The new buzzword (well, not THAT new but…) on the Net is Ajax. It\’s like a web-developer\’s dream: “richer” client but with the standard technologies. No plugin to install, just POS (Plain Old Stuff) like: standards-based XHTML, CSS; XML, DOM and some XMLHttpRequest with some Javascript. That\’s promising to deliver almost the same kind of interactivity as Macromedia Flex, for example, but with the nice POS approach, rather than ad-hoc plugin from a single vendor. Way better!\r
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Anyway, what is the list of the browsers supported? Well, Ajax is not a technology, itself - it\’s a collection of them (see up) used in a smart way, so it depends a lot on - how you use them, how smart you use them. And yet, considering that Google Maps and Google Suggest are two shining example of the “Ajax-way”, we can guess the answer, and here is how:\r
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MS IE on Mac is the worst browser ever :) The reason why people use IE on Windows is: it supports more “features” (all of them - non-standard, the M$ way, of course) than other browsers so pages created in Windows IE deliver “richer” experience. This is not quite true for Mac version of IE. It does not have the same featureset on Mac that it has on Windows. Actually it is quite poor and, IMHO, plain sucks. So, if we open maps.google.com in Mac IE, we will get a Google response, saying this browser is not yet supported, with the list of the browsers (Google has always been polite enough!) that it does.\r
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And here is the list:\r
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*\tIE 5.5+ (Windows)\r
*\tFirefox 0.8+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)\r
*\tSafari 1.2.4+ (Mac)\r
*\tNetscape 7.1+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)\r
*\tMozilla 1.4+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)\r
*\tOpera 7+ (Windows, Mac, Linux)\r
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This, IMHO, is a good approximation of the current compliance state of so-called Ajax.\r
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Not bad, by the way, eh?