Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
fremen writes "Spencer F. Katt has a few lines in his weekly column about Microsoft vs. Linux, including a comment about Microsoft forming a team to write a version of Internet Explorer for Linux. He indicates that Redmond is afraid, very afraid. "
Re:IE for Linux would be welcome...
by
Jerf
·
· Score: 5
Silly to think that someone could gain influence over the Internet by implementing special HTML tags?
Head over to the Web Standards project, and note the troubles special HTML tags are even now causing.
Ponder how many browsers are available for the general public. And why aren't they around? Because they can't handle the "real web", which is populated with lots of special tags? (recall that many of the "special" tags have been standardized after the fact, like CENTER)
Consider whether the browser wars were NOT overhyped, but are, in fact, mostly over now. And Microsoft and Netscape both have tremendous influence on the Internet, with, say, Mosiac nothing but a faint memory.
It's not silly to think that... it's just that it already happened, and you no longer notice, because it's in the background.
News?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4
Does anyone actually _believe_ these announcements anymore? How many times have you heard "Microsoft is going to port product [x] to platform [y]." ? Now think about how many times it's actually happened.
Yawn. I suppose we need to keep an eye on Redmond. But --dang!-- those vaporware announcements are getting boring.
Reading a few of the other comments in this thread I just had a thought. Don't MS use IE as their active Desktop, and several people have suggested that IE would require a port of the Win32 interface.
Well could a Linux version of IE be a MS built window manager?
It is afterall the desktop users that MS is really concerned about... suppose you didn't need that/nasty/ X-Server/window manager combination but instead you could run a linux OS with IE5 sat directly on top (using something like an SVGA library) giving you your desktop.
For people who understand X its wonderful and versatile as hell... but its also very complex and has plenty of security issues associated with it. Is that really what a simple end user wants?
Just imagine for a moment a box which ran the Linux kernal and a most of a normal distro and thus was remote adminable - but provided an end user with a windows interface and the same apps as they currently use.
I'd guess that each user would require their own registry or something - nasty as this might sound to some I can see the appeal.
The end user gets a familure box and doesn't need to learn anything new and the admins get remote access and proper file permissions.
The above, my fellow Slashdotters, is a troll. Please take a few minutes to study the warning signs of a troll, to see the dangers of trolls, and to learn the proper way of dealing with a troll.
I am not the most expert of trollologists; I am sure that Slashdot has much better trollologists. I just got here first. Feel free to reply to this to add points I missed, or argue points you think I am wrong about.
How to Recognize a Troll
A troll is a form of luser that makes incindiary remarks in order to get others to lose their cool, thus making worse incindiary remarks and making complete fools out of themselves.
Many trolls are made by anonymous cowards; people who do not want to be recognized. But not every AC is a troll, and not every troller is an AC. Some will troll from their named accounts; those are the brave trolls. What we have here is a specimin of the more cowardly troll.
But more important than the username is the post. The "best" kind of troll post will make a remark specifically engineered to push the hot buttons of the group being trolled (here, Slashdot itself). Additionally, the perfect troll fails to give any useful or arguable information.
Two perfect trolling sentences here are, "The current Linux file system sucks" and "With MS beginning to support the Linux community, Linux will be an improved product.". both hit hit a Slashdot hot button (there is a lot of "Microsoft-is-evil/Linux-is-good" running around here). Both are too vague to provide any useful information.
The Dangers of a Troll
The danger here is that, without any real information to argue, the tendency is to degenerate into a flame war. "The current Linux file system sucks" is not even an arguable fact; it is a broadbased opinion, posted to a group of people who believe the opposite.
A properly placed troll can tempt otherwise rational people into portraying themselves as complete idiots. Especially with Microsoft, this is exceedingly dangerous.
Microsoft would love to portray the Linux community (including Slashdot) as knee-jerk jack-booted weirdo geeks. They want to show us as untrustworthy people who can fly off the handle. This is where Astroturfing comes in.
Microsoft performs "Astroturfing". This means starting up fake grassroots movements. They tried to do this to forestall the DOJ trial, and were exposed. I do not believe that they are above hiring people to troll Slashdot and similar things, in order to show us making complete fools out of ourselves.
How to respond to Trolls
The first thing is how not to respond to a troll. Don't let them sucker you in. Think before you post, and do not post a flaming ball of hatred. This will do you, and Slashdot as a whole, harm. That's why flames get moderated down. But they're still on the record, so you and we still get to look like idiots.
Often, the best way to respond to a troll is to ignore it. This pisses a troll off worse than anything. Some trolls will respond by trolling more. At this point, you get to watch them making complete fools out of themselves. Remember: it is better to be silent and thought a fool, then to speak up and remove all doubt.
The other thing one can do is to note the troll as such. Newbie users won't recognize trolls as well as old farts, so this helps keep the newbies from flaming the trolls. Here, moderation does this. The troll above was moderated up; I disagree with that, so I'm writing this to mark the troll as such.
Again, please feel free to add to this or correct me. Just Say No To Trolls.
Go to the netscape archive. All versions back to 2.x for Win, Mac and *nix platforms. Opera is still not quite ready ( I check every week). Check out their Project Magic page.
-- --
100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST.
"The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'"
Free Kevin,
Whatever you do, dont install it... I installed IE for solaris once, and it completely hosed my Netscape installation... And anyone who does any UNIX programming knows that you have to purposely tell a program to write to disk and things dont happen by "accident" like it does with IE and netscape... I for one, will never install it on my computer if they do make it for linux.
If IE for Linux would bring better fonts (such as Verdana) to the Linux platform, it might really help us. But I'm not betting on it.
You can install a truetype font server under Linux and use your Veranda font under Netscape now.
--
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Same as vs. Netscape or different?
by
Paradox+!-)
·
· Score: 5
So is this the same as MS vs. Netscape or different? 1. MS was afraid of Netscape 2. MS writes Navigator clone, then 'embraces and extends' it, bundling it into the Windows OS, giving it away for free 3. Navigator market share crumbles 4. Netscape loses momentum and edge, stock decreases (perhaps causing some Netscape coders to rethink their options...literally?) 5. IE 5.0 debuts to rave pundit reviews, Netscape is broken up and sold in pieces to two lesser industry evils...
1. MS is afraid of Linux 2. MS is NOW writing a Lunix clone (think I remember a/. article on this...but don't see it in the older section...could be simply delusional) as well as porting IE to Linux - embrace and extend from multiple fronts 3. Unix market share, viz NT, is crumbling (Linux is cannibalizing the commercial Unix marketshare for its own marketshare, rather than converting NT shops to Unix, IMHO)
But here is where I think it's different.
