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Comment by zepolen | Hacker News Reader

Personally I can't see why they don't stick an IE badge on webkit and be done with it.

Actually I think that's pretty well addressed in the article - WebKit supports a bit too much. Contrary to Apple Microsoft targets the corporate market and weird internal applications. If they start implementing unstable features or using an engine that supports them they will just paint themselves into a corner once again.

. . . or a Windows badge on Linux.

For the most part webapps will work under any OS with a browser, you can't really say the same thing about Windows/Linux software.

Windows NT was designed to have "multiple personalities". It has a Win32 personality most Windows programs see, a POSIX personality (that I think doesn't exist anymore) and an OS/2 personality (that I never saw). Each one could run binaries designed for the respective environment. Few Windows programs ever touch the NT kernel.

OSX is also modeled like this. There is a Mach kernel and a BSD-like personality on top of it.

Wine allows Win32 software to run on top of Unix without ever realizing they are running on top of a "fake" Win32 stack.

I think GNUStep could be used to build something similar that could allow OSX software to run on non-OSX hosts.

the posix personality still exists - it's called SUA; the Subsystem for UNIX Applications. the guys at interop systems have made a really nice ports-esque system for it so it's easy to get up and running with the usual pile of apps.

Do you have more details on this? I looked around for a while and ended up installing cygwin...

I totally agree, I've many times pleaded the case that MS should just ditch Trident in favor of Webkit, and everyone would benefit.

I think it's like a turf war inside MS and the existing IE team managers wouldn't like to lose their position of strength and the no.of developers working under them.

Also the browser is taking up more of the OS capabilities, like threads, storage, GPU acceleration and so on. So MS would be reluctant to let the browser become too strong. But the horse has already bolted and there's always Linux, Android, Meego etc for the browser makers to cater for the netbook, tablet, smart phone markets.

webkit has a fatal flaw: they didn't write it!

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