MacIE… Useful?

Since everyone seems to have taken an interest to the now-well-publicized MacIE death, I almost seemed forced to take an interest. Slashdot even picked it up… twice.

As a contributor to caminobrowser.org, we actually care quite a bit about MacIE. One of our goals is to get MacIE “switchers” which feel a bit left behind. Our website plans on supporting MacIE until Camino no longer supports Mac OS X 10.3 (which is a long way off). I, of course, downloaded MacIE one final time so I could archive it and be ready to test our website with it in the future.

One quote in all of this especially caught my attention. It was that of Jimmy Grewal, a former MacIE developer.

“Sadly, there are still many very useful features in Mac IE that neither company has replicated in their browsers…”

Wait… huh? Having really never used MacIE more than five minutes (to test websites), I wasn’t sure what Jimmy was talking about. So, having just downloaded the app, I gave it a shot.

I can’t believe these words are coming out of my lips (or fingers as it were) but… MacIE has some very useful features. Really. I didn’t believe it myself. The following is just a small list of some features that I actually see major use in:

1. Internet Scrapbook - Genius. Simply genius. After adding a site to your Internet Scrapbook, MacIE saves a copy of the page (in it’s preferences folder) with the date and time it was saved (as well as the original location). This information drops down (the way the popup blocker drops down in Firefox) so it’s easy to see the most relevant information. What a great and useful feature! I can see how it might end up taking up far too much hard drive space, but in all honesty, who cares about that anymore?
2. Page Holder - Another great idea. Back when sidebars were still popular, this worked great. Now, of course, this could be put in a drawer. Basically, this allows a user to view the current web page in the sidebar and makes all clicked links open in the main window, allowing easier browsing of pages with lots of link. In addition, you can view just the links (not the entire page). Of course, CamiLink and SafaLink do the same thing, but not nearly as efficiently.
3. Page Subscription - Subscribing to pages in MacIE is really the first implementation of Live Bookmarks except… it doesn’t require RSS/Atom. With MacIE’s implementation, the HTTP header is checked to see if the page has been updated. The user can then see if the pages have updated. This is particularly useful for pages that aren’t actually blogs.
4. Work Offline - I don’t need to go into how useful this feature is. Many, many people love it and it’s a feature that’s needed in some browser on our platform.
5. Auction Manager - I’m not a big auctioner/auctionee, but for the many that are (very, very many, it seems), this is a killer feature. Someone more prone to using it can go into detail though.
6. Show Related Links - This is just a quick link to Alexa information for the current site. It’s very handy, but does use the sidebar again.

So yes, MacIE is a old, a pain to use, clunky, a horrible renderer, has horrible preferences, and more… but it does have some nice features. I can’t, of course, speak on whether any of these features will make it into Camino, but I can’t say none of them shouldn’t. What am I saying then? Let’s remember to look to the past as we pave the future…