4. Linux DEVELOPMENT is non-commercial. The psychic well-being of the coders is not dependent on the fate of a single company, or stock options. Linux should retain its momentum and edge for at LEAST another year 5. Next year conflicts among Linux distributions become a much bigger issue as marketshare growth for Linux begins to flatten - most commercial Unices other than Solaris will probably be inconsequential by this time next year. (blatent, unfounded, bold, bull-ony prediction) 6. MS folds Linux-like functionality into NT, making the OS even more unweildy, but allowing MS to claim to the biz market it has all the good parts of Linux, without that bad lack-of-single-vendor part. Glossy mags go wild for MS LiNTux (thereby MS co-opts both Tux and Linux while keeping the NT brand).
7. Linux coders setup the "Free State of Silicon Valley and Finland," declare war on "The People's Republic of Redmond."
8. President Ventura intervenes, sending in the 101st Airborn and SeALs. As the first victorious third-party candidate in US history, he asserts that precedent to legally mandate all computers to run a third-party OS...BEOS!!!
Ahem...sorry...got out of hand there.
Re:Same as vs. Netscape or different?
by
Tolchz
·
· Score: 3
2. MS is NOW writing a Lunix clone (think I remember a/. article on this...but don't see it in the older section...could be simply delusional) as well as porting IE to Linux - embrace and extend from multiple fronts
They might be also writing a Linux clone but in Windows 2000 there is going to be the capability to run Linux applications on top of Windows. They got together with Interix to achieve this.
The reason Lynx can't view it is that it is framed, and there is no way to break out of the frame. Here's a straight copy.
Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API
Nancy Winnick Cluts
Microsoft Corporation
November 1998
Summary: Details the cross-platform development of Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0 for UNIX using the Microsoft Win32® API. (4 printed pages)
Introduction Yes, you read that correctly. I said that you can create a UNIX application using the Win32 application programming interface (API). And I have proof. Internet Explorer 4.0 for UNIX was written using the Win32 API. I bet you'd like to know how the team pulled that one off. (I know I did!) If you are interested in the details, read on.
At TechEd in New Orleans, LA, in June 1998, Digvijay Chauhan, Development Manager of the Internet Explorer UNIX team, outlined the cross-platform issues in Internet Explorer 4.0 (for a full list of cross-platform issues, search for my article "Internet Explorer Runs Cross-Platform" on the MSDN Online Web Workshop site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/) as well as how to use the Win32 API for cross-platform development. This article is based on the second part of his presentation: Win32 development on Unix. Another session, titled "Targeting Unix & Windows Platforms with a Single Code Base: A Case Study" (IOP05) was given at the Professional Developers Conference in Denver.
Win32 API on UNIX--A Case Study Imagine that you are on a development team and you are told that you need to develop a browser using the Win32 API and deliver it on both the Win32 and Unix (Solaris) platforms. In order to do this, you need to take into consideration the user interface differences as well as how you are going to actually code the application. X-Windows has a different user interface than Windows. With the pace of the software industry, you do not have the luxury of spending a lot of time and resources on this project--you must get this browser to market rapidly. You also must be sure the Unix version has the same rendering fidelity as the Win32 version. Finally, you must incorporate the Unix look. That's the challenge that the Internet Explorer UNIX team faced and met.
The targeted time frame was 2-3 months after the Win32 version shipped. The team consisted of approximately 50 people. There were about 600 Win32 functions that were used by Internet Explorer. There wasn't time to start from scratch and create their own Win32 layer for Unix, so they looked at vendors that already had such a layer, and tools available. They found two such vendors: Bristol and Mainsoft. Throughout this project, there were some issues the team had to solve, including differences in focus, the Component Object Model (COM), the registry, performance, fonts, UI issues, and portability.
Focus The biggest area of trouble (read: bugs) had to do with focus. On X-Windows, the user can configure the workstation for multiple Window Manager modes and each Window Manager supports multiple modes. This leads to some interesting differences in the use of focus on Unix versus Win32. On a Win32-based platform, when the user clicks the mouse once on a window, that window gains the focus. On X-Windows, you can configure your system such that the focus follows the mouse. That is, when you move the mouse to a window, the focus automatically moves to that window. The workstation can also be set up to support auto raise focus--when the window gets the focus it is automatically put in the foreground. X-Windows also supports the single-click to focus scheme that Win32 supports. The Internet Explorer Unix team had to make sure the browser they created also supported these different forms of focus.
Modality In Microsoft Windows®, it is common for developers to create modal windows. A modal window is a window that, when it has the focus, does not let any other window within the application get the focus until the window is dismissed. For example, if you click the View menu on Internet Explorer and choose Internet Options, you will bring up a window that stays in focus until it is dismissed--if you click the Internet Explorer main window, you will hear a ding and the window will not come into the foreground. Windows developers create modal windows through the use of the GetMessage, TranslateMessage, and DispatchMessage functions in a loop. X-Windows employs a Window Manager that must be told, via hints, whether a window is modal or not. Unfortunately, this information is only read once, when the window is shown. The solution to this difference was to use a new window style hint to tell the Window Manager the window modality prior to the window being shown.
COM Internet Explorer relies heavily on the Component Object Model (COM) in order to function. In fact, any of the window items you see that are outside of the client area of the screen (for example, the rebar, the dialog boxes, and so on) are all COM objects. They use COM to communicate between the browser and the other COM objects. One important portability problem faced by the team involved using C code to access COM object methods directly via virtual table (known as a vtable) structure pointers. The vtable layout is compiler-specific. As a result, the layout of the pointers is different on Solaris. The solution was to replace the C code accessing COM objects with C++ code.
Registry On Windows, the registry is used to store and access information such as user preferences. Most Windows applications read these values from the registry in order to persist data from session to session. In Unix, a user can log on to his workstation and use his home directory from any machine with all of his settings preserved. Because the registry resides on only one machine, this is problematic. The team had to figure out how to share registry information across machines.
Another registry-related issue is synchronization of registry settings across processes. Okay, that's a complex sentence. In real terms: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook® Express share registry settings. If you change a registry setting in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express immediately reflects the changes.
The solution was to keep the registry in a location that is shared by all workstations, leveraging a single home directory. This way, different processes, regardless of machine, can be in synch.
Performance The Internet Explorer Unix team created some simple and effective in-house performance tools to analyze performance bottlenecks and solve them. One tool wrapped all of the Win32 APIs in order to log the calls to the APIs as well as determine which thread called the API. This information was used to identify frequently used APIs and determine which should be optimized (the ones that were used often) and which were taking the most time.
Another tool was created to analyze heap space. This was done by mapping the memory allocation functions (malloc, realloc, and so on) along with thread identifiers. They were then able to identify resource hogs (image copy was a big one) and where they could group allocations in order to maximize performance.
In order to help in the debugging process, they created a program that modified exception-handling code to determine (via a stack trace) what caused Internet Explorer to crash. This was particularly helpful in determining if the testers had found a new bug or one that already existed, albeit in a new user scenario.
The final tool that was created was a quick and dirty profiler. This profiler would suspend all threads in a process, sample the program counter, and map the symbols to get a running count of where the application was spending most of its time. Here again, the team could go back and optimize that code.
