#tasman — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Retro Markus 🇩🇰🇩🇪 @[email protected] · 2026-05-09 · 17:56 UTC

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogFind #apple #mac #powerpc #internetExplorer #tasman

Catch of the Day: The Forbidden Apple! 🍏🪟

Hey Retro Fans!
Hold on to your CRT monitors, because our FrogFind radar has caught something today that feels like a relic from a parallel universe. Among all the Nintendos and Linux machines, this legendary identifier appeared:

Internet Explorer 5.17 on Mac (PowerPC)!

For everyone rubbing their eyes right now: Yes, Internet Explorer existed for the Mac, and it was a big deal! Following the historic "peace treaty" between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in 1997, Internet Explorer became the official default browser on all Apple computers for five years.

The craziest part? Mac IE was technically vastly superior to its Windows counterpart at the time! Microsoft built a completely bespoke rendering engine for Apple called Tasman, which was one of the very first to properly support CSS. Version 5.1.7 (released in the summer of 2003) was the absolute final update ever pushed for classic Mac OS 8 and 9 before Apple entirely shifted focus to their own browser, Safari.

The fact that today, over 20 years later, someone boots up an old PowerPC Mac (perhaps a colorful iMac G3?) and browses FrogFind with the Mac-exclusive Internet Explorer is a glorious time machine to an era when Microsoft and Apple surfed hand in hand.

Cheers to the Tasman engine!

Your FrogFind Team 🐸

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #search #searchengine #frogfind #apple