Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I'm no techical wizard, but the article really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it? As far as I know, the rendering engine is totally different from Mac to Windows. It isn't as though they're using the MSHTML dll. Hell, doesn't Safari use WebCore for display and WebKit for their plugin architecture? (again, I'm not really up on this, so feel free to correct)
IE5 for OS9 was a fairly nice piece of software, but the OSX version was always ghastly. If the rendering engine is passé too, then ... why release the code? I'd suggest the effort is better spent getting Microsoft to release a standards-compliant "browser" with be done with this particular era in the history of the internet.
I know some people will say that they need IE for browsing Active X enabled websites. This is a valid argument.
However, I think, the bigger question is why do these website owners completely disregard the security architecture and Open Standards by using technology that is unsafe and proprietary.
The most common answer to this question is: It is easier to develope websites that are only supported in IE i.e. Active X enabled etc. And I am quilty of that as well.
So my proposal is: Instead of wasting time on Developing a Open Source IE, we should spend time to developing tools that make building sites easier using Open Standard technology.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Microsoft does seem to be making an effort to change their image.
And that's about all; Microsoft is all about marketing. They can change their image by putting millions of dollars into ad campaigns, without having to change the way they run their monopoly. It is very expensive from a marketing perspective to change the opinion of anyone that has caught on to what they are really doing behind the scenes with all their OEM contracts and extending of protocols -- so they are only interested in beguiling ignorant people and management-types.
Statements like this that put an arguably misplaced faith in giant multinational monopolies are nothing short of propaganda and free marketing for Microsoft.
Microsoft could open-source some of the code - what they wrote themselves - but there's still code in there from Mosaic, which MS licensed from Spyglass. Not sure if Spyglass owns the rights or has just licensed them, but the ownership seems a little murky to me. Does UIUC own it? NCSA? The citizens of the USA, who paid for much of its development?
I dunno, but I'm betting that MS couldn't easily release IE as OSS even if they were so inclined.
Mudge
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they're not.
I'm not that interested in the browser but some of the middleware code to emulate windows calls on the Mac might be interesting to play with...
There are none. IE for the Mac was built from scratch not using a single line of IE Windows code by a different team of developers who most likley didn't have any formal communication with the IE for windows team.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I've never understood why people would want to use any MS product on a Mac. Whether it be IE, Office, or whatever - surely one of the points of using a Mac is that it's an alternative to using MS products. Would you consider running IE on Linux? Probably not, theres no point.
http://www.mongoosesystems.co.uk
Ok, here's the thing: IE-only sites are IE-only for one of two reasons: they've either got stuff on them that only works under Windows Internet Explorer, or they deliberately look for IE in the version string.
Of the former, relatively few happen to work on IE for Mac. This is because IE for Mac is unrelated to IE for Windows. It's a different code base, written by (apparently) different people, and doesn't work in the same way. (It's possible IE for Mac supports VBScript, that's about the only extra-level-of-compatability I can think of it would have that would help here. Now, how hard could it be to add VBScript compatability to Firefox?)
Of the latter, many also look for information reporting the browser as working on Windows. And, yes, as you say, it's a lot simpler to fake and/or emulate IE's responses in Firefox than to bring Mac IE up to date.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Admittedly, I can see why someone would want IE on the Mac; there tend to be way more "legacy" pre-OSX Macs than Windows PCs out there that can't run the latest and greatest. Lots of Mac installations tend to be task-based (running a piece of scientific equipment, desktop-publishing the same publication month after month, etc.) or they're simply in non-profit organizations that can't afford to replace them every three years.
However, without that exception I can't see why anyone would want IE on OS X. Maybe for compatibility with a web application that only works with IE?? I installed IE on my Mac when I got it a year ago, and I don't think I've ever opened it. Firefox is capable of handing most sites now. Even "IE Only" sites at least render OK.
Seriously. IE for Windows has hella security holes as it is. Releasing the source code for Mac IE, which is also widely used, would only open up more security holes than already exist in public knowledge.
Besides, it would take months for any initiative to start and release a "patch" to fix said new holes.
