6 ms·

I'd love to see them harness the new-found underdog energy they have and develop a proper Mac/Linux port of IE that they can maintain alongside the desktop vers

I'd love to see them harness the new-found underdog energy they have and develop a proper Mac/Linux port of IE that they can maintain alongside the desktop version. I honestly do my best to test across all the modern browsers when I develop, but having to spin up a random VM running whatever version of windows they require for whatever the edge version of IE is starts to get old after a while. If the Chrome and Firefox teams can maintain multiple architectures and release them in lock-step, it's certainly possible for Microsoft to start on the road to this process, even if it takes them a couple of years. And would open-sourcing the browser really kill them?

Scuds 12y ago
> And would open-sourcing the browser really kill them? No idea why not, but it's a different group than MS's other Open Sourcing efforts; The Dev tools people are happy to show their ASP.net mvc work[1], among other things[2], but IE falls under their Windows group, so it's a different set of people making the decisions. [1] http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest [2] https://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest https://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest (hell yeah)
venomsnake 12y ago
If they have functioning brain they should - decouple the browser from the OS and then sue apple for anti competitiveness if the browser engine is not allowed on the ios store (MS is one of the few companies that could reasonably well pull this off)
- freehunter 12y ago
  I might be wrong, but as far as I am aware the last time Apple and Microsoft faced each other in court was when Apple sued Microsoft in 1988. When the dust settled, IE was the default Mac browser and Microsoft owned $150m of Apple stock. I wouldn't bet on Microsoft and Apple ever suing each other again.
tkmcc 12y ago
Internet Explorer is a relatively simple executable that relies on other Windows DLLs to do pretty much everything that needs to be done. Check out the architecture here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312.aspx Ideally just the Trident rendering engine (in MSHTML.dll) could be ported to other platforms for web developer use, but I don't know how reliant on other Windows features it is. I also don't think it's much of a priority (or at all feasible) for the IE team to re-architect their entire product, but I would love for them to prove me wrong.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
mikelat 12y ago
Microsoft still lives and breathes with their old proprietary software licensing model. There would have to be some sort of major gain for them to port the browser outside of their ecosystem. I can see them doing it with IE mobile though as they aren't the most popular player in the mobile market and they need to get people hooked.
jbergens 12y ago
It would also be nice if Apple could develop a Safari for Windows. Right now we have javascript bugs we cannot debug without buying a Mac.

Scuds 12y ago

> And would open-sourcing the browser really kill them? No idea why not, but it's a different group than MS's other Open Sourcing efforts; The Dev tools people are happy to show their ASP.net mvc work[1], among other things[2], but IE falls under their Windows group, so it's a different set of people making the decisions. [1] http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest [2] https://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest https://roslyn.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest (hell yeah)

venomsnake 12y ago

If they have functioning brain they should - decouple the browser from the OS and then sue apple for anti competitiveness if the browser engine is not allowed on the ios store (MS is one of the few companies that could reasonably well pull this off)

freehunter 12y ago
I might be wrong, but as far as I am aware the last time Apple and Microsoft faced each other in court was when Apple sued Microsoft in 1988. When the dust settled, IE was the default Mac browser and Microsoft owned $150m of Apple stock. I wouldn't bet on Microsoft and Apple ever suing each other again.

tkmcc 12y ago

Internet Explorer is a relatively simple executable that relies on other Windows DLLs to do pretty much everything that needs to be done. Check out the architecture here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312.aspx Ideally just the Trident rendering engine (in MSHTML.dll) could be ported to other platforms for web developer use, but I don't know how reliant on other Windows features it is. I also don't think it's much of a priority (or at all feasible) for the IE team to re-architect their entire product, but I would love for them to prove me wrong.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mikelat 12y ago

Microsoft still lives and breathes with their old proprietary software licensing model. There would have to be some sort of major gain for them to port the browser outside of their ecosystem. I can see them doing it with IE mobile though as they aren't the most popular player in the mobile market and they need to get people hooked.

jbergens 12y ago

It would also be nice if Apple could develop a Safari for Windows. Right now we have javascript bugs we cannot debug without buying a Mac.