Fonts There are a few exceptions to font support using Internet Explorer 4.0 on UNIX. Some fonts are simply not available on Unix. In general, Windows fonts will be mapped to those available on a particular Unix server. The Verdana, Arial, and Sans Serif fonts are mapped to the Helvetica font. The Marlett font is not supported on UNIX at all. Internet Explorer 4.0 Unix maps fonts to an equal or smaller point size. In addition, X-based servers can have different configurations and different font installations. As a result, it was necessary to map fonts for specific font installations on the server. Internet Explorer 4.x shipped some prebuilt font caches for standard server configurations. For nonstandard configurations, a font cache is built the first time the browser starts; however, this proved to cause a slowdown in startup. As a result, Internet Explorer 5.0 has changed to an alternate design.
Interface Issues The Windows interface is different from the look you get when you run X-Windows-based Motif or common desktop environment (CDE) applications. The Internet Explorer Unix team had to take into consideration the different appearance for their version of the browser. Some of the interface issues that the team had to address were:
A person running Unix is accustomed to using the + and + key combinations to position the cursor at the beginning or end of a line respectively.
Tab completion is also an expectation of the X-Windows user. Tab completion was implemented at the application level by the team.
The middle mouse button is also supported under X-Windows for copy-and-paste functionality.
Selected text is automatically copied to the Clipboard and available to be pasted into another application.
Menus stay dropped down after they've been clicked, even after the mouse moves away from the menu.
Common dialog boxes look different. For example, the CDE File Open common dialog box and scroll bar widgets are different from their Windows counterparts. Based on user feedback, the Internet Explorer team decided to stick with the Windows 3.1 File dialog boxes and the CDE widgets for scroll bars.
Multiple workspaces are supported by the Window Manager.
Additional system menus are supported under CDE.
CDE integration--including CDE color changes dynamically reflected in the application--required additional work.
Coding Issues--Portability Problems When it got down to coding, there were some interesting issues that the team had to solve, including:
The WCHAR is 4 bytes in most UNIX compilers and 2 bytes in Microsoft Visual C++®. As a result, there were many coding bugs found that assumed the size of a WCHAR was 2 bytes.
Global variables in Win32 dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) are visible across processes, so it is important that developers are careful that these globals do not conflict with any variables within the Unix shared libraries.
Win32 developers have come to rely on Win32 Structured Exception Handling (SEH) in their applications. Unix does not inherently support this. With the help of the Internet Explorer team, Mainsoft now includes fairly complete support for SEH in their Win32 layer.
Visual C++ makes use of keywords for alignment, such as unaligned. The Unix team had to write macros to do alignment.
Compilers for Unix do not support nameless nested structures.
Summary All of this was a lot of work and the Internet Explorer Unix team learned a lot from it. In the future, they plan to use a common code base between their Win32 and Unix versions so that a change in one will automatically be reflected in the other. They are planning to use the Apoge compiler (http://www.apogee.com/) for this common code base. They also plan to incorporate the feedback they get on interface issues. In the meantime, you now know that you, too, can develop your Unix application on Win32. The Internet Explorer team did it and so can you.
GNOME and KDE already HAVE the active-desktop-esqe thing going on though....so I dont' really see the point.
You could use GNOME, w/E running it's win95 theme w/win95 widgets and you've pretty much got a win95-look-and-act-alike.
Just this week, I switched my roommate, who was a Win95 user to the core over to GNOME w/E....to him (using the configuration mentioned above) it's pretty much the same box he always used (without the apps of course).
So even if they DID port the Win32 APIs over to Linux (PLEASE NO!!!) they wouldn't need to write a window manager.....
It would be nice to have a working and fast version of IE5 though...it's so much better than NS4.6 it makes me sick.
Just wondering, who would actually use it? Knowing how vehemently most Linux users despise Microsoft (myself included), it would be interesting to get figures of how many people would use it if Microsoft actually came out with MSIE for Linux. I think I personally would, but only for testing purposes to make sure my web sites look right in both IE and Netscape. I figure that would be the main reason why most people would use it as well. Hey, at least it would be useful, eh?
M$ doesn't have much to worry about, most consumers assume that M$ makes the better (or best) application sets, so if they make a web browser for linux (charging a nominal fee for it of course), that's what the cattle population will use, even if there is a free alternative.
But... if you're one of the "cattle population", would you even be using Linux? Obviously Windows must be better, so you'd be running 98 or NT.
I don't care what people say, I don't believe anyone runs Linux just because they hate M$ products -- those people would probably want to use a Mac in that case. People run Linux because of a billion other reasons -- more control over what the computer is doing; get to learn about the design of a "real" OS; they're used to UNIX or want to learn UNIX; they need a reliable solution to a problem; etc, etc, etc. Hating M$ isn't reason enough, there has to be something else.
IE port to Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
I *did* register, honestly. Just haven't got time right now to wait for my pwd. Coward or not, here's my 10c worth.
Microsoft ported IE to Linux using MainSoft's Win32 port (they already trashed Bristol Software, Mainsoft's only competitor, by abruptly withdrawing their source code license - there's a lawsuit ongoing over this).
At any event, consider this. A port of IE requires a port of Win32. Which would let everyone else port their software to Linux, right. All you have to do is download IE and then you have the Win32 APIs, unless MS take a lot of time and trouble to remove all the entry points or something. Even if they do, cunning individuals will for sure figure out a way of calling into those routines.
Of course, WINE continues to evolve - although very very slowly - and maybe we *will* have Win32 for Linux soon. I know this will offend the purists but being able to port something quickly to Linux can only help Linux's future, even if the resulting mess might not be very elegant.
Of course, WINE continues to evolve - although very very slowly - and maybe we *will* have Win32 for Linux soon. I know this will offend the purists but being able to port something quickly to Linux can only help Linux's future, even if the resulting mess might not be very elegant.
Don't be too sure. Back in the time of OS/2 v2.x, IBM was pushing ISVs to release OS/2 versions of their windows software. This resulted in incredibly crappy ports (for example, WordPerfect 5.2 for OS/2), and OS/2 got blamed for the bad applications. (When in fact, good and native OS/2 applications were available from other vendors - the Describe word processor for example - but never got the attention they deserved.)
Microsoft porting to Unix article
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 4
It took a bit of digging but here is the link to "Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API" --
Open-source? Of course not.
by
jamesm
·
· Score: 3
Why would it ever be open source?? The idea that MS would give away its browser source is almost laughable, especially in any way that would even remotely resemble OS. Microsoft is scared of open source; embracing the model would legitimize the Linux development model they have, so far, gone to great lengths to downplay in front of the media.
If they were ever to 'embrace' the open source model, they would do so in a half-assed way in the form of something that is not even open source, such as restrictive licensing of NT source code that has been mentioned. That way, they can say "we tried it, and people didn't want it, it's a bad idea and it sucks... back to business". That is the ultimate in FUD. They essentially did the same thing when they ported IE to solaris; they bastardized the port - it was bloated, slow, buggy and the most pathetic piece of software I've ever had the misfortune of running. But I'm sure it shut up all the solaris people who had asked for a port, and it sure looks good when they can go to the media and say "look how badly our wonderful software runs on this platform; we tried, but it's just not as good as windows".
