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IE For Mac OS X == MS Apps For UNIX?

Posted by Cliff on from the things-that-make-you-go-'hmmmm' dept.

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?

10 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. The Solaris/HP-UX ports... by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 2
    ...they feel so fucking slow -- even on the latest Ultra hardware -- that I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Microsoft ported a _great_ deal of Windows itself in order to get them to work. Take a look at the shit it installs sometime - libtcpip.so? Um, gee, isn't the standard TCP stack that comes with Solaris good enough? As if that's not scary enough, the color picker is straight out of Windows 3.1 (and it's slooooow.)

    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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    1. Re:The Solaris/HP-UX ports... by robertchin · · Score: 2

      I have an Ultra 10, 440MHz. Although it's a little bit slow loading, it's a heck of a lot faster than netscape loading. The page renderer is also a lot better than netscape 4.x's (however mozilla's page renderer is vastly superior). Outlook express is also a lot more functional than Netscape messenger, which doesn't even support multiple pop accounts under UNIX.

  2. Re:GUI by osu-neko · · Score: 2
    And, the likelihood of Apple making their GUI available, is the same as the likelihood of MS Office for KDE.

    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."
  3. Re:OS X is not Unix by drix · · Score: 3

    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.
  4. Not quite... by Darchmare · · Score: 2

    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
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  5. OS X is not Unix by Detritus · · Score: 3

    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.

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  6. GUI by JamesKPolk · · Score: 2

    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. :-)

  7. Re:Carbon... by The+Happy+Blues+Man · · Score: 3

    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.
  8. Of course MS has thought of it... by mcmay · · Score: 3
    It's probably a part of the reason why work on Mac IE is finished, after they put out the version for Mac OS X.

    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.

  9. Re:Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? by Duxup · · Score: 2

    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 :-)