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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?"
Surely the reason why microsoft would never do that is the fact that not in a million years would that product stay on Mac. I would give it two weeks before it was given enhancements, ported to windows, and released as a compatible alternative to IE 7, eating away at ever more market share.
The real question is why? The Mac already has both a more modern Apple-produced browser (Safari) that MS themselves recommend, along with a true open-source alternative (Firefox), not to mention all the usual suspects if you're not a fan of either of those (Opera, etc.).
While it may be a nice pseudo-political irony to have IE Mac go open-source, it is an old, outdated browser that was rendered unnecessary long ago in every sense of the word.
Not gonna happen. Not in my lifetime anyway.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Let it die, let it die already!
Yes, Mac IE was fairly advanced for its time, but the quicker it disappears from the face of the planet, the better! All the techniques on which modern web design rely that work reliably in all the major browsers have major issues in Mac IE. Floats and clear in particular - these just require such awful hackery when Mac IE specifically needs to be supported... it's worse than IE 5 and Netscape 4 combined! (Okay, so that might be a slight hyperbole.) ;P
Yes, it's very understandable that the behaviours of these properties weren't well defined back then, and compared to the Win IE of its time, Tantek and team did a superb job with this browser... but that was years ago. It's dead now, and needs to be forgotten as quickly as possible!
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.
Apparently, whoever modded you flamebait never had to use IE for the mac. It is a horrid wretched peice of software that should die like the rotting beast of Golgamathea that it is.
It is like a program with all the problems and stability issues of IE 5 (sans Active X because there is not Active X for the mac) with none of its benefits that you would get on a PC version. Hell... Most of the pages rendered nothing like their windows counterpart. The program was made from scratch using a totally different team not related to the IE team for the PC.
As soon as a better alternative came out (Safari) I dumped IE.
May it burn in hell and let us not metion it ever again.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Other Suggestions:
China should withdraw from Tibet and allow the Tibetans to construct a Disneyland in Lhasa, since Tibet is already becoming little more than a tourist trap.
Bush should withdraw from Iraq and let the war be carried out by our powerful allies from Togo and Lithuania.
The Road Runner should let the Coyote have him for dinner.
They should develop a snow ball in hell that would survive for an extended period of time.
Etc.
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!