The question of whether ie would be open source honestly never even crossed my mind.
I remember, not too long ago, MS ported IE 3(?) to Solaris (?) and was saying that they were porting it to the two remaining big unicies (which were HP-UX and SCO, as I recall)
I tried IE for HP-UX last year. It stank: it was almost unbelievably slow; the GUI was a custom-designed job that looked like the illegitimate child of Windows and Motif; the Unix convention for config files (human-readable text files) was thrown out the window - the silly thing created a $HOME/.microsoft directory and wrote a registry into it.
It strikes me that Microsoft's engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a port to Unix should be. It should have the functionality of the Windows original, but behave in a way typical of the target platform. The HP-UX port felt like a botched job.
Re:IE for HP-UX is a dog
by
Guy+Harris
·
· Score: 3
The IE ports to UNIX are implemented atop Mainsoft's MainWin product, which is a "Win32 API atop UNIX" package. See this item about IE5 and MainWin, which says:
Rather than rewrite the code for the UNIX version, Microsoft chose to use MainWin to rehost the source code on UNIX.
The same was true of IE4, according to stuff on Mainsoft's site.
I saw something ages ago on, I think, Microsoft's Web site indicating that they were developing a Win32-atop-MacOS package and getting third parties to do Win32-atop-UNIX packages; they were, I think, pushing this as a way of getting app developers - or, at least, custom in-house app developers - to write Win32 apps and to get them on other platforms with those packages. I don't know if that's the way they do MacOS ports of their own apps.
Re:IE for Linux would be welcome...
by
Bob-K
·
· Score: 3
It seems to me that browsers are really a pretty trivial application. That's not meant to downplay the fact that there are some complex things going on inside. But look at the interface. Forward, Back, choose a bookmark. From the users' perspective, they're all pretty much the same. Unlike word processors or spreadsheets or accounting or graphic packages, there really aren't many ways to make one browser dfferent from the next, especially from the end-users' perspective.
It turns out the browser wars were insanely overhyped. It looked important three years ago, but in retrospect, it seems pretty silly to think that somebody could gain influence over the Internet by implemeting and promoting special HTML tags.
The other question is: how deeply can one integrate something into the Linux kernel before open-sourcing it? For all their talk about deep OS integration, we of the Linux community might have a strong case to require them to copyleft IE for Linux.
OTOH, I'm not exactly holding my breath on the port, with or without source code. This is less than vaporware; this is a rumor of vaporware.
--
--The basis of all love is respect
Now they can squeeze the PC Makers again
by
nbor
·
· Score: 5
This seems to me to be a way to get back control of the straying PC makers. Now MS can demand that they install IE5 on Linux whenever the PC makers pre-install Linux. This is the thin edge of the wedgie, folks.
Nitin
-- The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
Windows Version vs. Other Versions
by
Hrunting
·
· Score: 5
I suspect that this version won't be the IE that people have come to know. On my Windows machines, I use IE5 and I love it. It integrates rather nicely with the operating system, takes advantage of many of Windows' features, and provides a very smooth, stable browsing platform. I've also used IE4.5 for the Mac, and the complete opposite is true. It was slow, bloated, tended to crash a lot, and extremely clunky to use. Without the operating system's built-in mechanisms to take advantage of, IE becomes just another application and it's not particularly an efficient one.
I probably won't even touch IE for Linux if the rumor is true (I think it is; Microsoft legitimizes Linux as a competitor if they develop their software for it). Netscape, even the browser standalone is large enough as it is and I don't need another browser mussing up my system.
It is actually bad enough to make me wonder why they bothered.
You don't have to be paranoid to realize that the reason they "ported" it and actually released that piece of crap was to demonstrate to the public that Solaris is not a useable OS for running desktop applications.
It just isn't possible to write something that crappy and bloated by accident or incompetence.
I guess the reason there's no IE for Linux yet is that they won't recognize it as an OS. When they do that, they will probably release IE for it, and it will be at least as crappy as the Solaris version.
-- -segfault
Re:IE for Linux would be welcome...
by
Megaweapon
·
· Score: 4
I basically agree, however, there is an increasing demand (at least in my company) for intranet web-based applications. Static content is fine, but having a web application is a great way to distribute functionality without the overhead of installing programs on client machines. Since most systems nowadays have web browsers, there is (usually) no additional work to be done. Just give them a URL. The problem as I see it is that the standard form elements provided are too simplistic. Simple text boxes, radio buttons, and drop down lists are fine but are limiting. Also, it was only recently that a standardized document object model was introduced by W3C. That, with a good scripting language, can lead to beautiful and functional applications that people can use in a familiar environment.
IE5 provides a nice platform for web applications. A well designed object model (proprietary, but it is well done) with generally solid scripting has allowed us to develop some really cool web pages. Given the newer standards released by W3C, Mozilla and other non-IE browsers should give Microsoft a run for their (lots of) money.
-- I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
But MS will just *require* root access to install
by
root
·
· Score: 3
It'll go something like this
frob% cd/tmp/ie frob% tar -xzf msie5.0.666.tgz frob%./ms-install Error: Internet explorer may only be installed by the superuser frob% su Password: ******* frob#./ms-install MSIE5.0 installer for Linux x86 Checking for available disk space... Installing MSIE5.0... Installing system fonts... Installing JFC 1.x... Installing Plugins... Configuring IE5.0... Updating system settings... Done. The installer will now restart your machine so the changes can take effect...
[beep]
Broadcast message from root (ttyp0) Tue May 25 04:29:06 1999...
> Would it be that hard for them to port it to > Linux if they already have IE 4.01 and IE 5.0 > for Solaris and HP-UX? (They do have it > available for download.) I mean, would there be > a lot of code to rewrite If they already got the > thing working on other POSIX compliant OS's?
It would really depend on how careful/competent the porting team had been. It's easy to write to the POSIX spec and expect the software to build and work on any POSIX-compliant OS, but it's another matter to write it to a specific POSIX-compliant OS (or any small set of them) and then expect it to build and work on any other POSIX-compliant OS.
This is especially true when you throw architectural differences into the mix; SPARC and PA-RISC are both 64-bit big-endian architecures (well, PA-RISC might be little-endian; I can't remember). It may well be that their IE for Unix codebase (hopefully they didn't do two individual ports) contains a lot of 64-bitisms. I have learned not to expect good software engineering practices from them.
> Even though I LOVE Linux, I do welcome IE, even > though it's from M$, It is the superior browser, > that wasn't the case when they were both like > 2.0, but the more they progress, the more bugs I > see in netscape, and the the more I see IE > handle browsing the web better and better.
IMO, the existing (old) Netscape codebase is slowly collapsing under its own weight. It's high time a Mozilla-derived product got into Alpha...
> The biggest reason I welcome IE to Linux is > because I'd like to see a Linux browser that > properly handles Cascading Style Sheets. I have > yet to see that on Linux browsers.
