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Give Mac Explorer to the People?
An anonymous reader writes "In an article on the BBC News site, Bill Thompson suggests that Microsoft release the source for IE:Mac to the world so that others can continue to develop the product. While this may be a pleasant fiction, Microsoft does seem to be making an effort to change their image. Could we see more OSS interaction from the software giant in the near future?"
And how would open sourcing Mac IE help this? The ActiveX-based sites in question do not work with Mac IE. Although it does contain a half-baked version of the ActiveX API, no one ever used it. Why not? No ActiveX controls that these ActiveX sites depend on are available for the Mac.
So while you may argue the need to access ActiveX sites as justification for using IE on Windows, that doesn't hold true for Mac IE.
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He is referring to the closed source libraries. OSX is not completely free.
Microsoft still makes MSN Explorer for the Mac and that is wher I think Microsfot wants its existing IE users to migrate off to. By opening the code for IE up they creating competition for MSN Explorer as well as risking people improving IE for Mac and then porting it over to run on Windows.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
MS has NOT acquired Opera, as the parent states.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Look at the Help -> About for IE. There's a load of licenced tech in there - what do these licences say about releasing the code?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
This can't and will never happen. Internet Explorer, until 5.5 was mostly written in C++ with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class Library). With MFC you could, in theory, write your code on one platform and run it on almost any platform. If they release the Mac version to the public Microsoft would release at least half, if not more, of its IE source (even from current development branches.)
A lot of that technology is either licensed from other sources, regional and is under local governmental control, or is closed source because it is under court order because of past law suits. In other words much of Internet Explorer isn't a Microsoft product; it would a nightmare for Microsoft to make it such.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
You left out:
5. Intellectual property concerns. In its current state the code may contain code which is subject to patents owned by Microsoft or in turn licensed from another company. The effort to purge the code of such dependencies for public release might not be worth their effort.
I know a lot of people have already stated this here, but it needs to be reiterated ad infitum, since so many of you can't seem to get it into your heads. The only thing that IE for Mac has in common with IE for Windows is the name! That's it. It's not a common codebase. It's not the same developers. They both just happened to be made by the same company and given the same name. Got it?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Office is what keeps Macs alive in the corporate environment. The fact that I can take my Excel 2003 spreadsheet home and use it on my Mac is a major convenience. It's been speculated more than once that MS continues to develop Mac Office so that the platform doesn't go away because of interoperability issues. If the file formats weren't proprietary, this would be a non-issue, but such is the world we live in.
The fact that Entourage supports Exchange environments is another big telling factor. The art and scientific users in your company can use their Macs to check their Exchange mail just as if they were using Outlook.
...Or Camino
I agree. IE for mac is buggy, ugly, renders badly, has terrible support for non ascii characters (at least 90% of icelandic webpages that I viewed with it had little diamonds with a question mark inside them, instead of all the icelandic characters). My dayjob is running iceland's most popular website (mbl.is) and trying to keep support for IE:MAC was just a complete nightmare, whilst we could easily maintain correct rendering for Netscape 5+, IE5+ (for windows), Opera 7+, Mozilla 1.4+ or Firefox 0.8+. IE:MAC is terrible violation against the internet, and the notion of extending it's life and furthering the pain and misery it brings down on users is just preposterous. If Microsoft by their own accord want to park this weapon of bad rendering and vileness, please please please lets not give them a game plan to continue! Someone should smack the proposer of this idea on the top of his head for being a big doofus. People should rather focus on making the already better, already open-source browsers for Mac OS better!
They didn't, and it doesn't. IE for Mac was a completely different team, and it does not render the same as IE for Windows. It does not support ActiveX, either. It is a different browser in all but name. Unlike some other unfortunate ports to Mac, MS did not implement a hacked up Windows API compatibility layer for IE.
Go look at the project history, developer statements, or thousands of different web design sites that talk about this. The two browsers render quite differently, in that IE for Mac tended to be much more standards compliant, and did not implement the IE for Windows specific behaviors.
IE for Mac is a completely different beast. It uses a completely different codebase--different features, different rendering engine, basically the only similarity is the name.
Several years ago Mac IE 5 was one of the best browsers on any platform. The tazman layout engine was great, and the application had some well executed features. IMHO, Mac IE still has the best download manager out there... even if the OS X version is buggy.
Unfortunately, aside for some security updates, Microsoft more or less stopped development after their half ass OS X port. IE 5 was a GREAT web dev tool when it was good. It significantly limited (not eliminated) my need to run over to a networked PC to check new projects.
It's disappointing to see that MS let this thing rot and die.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I'm sure firefox would run fine on such an eMac. It runs very well on my 1.25 GHz 1GB RAM iMac and runs fine on my 400 MHz 340MB RAM iBook. (This is Safari 2 on Tiger for both). Safari runs even faster. There is also a G4 optimized Firefox (and a G5 one). Internet Explorer is much slower than Safari or Firefox on both of these computers, but it isn't unbearable. I see no reason for I.E. Mac to be open sourced; the interface is horrid and I'm sure most Mac developers would rather use webkit or gecko than whatever the foundation of I.E. is.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.