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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.
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.
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.