I have yet to see that on Microsoft browsers. Try some of the CSS conformance tests in IE sometime.
Personally, I'd rather wait for Mozilla on Linux than for IE. Yes... I know... Mozilla might not not be all there yet, but IE for Linux sure as hell isn't.
I have had issues with Netscape 4.x being stable before, but have had no problems with it in the Redhat 6.0 distro. The problem with severe memory leaks and random crashing and on certain pages appears to have vanished. I only restarted netscape a few days ago when I accidently killed the window with Alt-W (I frequently have dozens of browser windows open.)
Would I test Microsoft's browser? No Thanks, I would never trust a code base like that on my computer. I don't want something reading my/etc or/home or whatever back to the parent company to see what competitor's products I have. Its a matter of trust and Microsoft does not have it. Not only that, I don't want to get comfortable with such a product to only get "locked in" to the standards they promote. Active-X? No Thanks!
Regardless of my lack of problems, I hope to have a GPL'd browser soon. It would be nice to swap code with a browser and build something on a whim.
I downloaded it. It is large, slow, and extremely crash-prone. On the other hand, it did consume all available memory (I can't run both Outlook and Explorer on my desktop, since I only have a measly 64 Mbyte of RAM.)
It is, unfortunately, a fairly typical Microsoft product. In Windows, IE is better than Netscape (by which I mean it's faster, uses less memory, and crashes less often), because they really need for it to be, and because they can get in bed with the OS. In Solaris, they don't seem to care. It is actually bad enough to make me wonder why they bothered.
Re:Love the Full Screen Layout
by
andyf
·
· Score: 3
Actually, some italian guy wrote a shareware program called FullScreen for Netscape that does just what IE does, plus a little more. It's only for Windows, though, I think.
--
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
Slashdot Mirror
- Head over to the Web Standards project, and note the troubles special HTML tags are even now causing.
- Ponder how many browsers are available for the general public. And why aren't they around? Because they can't handle the "real web", which is populated with lots of special tags? (recall that many of the "special" tags have been standardized after the fact, like CENTER)
- Consider whether the browser wars were NOT overhyped, but are, in fact, mostly over now. And Microsoft and Netscape both have tremendous influence on the Internet, with, say, Mosiac nothing but a faint memory.
It's not silly to think that... it's just that it already happened, and you no longer notice, because it's in the background.Does anyone actually _believe_ these announcements anymore? How many times have you heard "Microsoft is going to port product [x] to platform [y]." ? Now think about how many times it's actually happened.
Yawn. I suppose we need to keep an eye on Redmond. But --dang!-- those vaporware announcements are getting boring.
Reading a few of the other comments in this thread I just had a thought. Don't MS use IE as their active Desktop, and several people have suggested that IE would require a port of the Win32 interface.
/nasty/ X-Server/window manager combination but instead you could run a linux OS with IE5 sat directly on top (using something like an SVGA library) giving you your desktop.
Well could a Linux version of IE be a MS built window manager?
It is afterall the desktop users that MS is really concerned about... suppose you didn't need that
For people who understand X its wonderful and versatile as hell... but its also very complex and has plenty of security issues associated with it. Is that really what a simple end user wants?
Just imagine for a moment a box which ran the Linux kernal and a most of a normal distro and thus was remote adminable - but provided an end user with a windows interface and the same apps as they currently use.
I'd guess that each user would require their own registry or something - nasty as this might sound to some I can see the appeal.
The end user gets a familure box and doesn't need to learn anything new and the admins get remote access and proper file permissions.
like I said, just an idea
Tom
I am not the most expert of trollologists; I am sure that Slashdot has much better trollologists. I just got here first. Feel free to reply to this to add points I missed, or argue points you think I am wrong about.
How to Recognize a Troll
A troll is a form of luser that makes incindiary remarks in order to get others to lose their cool, thus making worse incindiary remarks and making complete fools out of themselves.
Many trolls are made by anonymous cowards; people who do not want to be recognized. But not every AC is a troll, and not every troller is an AC. Some will troll from their named accounts; those are the brave trolls. What we have here is a specimin of the more cowardly troll.
But more important than the username is the post. The "best" kind of troll post will make a remark specifically engineered to push the hot buttons of the group being trolled (here, Slashdot itself). Additionally, the perfect troll fails to give any useful or arguable information.
Two perfect trolling sentences here are, "The current Linux file system sucks" and "With MS beginning to support the Linux community, Linux will be an improved product.". both hit hit a Slashdot hot button (there is a lot of "Microsoft-is-evil/Linux-is-good" running around here). Both are too vague to provide any useful information.
The Dangers of a Troll
The danger here is that, without any real information to argue, the tendency is to degenerate into a flame war. "The current Linux file system sucks" is not even an arguable fact; it is a broadbased opinion, posted to a group of people who believe the opposite.
A properly placed troll can tempt otherwise rational people into portraying themselves as complete idiots. Especially with Microsoft, this is exceedingly dangerous.
Microsoft would love to portray the Linux community (including Slashdot) as knee-jerk jack-booted weirdo geeks. They want to show us as untrustworthy people who can fly off the handle. This is where Astroturfing comes in.
Microsoft performs "Astroturfing". This means starting up fake grassroots movements. They tried to do this to forestall the DOJ trial, and were exposed. I do not believe that they are above hiring people to troll Slashdot and similar things, in order to show us making complete fools out of ourselves.
How to respond to Trolls
The first thing is how not to respond to a troll. Don't let them sucker you in. Think before you post, and do not post a flaming ball of hatred. This will do you, and Slashdot as a whole, harm. That's why flames get moderated down. But they're still on the record, so you and we still get to look like idiots.
Often, the best way to respond to a troll is to ignore it. This pisses a troll off worse than anything. Some trolls will respond by trolling more. At this point, you get to watch them making complete fools out of themselves. Remember: it is better to be silent and thought a fool, then to speak up and remove all doubt.
The other thing one can do is to note the troll as such. Newbie users won't recognize trolls as well as old farts, so this helps keep the newbies from flaming the trolls. Here, moderation does this. The troll above was moderated up; I disagree with that, so I'm writing this to mark the troll as such.
Again, please feel free to add to this or correct me. Just Say No To Trolls.
--The basis of all love is respect
Go to the netscape archive. All versions back to 2.x for Win, Mac and *nix platforms.
Opera is still not quite ready ( I check every week). Check out their Project Magic page.
-- 100% MS-Free as of 4-4-1999, 11:47:38 PST. "The lapdance is always better when the stripper is cryin'" Free Kevin,
Whatever you do, dont install it... I installed IE for solaris once, and it completely hosed my Netscape installation... And anyone who does any UNIX programming knows that you have to purposely tell a program to write to disk and things dont happen by "accident" like it does with IE and netscape... I for one, will never install it on my computer if they do make it for linux.
So is this the same as MS vs. Netscape or different?
