3 ms·
1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of do
by kyllo 14y ago
1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of doing so.
The difficulty of porting the application is not the issue at all. There was a Mac OS X version of Internet Explorer, and it was even the default browser in OS X. Microsoft deprecated it in 2003 shortly after Apple released Safari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac
The potential gains, of course, would be browser market share.
- eurleif 14y agoThe Mac version of IE was basically a completely different browser. It had its own rendering engine, called Tasman, which was developed separately from Windows IE's rendering engine, Trident.
- kyllo 14y agoFrom the Wikipedia article I linked to in my comment: Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows. Later versions diverged, particularly with the release of version 5 which included the Tasman layout engine. Again, the difficulty of porting the browser code over to OS X is not the issue. If Microsoft still wanted to have a cross-platform browser, they would have one. The reason they don't is a business decision, not a technical obstacle.
- adamnemecek 14y agoNo one said that it was technically impossible to port it. But it's not exactly easy either and it's not a problem worth solving since it's a wasted endeavor. And yeah I'm sure RMS can't wait to run IE on his machine.