there are some instructions out there on getting IE6 to run under Wine.
posted by majick at 7:41 PM on February 19, 2006

(But Darwine is basically at the point where people are struggling to get notepad.exe to run on it. It's not really a great option for trying to get a browser up and running.)
posted by majick at 7:45 PM on February 19, 2006

If you have a nice setup, of course, get Remote Desktop Connection for OS X (for free, from MS's site) and connect to your favorite PC direct :) A great solution in homes with a PC about. I use it over wireless often and it's way faster than VNC, etc.
posted by wackybrit at 8:10 PM on February 19, 2006

Why not just use Virtual PC?
posted by The Jesse Helms at 10:02 PM on February 19, 2006

The last release of MSIE for the Mac was 5.1.7. You can't download it from Microsofts site, but do a google search for "internet explorer 5.1.7 download". Universities usually have it available for download. You'll have to run in classic mode. Good Luck!
posted by johnd101 at 7:23 AM on February 20, 2006

The last release of MSIE for the Mac was 5.1.7...

The last release of MSIE for the Mac was 5.2, the only real update from 5.1.x was getting it to run on OSX (I've got a copy that's running with Panther, not sure about Tiger) - so I'd agree with the above in terms of searching (changing 5.1.7 to 5.2) or checking evolt's browser archive, but you won't need classic to run it.
posted by jalexei at 7:45 AM on February 20, 2006