/. article on this...but don't see it in the older section...could be simply delusional) as well as porting IE to Linux - embrace and extend from multiple fronts
1. MS was afraid of Netscape
2. MS writes Navigator clone, then 'embraces and extends' it, bundling it into the Windows OS, giving it away for free
3. Navigator market share crumbles
4. Netscape loses momentum and edge, stock decreases (perhaps causing some Netscape coders to rethink their options...literally?)
5. IE 5.0 debuts to rave pundit reviews, Netscape is broken up and sold in pieces to two lesser industry evils...
1. MS is afraid of Linux
2. MS is NOW writing a Lunix clone (think I remember a
3. Unix market share, viz NT, is crumbling (Linux is cannibalizing the commercial Unix marketshare for its own marketshare, rather than converting NT shops to Unix, IMHO)
But here is where I think it's different.
4. Linux DEVELOPMENT is non-commercial. The psychic well-being of the coders is not dependent on the fate of a single company, or stock options. Linux should retain its momentum and edge for at LEAST another year
5. Next year conflicts among Linux distributions become a much bigger issue as marketshare growth for Linux begins to flatten - most commercial Unices other than Solaris will probably be inconsequential by this time next year. (blatent, unfounded, bold, bull-ony prediction)
6. MS folds Linux-like functionality into NT, making the OS even more unweildy, but allowing MS to claim to the biz market it has all the good parts of Linux, without that bad lack-of-single-vendor part. Glossy mags go wild for MS LiNTux (thereby MS co-opts both Tux and Linux while keeping the NT brand).
7. Linux coders setup the "Free State of Silicon Valley and Finland," declare war on "The People's Republic of Redmond."
8. President Ventura intervenes, sending in the 101st Airborn and SeALs. As the first victorious third-party candidate in US history, he asserts that precedent to legally mandate all computers to run a third-party OS...BEOS!!!
Ahem...sorry...got out of hand there.
The reason Lynx can't view it is that it is framed, and there is no way to break out of the frame. Here's a straight copy.
Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API
Nancy Winnick Cluts
Microsoft Corporation
November 1998
Summary: Details the cross-platform development of Microsoft® Internet Explorer 4.0 for UNIX using the Microsoft Win32® API. (4 printed pages)
Introduction
Yes, you read that correctly. I said that you can create a UNIX application using the Win32 application programming interface (API). And I have proof. Internet Explorer 4.0 for UNIX was written using the Win32 API. I bet you'd like to know how the team pulled that one off. (I know I did!) If you are interested in the details, read on.
At TechEd in New Orleans, LA, in June 1998, Digvijay Chauhan, Development Manager of the Internet Explorer UNIX team, outlined the cross-platform issues in Internet Explorer 4.0 (for a full list of cross-platform issues, search for my article "Internet Explorer Runs Cross-Platform" on the MSDN Online Web Workshop site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/) as well as how to use the Win32 API for cross-platform development. This article is based on the second part of his presentation: Win32 development on Unix. Another session, titled "Targeting Unix & Windows Platforms with a Single Code Base: A Case Study" (IOP05) was given at the Professional Developers Conference in Denver.
Win32 API on UNIX--A Case Study
Imagine that you are on a development team and you are told that you need to develop a browser using the Win32 API and deliver it on both the Win32 and Unix (Solaris) platforms. In order to do this, you need to take into consideration the user interface differences as well as how you are going to actually code the application. X-Windows has a different user interface than Windows. With the pace of the software industry, you do not have the luxury of spending a lot of time and resources on this project--you must get this browser to market rapidly. You also must be sure the Unix version has the same rendering fidelity as the Win32 version. Finally, you must incorporate the Unix look. That's the challenge that the Internet Explorer UNIX team faced and met.
The targeted time frame was 2-3 months after the Win32 version shipped. The team consisted of approximately 50 people. There were about 600 Win32 functions that were used by Internet Explorer. There wasn't time to start from scratch and create their own Win32 layer for Unix, so they looked at vendors that already had such a layer, and tools available. They found two such vendors: Bristol and Mainsoft. Throughout this project, there were some issues the team had to solve, including differences in focus, the Component Object Model (COM), the registry, performance, fonts, UI issues, and portability.
Focus
The biggest area of trouble (read: bugs) had to do with focus. On X-Windows, the user can configure the workstation for multiple Window Manager modes and each Window Manager supports multiple modes. This leads to some interesting differences in the use of focus on Unix versus Win32. On a Win32-based platform, when the user clicks the mouse once on a window, that window gains the focus. On X-Windows, you can configure your system such that the focus follows the mouse. That is, when you move the mouse to a window, the focus automatically moves to that window. The workstation can also be set up to support auto raise focus--when the window gets the focus it is automatically put in the foreground. X-Windows also supports the single-click to focus scheme that Win32 supports. The Internet Explorer Unix team had to make sure the browser they created also supported these different forms of focus.
Modality
In Microsoft Windows®, it is common for developers to create modal windows. A modal window is a window that, when it has the focus, does not let any other window within the application get the focus until the window is dismissed. For example, if you click the View menu on Internet Explorer and choose Internet Options, you will bring up a window that stays in focus until it is dismissed--if you click the Internet Explorer main window, you will hear a ding and the window will not come into the foreground. Windows developers create modal windows through the use of the GetMessage, TranslateMessage, and DispatchMessage functions in a loop. X-Windows employs a Window Manager that must be told, via hints, whether a window is modal or not. Unfortunately, this information is only read once, when the window is shown. The solution to this difference was to use a new window style hint to tell the Window Manager the window modality prior to the window being shown.
COM
Internet Explorer relies heavily on the Component Object Model (COM) in order to function. In fact, any of the window items you see that are outside of the client area of the screen (for example, the rebar, the dialog boxes, and so on) are all COM objects. They use COM to communicate between the browser and the other COM objects. One important portability problem faced by the team involved using C code to access COM object methods directly via virtual table (known as a vtable) structure pointers. The vtable layout is compiler-specific. As a result, the layout of the pointers is different on Solaris. The solution was to replace the C code accessing COM objects with C++ code.
Registry
On Windows, the registry is used to store and access information such as user preferences. Most Windows applications read these values from the registry in order to persist data from session to session. In Unix, a user can log on to his workstation and use his home directory from any machine with all of his settings preserved. Because the registry resides on only one machine, this is problematic. The team had to figure out how to share registry information across machines.
Another registry-related issue is synchronization of registry settings across processes. Okay, that's a complex sentence. In real terms: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook® Express share registry settings. If you change a registry setting in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express immediately reflects the changes.
The solution was to keep the registry in a location that is shared by all workstations, leveraging a single home directory. This way, different processes, regardless of machine, can be in synch.
Performance
The Internet Explorer Unix team created some simple and effective in-house performance tools to analyze performance bottlenecks and solve them. One tool wrapped all of the Win32 APIs in order to log the calls to the APIs as well as determine which thread called the API. This information was used to identify frequently used APIs and determine which should be optimized (the ones that were used often) and which were taking the most time.
