Microsoft is killing off Internet Explorer for the Mac. The company already pronounced the Windows version of IE dead not but a short while ago.

In other Microsoft-is-killing-something-off news, the company has bought a Linux-based anti-virus company and has killed their product too.

Discontinuing the two products also will play into competition and influence, simply because Microsoft has a very large presence within the world of computers. The impact will not be as great as with Internet Explorer for Windows being shelved, however.

The death of IE for Windows is a huge blow to web standards. We’re going to be stuck with a broken browser for around seven more years (if Longhorn makes its estimated debut in 2005), as it takes a few years before a browser can be considered “phased out”. Think of Netscape Navigator 4.x. The old Navigator browser is just now going away — and only after tons of effort.

At least Mac OS X has Safari and does not have to rely on Internet Explorer any more. Thankfully, the lack of IE on Linux has furthered Mozilla’s development over the years. As Mozilla is available for all platforms, we can hope that adoption might be increased over time. With more people raving about it, hopefully more and more will install it on their computers. We can hope. Still, even if 75% percent of the web browsing population suddenly switched to Mozilla overnight (a very optimistic number), there still would be around one-in-four using Internet Explorer. Such a dwindled number would still be a large enough percentage to care how sites look in Microsoft’s non-compliant browser. That’s quite a bit of market influence to be tied up in one company, especially one determined to be a monopoly by the courts of the land.