Microsoft tells Mac users to get Firefox

Two and a half years ago Microsoft discontinued its Internet Explorer for Mac and the firm recommended users migrate to Apple's Safari. Today, the MSN video page tells Mac users to use Firefox.

Microsoft killed its proprietary IE engine for Mac OS X and removed it from the firms' download pages in early 2006, suggesting at the time that "Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari."

While testing the Flash plug-in for Linux and the very nice Preferences Toolbar we decided to switch to the IE 5.0 for Macintosh user-agent on Microsoft's MSN Video web page.

The result was a warning page telling that our browser and OS combination was unsupported - as a result of the browser user-agent sniffing by Microsoft's servers - but what really caught our attention was the recommended browsers: IE 6 or 7 - predictably- but Firefox 2.0 as the second option, both on Windows and on Mac OS X.

The message, verbatim, reads: "We recommend the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and FireFox 2.x on Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2.x on Windows Vista, FireFox 2.x on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger".

So, we guess that Microsoft is still not aware of the Firefox 3.0 release, yet.

Besides highlighting the pitfalls of recommending a given version number instead of just "the latest version of..." in an error page - specially considering the fast-moving world of web related software - it's good to know that Microsoft is not even recommending Safari for Mac OS-X users.

Or perhaps they do like plenty of web designers and just test its site with the two most common browser engines, IE and Mozilla?

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