Another tool was created to analyze heap space. This was done by mapping the memory allocation functions (malloc, realloc, and so on) along with thread identifiers. They were then able to identify resource hogs (image copy was a big one) and where they could group allocations in order to maximize performance.
In order to help in the debugging process, they created a program that modified exception-handling code to determine (via a stack trace) what caused Internet Explorer to crash. This was particularly helpful in determining if the testers had found a new bug or one that already existed, albeit in a new user scenario.
The final tool that was created was a quick and dirty profiler. This profiler would suspend all threads in a process, sample the program counter, and map the symbols to get a running count of where the application was spending most of its time. Here again, the team could go back and optimize that code.
Fonts
There are a few exceptions to font support using Internet Explorer 4.0 on UNIX. Some fonts are simply not available on Unix. In general, Windows fonts will be mapped to those available on a particular Unix server. The Verdana, Arial, and Sans Serif fonts are mapped to the Helvetica font. The Marlett font is not supported on UNIX at all. Internet Explorer 4.0 Unix maps fonts to an equal or smaller point size. In addition, X-based servers can have different configurations and different font installations. As a result, it was necessary to map fonts for specific font installations on the server. Internet Explorer 4.x shipped some prebuilt font caches for standard server configurations. For nonstandard configurations, a font cache is built the first time the browser starts; however, this proved to cause a slowdown in startup. As a result, Internet Explorer 5.0 has changed to an alternate design.
Interface Issues
The Windows interface is different from the look you get when you run X-Windows-based Motif or common desktop environment (CDE) applications. The Internet Explorer Unix team had to take into consideration the different appearance for their version of the browser. Some of the interface issues that the team had to address were:
A person running Unix is accustomed to using the + and + key combinations to position the cursor at the beginning or end of a line respectively.
Tab completion is also an expectation of the X-Windows user. Tab completion was implemented at the application level by the team.
The middle mouse button is also supported under X-Windows for copy-and-paste functionality.
Selected text is automatically copied to the Clipboard and available to be pasted into another application.
Menus stay dropped down after they've been clicked, even after the mouse moves away from the menu.
Common dialog boxes look different. For example, the CDE File Open common dialog box and scroll bar widgets are different from their Windows counterparts. Based on user feedback, the Internet Explorer team decided to stick with the Windows 3.1 File dialog boxes and the CDE widgets for scroll bars.
Multiple workspaces are supported by the Window Manager.
Additional system menus are supported under CDE.
CDE integration--including CDE color changes dynamically reflected in the application--required additional work.
Coding Issues--Portability Problems
When it got down to coding, there were some interesting issues that the team had to solve, including:
The WCHAR is 4 bytes in most UNIX compilers and 2 bytes in Microsoft Visual C++®. As a result, there were many coding bugs found that assumed the size of a WCHAR was 2 bytes.
Global variables in Win32 dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) are visible across processes, so it is important that developers are careful that these globals do not conflict with any variables within the Unix shared libraries.
Win32 developers have come to rely on Win32 Structured Exception Handling (SEH) in their applications. Unix does not inherently support this. With the help of the Internet Explorer team, Mainsoft now includes fairly complete support for SEH in their Win32 layer.
Visual C++ makes use of keywords for alignment, such as unaligned. The Unix team had to write macros to do alignment.
Compilers for Unix do not support nameless nested structures.
Summary
All of this was a lot of work and the Internet Explorer Unix team learned a lot from it. In the future, they plan to use a common code base between their Win32 and Unix versions so that a change in one will automatically be reflected in the other. They are planning to use the Apoge compiler (http://www.apogee.com/) for this common code base. They also plan to incorporate the feedback they get on interface issues. In the meantime, you now know that you, too, can develop your Unix application on Win32. The Internet Explorer team did it and so can you.
© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of use.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
You could use GNOME, w/E running it's win95 theme w/win95 widgets and you've pretty much got a win95-look-and-act-alike.
Just this week, I switched my roommate, who was a Win95 user to the core over to GNOME w/E....to him (using the configuration mentioned above) it's pretty much the same box he always used (without the apps of course).
So even if they DID port the Win32 APIs over to Linux (PLEASE NO!!!) they wouldn't need to write a window manager.....
It would be nice to have a working and fast version of IE5 though...it's so much better than NS4.6 it makes me sick.
Werd.
Just wondering, who would actually use it? Knowing how vehemently most Linux users despise Microsoft (myself included), it would be interesting to get figures of how many people would use it if Microsoft actually came out with MSIE for Linux. I think I personally would, but only for testing purposes to make sure my web sites look right in both IE and Netscape. I figure that would be the main reason why most people would use it as well. Hey, at least it would be useful, eh?
Jaraxle
I *did* register, honestly. Just haven't got time right now to wait for my pwd. Coward or not, here's my 10c worth.
Microsoft ported IE to Linux using MainSoft's Win32 port (they already trashed Bristol Software, Mainsoft's only competitor, by abruptly withdrawing their source code license - there's a lawsuit ongoing over this).
At any event, consider this. A port of IE requires a port of Win32. Which would let everyone else port their software to Linux, right. All you have to do is download IE and then you have the Win32 APIs, unless MS take a lot of time and trouble to remove all the entry points or something. Even if they do, cunning individuals will for sure figure out a way of calling into those routines.
Of course, WINE continues to evolve - although very very slowly - and maybe we *will* have Win32 for Linux soon. I know this will offend the purists but being able to port something quickly to Linux can only help Linux's future, even if the resulting mess might not be very elegant.
It took a bit of digging but here is the link to "Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API" --
http://msdn.microsoft.com/isapi/msdnlib.idc?the
Beware Netscape users: This page will load a really slow Java applet designed to make you wish you had ActiveX.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Why would it ever be open source?? The idea that MS would give away its browser source is almost laughable, especially in any way that would even remotely resemble OS. Microsoft is scared of open source; embracing the model would legitimize the Linux development model they have, so far, gone to great lengths to downplay in front of the media.
If they were ever to 'embrace' the open source model, they would do so in a half-assed way in the form of something that is not even open source, such as restrictive licensing of NT source code that has been mentioned. That way, they can say "we tried it, and people didn't want it, it's a bad idea and it sucks... back to business". That is the ultimate in FUD. They essentially did the same thing when they ported IE to solaris; they bastardized the port - it was bloated, slow, buggy and the most pathetic piece of software I've ever had the misfortune of running. But I'm sure it shut up all the solaris people who had asked for a port, and it sure looks good when they can go to the media and say "look how badly our wonderful software runs on this platform; we tried, but it's just not as good as windows".
The question of whether ie would be open source honestly never even crossed my mind.
I tried IE for HP-UX last year. It stank: it was almost unbelievably slow; the GUI was a custom-designed job that looked like the illegitimate child of Windows and Motif; the Unix convention for config files (human-readable text files) was thrown out the window - the silly thing created a $HOME/.microsoft directory and wrote a registry into it.
