It's everywhere. Microsoft is dropping development of IE on the Mac. They cite Safari as the reason to stop. It just ain't so.

Apple and Microsoft talk. Apple knew MS wanted to drop IE's production or at least get paid (I assume) to keep this browser on Windows' only current viable desktop competitor. Apple needed a browser, and they needed it quickly. Luckily Apple didn't sell -- and cheap -- out and license OmniWeb (whose engine was apparently so bad they're dying to use Safari's spin on KHTML) or Opera (who apparently was just looking for a good excuse to dump Mac OS). Safari is fast, lean, and a right good browser, even if there are bugs with Hotmail and Blogger thinks it can only handle the "LoFi" version of the Blogger entry screen.

The point is that Apple made Safari because they knew Microsoft was playing hard[-er] ball; MS did not kill IE Mac solely b/c Safari rocks. Apple made the decision from the options MS gave them.

It'll be sad to see IE go, however. IE 5 Mac, when first released for OS 9, was a great browser, trumping its IE 5 for Windows contemporary with standards compliance and feature set.

I can't see MS dropping Office on X any time soon, however. It's one thing to drop a product with competition that's given away for "free". It's another entirely to back out of your position of king of the desktop office suite. Nobody's going to trade in their free IE 7 on Windows for Konquorer, but they very well might grab OpenOffice instead of dropping hundreds on MS Office if Apple throws some weight behind it.