yet to the casual observer they were almost indistinguishable.'ĭespite Jobs ignoring the agreed points, and despite later regrets about cutting the Media Toolbar, Grewel says that he and the team were proud of the app.

'From the horizontal pin-stripped background of the toolbars, to the 24-bit semi translucent buttons and Gaussian-blurred menu backgrounds, none of it was part of Apple's Aqua UI elements in the Carbon toolbox. 'But other than the scroll bars and window controls, the rest was generated by the UI code in the app and looked identical in the Mac OS 9 version,' says Grewal. Instead, Jobs 'implied' that the overall look of the browser was a result of it using Apple's standards. Talking points were agreed, but much to our dismay Jobs didn't mention a single one,' says Grewal. We cut the feature and deeply regretted it.'įor that Januannouncement, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac would be included in Steve Jobs's keynote instead of getting a regular demo from a Microsoft executive. It was released by Apple under the name iTunes. 'Some time after the launch of MacIE 5, Apple acquired SoundJam and its development team. 'Jobs insisted we cut this feature claiming it undermined QuickTime,' continues Grewal. Media Toolbar was significant because it leveraged SoundJamp MP, the same software that Apple was in the process of acquiring to create iTunes. This feature provided support for playing back MP3's on websites.' ' he directed his ire at another new feature in MacIE 5 called Media Toolbar. 'Since no one outside Apple was supposed to know about Aqua at the time, couldn't say anything to us about the resemblance,' he says. While Vosburgh says that Jobs was enthusiastic about Microsoft's design, Grewal tells a slightly different story about what may have been a later demonstration. Our stuff was in any case inspired by Apple's hardware designs, so I can't feel too bad about it.'

'So did Steve see our Summer 1999 New Look demo and tell his team to create Aqua?' says Vosburgh. Vosburgh says the idea was that if you had a Bondi blue iMac, then IE 5 would use that same color. In an accompanying blog on the same topic, Grewal quotes a colleague, Maf Vosburgh, saying that their 'new look' started with an idea to match hardware with software. to Apple in the Summer of 1999, Jobs was not pleased.' 'However it was developed in complete secrecy within Microsoft. 'This 'new look' had an uncanny resemblance to Apple's later Aqua interface for Mac OS X,' continues Grewal. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac featured a design highly reminiscent of the early OS X desktop, though Grewal says this was coincidence - at least on Microsoft's part.

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