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IE For Mac OS X == MS Apps For UNIX?
A nameless mouse slipped this one under the door a bit ago: "Just a quick question ... If Mac OS X is based on Unix, and Microsoft creates applications eg IE for Mac OS X, how much work is involved in getting those applications working in *nix??" Y'know, I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I bet you Microsoft has. What do you think?
They have HP-UX and Solaris binaries for IE. Yuck.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Oh well. I'm still waiting for the Linux Media Player which will be released "in a few weeks"!!! I can HARDLY wait!
(don't bother if you don't get the joke.)
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Not so. MS Office for KDE is quite a bit more likely, especially if there's an MS breakup but even if there isn't. MS is NOT utterly opposed to writing software for other platforms. They're not entirely stupid. If there becomes a significant market for it, it'll eventually happen...
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"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
They didn't port Win32 - far be it from Microsoft to do something truly challenging and innovative. Rather; they bought a competing API called MainWin IIRC to do the trick.
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
As another poster said, it's not quite that simple. IE5 for MacOS X is Carbon-based, which basically means that it is based on a rewritten set of traditional MacOS APIs (basically MacOS stripped of the stupid code that has held it back).
It technically runs on a Unix, but so do some Windows apps in Wine. About the same kind of thing, but it's an officially blessed API. You won't be seeing Apple release their APIs any time soon (I wouldn't blame them), and stuff would still need to be recompiled to X86 for most Unix/Linux people to make use of it.
Of course, it doesn't use stuff like X anyhow, so Microsoft would be in for quite a rewrite...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I doubt that Microsoft will write X apps for Mac OS X.
:-)
They'll use Apple's GUI system.
And, the likelihood of Apple making their GUI available, is the same as the likelihood of MS Office for KDE.
Under MacOS X, Carbon and Cocoa run with full BSD creamy goodness and with juicy Aqua and the rest of the good services OS X brings... for the "normal" MacOS apps written in less enlightened times, they'll have the Classic Environment. It's not quite as glitzy (as of DP3, it still looked like MacOS 9), but it will allow older programs to run completely unmodified.
I think that's what you're thinking of. Carbon is the updated set of APIs. Applications will still have to be recompiled to use Carbon; it's not automatic.
Cocoa is what Apple will be pushing after everyone's made the transition, but both Cocoa and Carbon will be "native" and "true" OS X.
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The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
Well, you're mostly right. Carbon is the Mac Toolbox with all the stupid code gone (like munge, I hope). I do believe that Apple will be phasing Carbon out, but not after a looong time.
Carbon is there so Developers don't have to do a complete rewrite to get well-performing apps in OS X. I don't see them getting rid of it for years, simply because it's *that* much easier to make real OS X apps.
As for the CarbonLib for OS 9 and 8.5, that's just so developers who don't have a developer preview can still build Carbon apps... and it also allows Carbon apps that would normally only be able to be run on OS X to be run on OS 9. It's not stripped down at all (any more than is due to the limitations of OS 9 anyway, but on OS X, it rockets on like it should), just an abstraction layer.
As for Microsoft, I don't see them doing any pure Unix stuff anytime soon (aside from what they have done). OS X isn't exactly the stepping stone its BSD layer makes it out to be.
... just in case anyone cared.
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The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
Yes, completely.
The story circling on sites like Macintouch is that, despite press releases suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.
I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.
Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris and HP/UX, in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.
Well this was just posted in the AskSlashdot area, so you'll get nice responses.
:-)
I've tried IE in Solaris. It was ugly at first but survivable later, enough so I don't mind using it too much when I rember I have it
Apple is supporting the carbon api for maintaining compatibility with "classic" apps. The cocoa api is supposed to be for Mac OS X natively.
The fact that the Mac remains a "mainstream alternative" to windows lies in it's developer support. Once those companies start to make the transition to designing apps for the FreeBSD environment, I don't see a very difficult time writing an appropriate GUI API (perhaps working with Eazel) to be able to easily port over applications to other *nix platforms.
- passion
But, Carbon is essentially a stepping stone to Cocoa, which is the real POSIX stuff, IIRC, and likely Apple intends to slowly supplant Carbon - it was introduced with OS 9, downloadable for OS 8.5 +. This presumably means that it doesn't use the full power of Mach, BSD, etc.
So, my (highly uninformed) guess is this will mean IE 6 for UNIX, since that will likely line up with Mac OS XI or 11 or whatever they decide to call it, which will be the one where they're really phasing out Carbon.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Yup, bsd, despite all the POSIX support that Wilfredo Sanchez has been building in.
IE5/MacOSX will be/is a Carbon app. As others have mentioned, this is a technology added by Apple so that people with existing MacOS projects can protect their investment by porting to the environment with "less than ten percent" change required to the codebase.
There are other, more exciting rumours about a version of Office being built on the (new, exciting, NEXTSTEP-derived) Cocoa APIs. This is only a wild rumour, which I personally do not believe, but either way, as with the Carbonised IE5, it would be only an infinitesimally small step on the way towards having it up and running on any sort of *nix other than MacOSX.
I prefer NS6 over Communicator 4.7, and either one over IE5. This, however, isn't just flat out hating MS. First off, I haven't used Windows in months, second, NS6 is much faster, and third, IE is just too vulnerable (I have a Pentium w/ the f0 0f bug, which is prob. under Linux, but windows, which doesn't have the workaround, with IE, which allows the bug to be put into effect with a simple ActiveX control, is not a good combination. As for the appearance, it doesn't look all that bad to me, but then again, I need a new monitor (a wire broke, so now everything is blue). In regards to Unix ports of MS apps, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon, one of the reasons being that MS won't have anything to do with aything htat is open source, unless it's under an NDA.
Think --> Think Different --> Think OSS
Just wondering if anyone has used the HPUX or Solaris versions of IE5? If so, how do they compare to the Mac and Win versions? I was a die-hard Netscape user until AOL turned it to crap. (here come the flames) :-)