[knuckleheadsmif]

As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser.

You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting.

I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.

By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.