That's easy enough for you to say, but some of us are required to use IE-only sites to do our jobs. I can't even fill out my timesheet without loading an IE-only site and our help desk system (Remedy) requires IE on Windows the way they have it setup. Yes, my company has drank the MS Kool-Aid and is 100% devoted to Microsoft only solutions, but there are still many of us out here using Macs and Linux that would love a compatible browser solution.
They haven't updated it in forever, so IE mac is really so old as to be useless. If you use a Mac, you're probably using Firefox, Opera, or Safari, and much happier anyway.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There's a deal between Apple and Microsoft. Part of the deal is that Internet Explorer for Mac should cease development. I presume the flip side of that deal is that Apple should stop developing/bundling Appleworks and promote Office:mac.
There's an upside to this deal for both companies, Microsoft gets to maintain a cross-platform Office Document format and product without worrying about a competing product in a niche market (though the cross platform part seems to fall flat all the time), and Apple gets to make people design web pages to work better on their system which is also an API for developers on OS X.
The side effect is axing two dated carbon apps.
To unkill/resurect the product would be to break the deal, whatever the other terms of the deal may be, they're good enough to microsoft that they probably wouldn't want to do that.
-Daniel
It's sad that it's come to this. IE 5.0 for Mac OS 9 was actually a pretty innovative browser, one of the first major browsers with good standards support. The Tasman rendering engine was somewhat ahead of it's time. Things started to go downhill when with the port to OS X, which by all accounts was quick and dirty. While it helped legitimize OS X (without it there would have been no useable OS X browser) it was slow, buggy and seemed to have been forgotten by MS. Safari was of course it's death nell. From MS's point of view, why should they use resources to develop a free Mac browser when the Mac had a native one? Happily none of this mattered. We now have several really strong standards compliant browsers on the Mac. I for one, never look back.
so rather than linked should I say intertwined? My point was that IE hooks into the windows kernal at some fairly deep levels, as well as the kernal hooking into many of IE's routines. M$ is big on hiding their propriatary stuff and those hooks and calls, while commented out for the mac version and such would still be there, for the OSS community to ponder. I doubt M$ would want even that level of exposure.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I for one would like to see evidence of the kernel using IE's routines, even such slight evidence as someone who is in a position to know saying so. The kernel runs in kernel space and IE runs in user space, so it would be a kind of major PITA. Also, it's not at all necessary, since IE primarily handles things like HTTP and rendering HTML to the display, neither of which is required behavior for the kernel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, ActiveX does run just fine on the Mac, and has for a long time. I used it in 1996 to develop a plug-in system for a visual programming language called Bounce, and Mac Common Lisp). Metrowerks actually modified their C++ compiler to support it (adding a _comobject magic class that you can inherit from to get the vtable pointers formatted in the right place so multiple inheritance and QueryInterface worked together properly). Microsoft used it to port IE to the Mac, and paid Metrowerks to make the modifications to support it.
ActiveX/COM is actually quite a cool and useful technology, which is why Firefox uses XPCOM on all platforms, a clone of ActiveX/COM. Mozilla's XPCOM isn't the only clone of COM: before Mozilla developed XPCOM, Macromedia developed their own ActiveX clone called MOA on all platforms. mTropolis mFactory also had its own COM clone called MOM. There are actually lots of COM clones, many of which are incompatible with the real thing and require their own special tool chains to develop plug-ins (which is ironic since the goal of COM was cross language binary compatibility).
And yes, MacIE is a horrible wretched piece of crap, and open sourcing it would be a pointless waste of time. The JavaScript interpreter is uselessly sub-standard, and the DHTML implementation is missing many important features.
Microsoft hired a bunch of excellent Mac programmers to develop it, and they wrote much of their own code base from scratch (using the Metrowerks Powerplant gui toolkit, totally different than the new Aqua [old NeXT Step] libraries), but Microsoft pulled the rug out from under them before they could fix any of the bugs, and wouldn't let them support it, instead diverting them to other projects like WebTV. So it's languished for many years, and even if it were open sourced, it would be an enormous amount of work to bring it up to being compatible with modern web browsers.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com