It’s official. Microsoft Internet Explorer is no longer bundled with OSX. If you do a Clean Install, or Archive & Install of 10.4 Tiger than Internet Explorer will not be installed. It’s about damn time! If you didn’t already know, Microsoft stopped developing IE for the Mac 5 years ago. As a result, the browser has become more and more incompatible over the years with emerging web standards. It really should have gone away a long time ago.
If for some STRANGE reason you are one of the few who actually prefer using IE on the Mac, and you want to upgrade to Tiger, than you should choose the “Upgrade” option from the Tiger install CD. If you already have IE installed, the tiger installation won’t remove it using this option.
The good news is that Verdana and Georgia fonts are still included with the Tiger install. They were only included in previous versions of OSX because they came with IE… They are Microsoft fonts. It looks like Apple licensed them for distribution. It’s a good thing too, because most web sites (including this one) use Verdana.
As a side note to this, Stuffit Expander is also not included in the install of Tiger. Apple’s built in tools will uncompress the other types of archives, .zip, .tar, .gz, etc… but if you want to uncompress .sit (or .sitx) you’ll have to download stuffit expander yourself. I think this was sort of an odd choice by Apple. I’m not sure why they decided to omit Stuffit.