It strikes me that Microsoft's engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a port to Unix should be. It should have the functionality of the Windows original, but behave in a way typical of the target platform. The HP-UX port felt like a botched job.
It seems to me that browsers are really a pretty trivial application. That's not meant to downplay the fact that there are some complex things going on inside. But look at the interface. Forward, Back, choose a bookmark. From the users' perspective, they're all pretty much the same. Unlike word processors or spreadsheets or accounting or graphic packages, there really aren't many ways to make one browser dfferent from the next, especially from the end-users' perspective.
It turns out the browser wars were insanely overhyped. It looked important three years ago, but in retrospect, it seems pretty silly to think that somebody could gain influence over the Internet by implemeting and promoting special HTML tags.
OTOH, I'm not exactly holding my breath on the port, with or without source code. This is less than vaporware; this is a rumor of vaporware.
--The basis of all love is respect
This seems to me to be a way to get back control of the straying PC makers.
Now MS can demand that they install IE5 on Linux whenever the PC makers pre-install Linux.
This is the thin edge of the wedgie, folks.
Nitin
The more idiot-proof you make it the smarter the idiots get.
I suspect that this version won't be the IE that people have come to know. On my Windows machines, I use IE5 and I love it. It integrates rather nicely with the operating system, takes advantage of many of Windows' features, and provides a very smooth, stable browsing platform. I've also used IE4.5 for the Mac, and the complete opposite is true. It was slow, bloated, tended to crash a lot, and extremely clunky to use. Without the operating system's built-in mechanisms to take advantage of, IE becomes just another application and it's not particularly an efficient one.
I probably won't even touch IE for Linux if the rumor is true (I think it is; Microsoft legitimizes Linux as a competitor if they develop their software for it). Netscape, even the browser standalone is large enough as it is and I don't need another browser mussing up my system.
You don't have to be paranoid to realize that the reason they "ported" it and actually released that piece of crap was to demonstrate to the public that Solaris is not a useable OS for running desktop applications.
It just isn't possible to write something that crappy and bloated by accident or incompetence.
I guess the reason there's no IE for Linux yet is that they won't recognize it as an OS. When they do that, they will probably release IE for it, and it will be at least as crappy as the Solaris version.
-segfault
I basically agree, however, there is an increasing demand (at least in my company) for intranet web-based applications. Static content is fine, but having a web application is a great way to distribute functionality without the overhead of installing programs on client machines. Since most systems nowadays have web browsers, there is (usually) no additional work to be done. Just give them a URL. The problem as I see it is that the standard form elements provided are too simplistic. Simple text boxes, radio buttons, and drop down lists are fine but are limiting. Also, it was only recently that a standardized document object model was introduced by W3C. That, with a good scripting language, can lead to beautiful and functional applications that people can use in a familiar environment.
IE5 provides a nice platform for web applications. A well designed object model (proprietary, but it is well done) with generally solid scripting has allowed us to develop some really cool web pages. Given the newer standards released by W3C, Mozilla and other non-IE browsers should give Microsoft a run for their (lots of) money.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
It'll go something like this
/tmp/ie ./ms-install ./ms-install
frob% cd
frob% tar -xzf msie5.0.666.tgz
frob%
Error: Internet explorer may only be installed by the superuser
frob% su
Password: *******
frob#
MSIE5.0 installer for Linux x86
Checking for available disk space...
Installing MSIE5.0...
Installing system fonts...
Installing JFC 1.x...
Installing Plugins...
Configuring IE5.0...
Updating system settings...
Done.
The installer will now restart your machine so the changes can take effect...
[beep]
Broadcast message from root (ttyp0) Tue May 25 04:29:06 1999...
The system is going down for reboot NOW !!
[beep]
Stopping ftpd...
Stopping inetd...
...
Unmounting filesystems...
Rebooting system...
[system reboots, BIOS screen, etc.]
Updating ESCD...Success.
Verifying DMI Pool Data...Done
Starting Windows 98...
> Would it be that hard for them to port it to
> Linux if they already have IE 4.01 and IE 5.0
> for Solaris and HP-UX? (They do have it
> available for download.) I mean, would there be
> a lot of code to rewrite If they already got the
> thing working on other POSIX compliant OS's?
It would really depend on how careful/competent the porting team had been. It's easy to write to the POSIX spec and expect the software to build and work on any POSIX-compliant OS, but it's another matter to write it to a specific POSIX-compliant OS (or any small set of them) and then expect it to build and work on any other POSIX-compliant OS.
This is especially true when you throw architectural differences into the mix; SPARC and PA-RISC are both 64-bit big-endian architecures (well, PA-RISC might be little-endian; I can't remember). It may well be that their IE for Unix codebase (hopefully they didn't do two individual ports) contains a lot of 64-bitisms. I have learned not to expect good software engineering practices from them.
> Even though I LOVE Linux, I do welcome IE, even
> though it's from M$, It is the superior browser,
> that wasn't the case when they were both like
> 2.0, but the more they progress, the more bugs I
> see in netscape, and the the more I see IE
> handle browsing the web better and better.
IMO, the existing (old) Netscape codebase is slowly collapsing under its own weight. It's high time a Mozilla-derived product got into Alpha...
> The biggest reason I welcome IE to Linux is
> because I'd like to see a Linux browser that
> properly handles Cascading Style Sheets. I have
> yet to see that on Linux browsers.
I have yet to see that on Microsoft browsers. Try some of the CSS conformance tests in IE sometime.
Personally, I'd rather wait for Mozilla on Linux than for IE. Yes... I know... Mozilla might not not be all there yet, but IE for Linux sure as hell isn't.
DNA just wants to be free...
I have had issues with Netscape 4.x being stable before, but have had no problems with it in the Redhat 6.0 distro. The problem with severe memory leaks and random crashing and on certain pages appears to have vanished. I only restarted netscape a few days ago when I accidently killed the window with Alt-W (I frequently have dozens of browser windows open.)
/etc or /home or whatever back to the parent company to see what competitor's products I have. Its a matter of trust and Microsoft does not have it. Not only that, I don't want to get comfortable with such a product to only get "locked in" to the standards they promote. Active-X? No Thanks!
Would I test Microsoft's browser? No Thanks, I would never trust a code base like that on my computer. I don't want something reading my
Regardless of my lack of problems, I hope to have a GPL'd browser soon. It would be nice to swap code with a browser and build something on a whim.
I downloaded it. It is large, slow, and extremely crash-prone. On the other hand, it did consume all available memory (I can't run both Outlook and Explorer on my desktop, since I only have a measly 64 Mbyte of RAM.)
It is, unfortunately, a fairly typical Microsoft product. In Windows, IE is better than Netscape (by which I mean it's faster, uses less memory, and crashes less often), because they really need for it to be, and because they can get in bed with the OS. In Solaris, they don't seem to care. It is actually bad enough to make me wonder why they bothered.
Actually, some italian guy wrote a shareware program called FullScreen for Netscape that does just what IE does, plus a little more. It's only for Windows, though, I think.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com