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?"

Comments

Potential copyright issues here

[Mister Mudge]

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.

Re:Well some of the middleware code might be usefu

[vertinox]

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.

Re:Why?

[squiggleslash]

Every time this subject comes up, people make statements about "IE only" sites that Mac IE can access, and Firefox can't.

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.