Safari not supported, told by my IT guy to use IE

Question

I bought my MacBook Pro basically for work, my family owns a few new car dealerships, ad I am to manage their web pages, and our new program is all web based, and my IT guy and host said their system will only work on IE, i've used a few of their tools on Safari, but the one I really need to use will not work.
I cant even do it at home because thats all I have are Macs, and the PC here at the dealership are always in use. Is there anything I can do for Safari to work? What makes IE so much different than Safari? And finally, I hate to even ask this, but is there an IE for OS X?

Answer 1

Hi
If the site in question uses Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX coding, then you won't be able to access the site on the Mac side. As designed by MS, this code (rather outdated at that) is Windows only.
With that said, have you tried the site using another browser such as Firefox or Camino?
If still no go, then your other option would be to install Windows on your machine, either using Apple's Boot Camp, which is included on your Leopard Installer DVD (you'll need a Windows Vista or XP installation disk), or one of the emulation software packages such as Parallels or VMWare. Have a look at this Macworld article, as well as this article from EveryMac.com.
The basic distinction between Boot Camp and the others is how you access Windows. In the former case you would need to reboot your machine to go from one system to the other. In the latter, you would not need to reboot, however, performance would not be as fast as Boot Camp.
Then, you would be able to use any of the Windows based browsers such as IE, Firefox, or even Apple's Safari (windows version).
Note: using Windows on a Mac makes your machine susceptible to the same viruses, spyware, etc. affecting any Windows system. In that regard, either limit how you use the machine in the Windows world, or install necessary spyware and virus detection programs to minimize these problems.