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Comment by jan_g | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with grandparent's take on webkit meme, I don't agree with your take on multi-platform meme. IE-on-other-platforms meme will never die, because this is an important issue for many people.

For major releases, like IE9, they could have taken another approach. Like, for example, abstracted many components (css/html engine, js engine, plugins framework, etc.) from the underlying OS and then port just the bridge between those components and underlying OS. It's not easy and there're always many quirks, but we're talking about Microsoft, after all.

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That "many people" is developers needing to test pages in IE, not browser end users. I'm web developer, I feel that pain, but realistically I don't see how could porting be useful:

Just quick'n'dirty abstraction layer would result in horrible experience that end users don't want to use: slow, not integrated with OS well enough. There are still Mac users who stick with Safari, because Firefox isn't native enough! Opera is still substandard on OS X and Linux compared to Windows, and they've been working on portable layer for a decade.

Such poor browser wouldn't even be good solution for developers, as your OS wouldn't get same fonts with same metrics and rendering as Windows. With abstraction layer you wouldn't get representative performance. You could even get different rendering and behaviour caused by differences in real DX vs emulation, different media frameworks/codecs/plugins, etc.

Without whole OS it's just not "bug-compatible" enough, and bugs are the only thing you need IE for.

1) I would like to point out that clear separation of functionality in implementation doesn't imply being slow or bug-ridden. And there are levels of abstraction you can take. No need to go Java swing path and abstract gui components, but you can abstract parsers, layouts, js runtime (at least large portions of those).

2) Firefox & Opera are quite good on all major OSes. Of course Linux/OSX versions may not be on the same level as Windows versions (I really don't know, haven't made any tests recently), but they're still pretty good.

3) I'm not advocating that Microsoft makes feature-by-feature compatible ports (for example, activex comes to my mind), but I would like to see the basic stuff, namely layout and js engine. And that would be much easier if they followed what I've said in 1) paragraph.

4) And no, I don't need IE only to test for bugs. I would happily switch if they made a better browser than Chrome which is my current default browser (Firefox used to be my default browser, but I switched earlier this year).

MS making their browser work on other OS's makes about as much sense as MS making their file system explorer app work on other OS's.

Hm, no. Internet explorer is used to view content of the publicly available documents. File explorer is nothing of the sort.

I would rather parallel IE to various document viewers (.doc viewer, for example) which Microsoft provides free of charge. And which, sadly, also aren't available for other platforms.

OK: There is no earthly reason why MS would want to add massively to the development effort of IE (test matrices, abstraction layers, etc etc), in ways that would in no way benefit their customers. Their goal is to provide the best browser tailored to the OS that they sell.

And the idea (by extension) that any app that works with standards-based content should be cross-platform is barmy.

I understand there's additional effort needed. What I don't understand is, why you and some others keep repeating that it's such big problem to solve. It really isn't, based on my experience. There's nothing massive about it. If nothing else, they could open-source it, since it's already free and someone else will write a port. Layout engine(css+html) and js engine would suffice for most use-cases.

No, I am arguing that it is a problem which they have absolutely no incentive to solve.

They're trying to sell Windows licenses. They have no reason to sweat to make a hardware accelerated IE work on OSX, I'm baffled that people think it'd make sense for them.

Ok, question for you. Why do other browsers have a reason to make versions for different platforms ? Even Apple releases Safari for Windows and Apple is notorious for their closed ecosystem of hardware+software.

Apple has a strong incentive to make sure that people using OSX have a great experience. To make sure that OSX can browse the web well they need to make sure that Safari is viewed as a mainstream browser, and that it's easy for developers to test websites on it without having to go buy a Mac.

So by releasing it on Windows they can (a) gain marketshare so it's taken more seriously, and (b) make sure developers who use Windows will test with it.

As for why they didn't just use Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine), Apple also wants to be certain that websites look great on the iPhone/iPad. And my understanding is that Gecko is an absolute monster to get working well on mobile devices. Plus by having their own rendering engine they get to be certain that there'll be no problems adding features needed for touch-based apps to it.

>>Apple has a strong incentive to make sure that people using OSX have a great experience. To make sure that OSX can browse the web well they need to make sure that Safari is viewed as a mainstream browser, and that it's easy for developers to test websites on it without having to go buy a Mac.

>>So by releasing it on Windows they can (a) gain marketshare so it's taken more seriously, and (b) make sure developers who use Windows will test with it.

Exactly, and in my opinion, Microsoft should follow this logic for the same reasons.

Except the argument is not applicable to MS due to their large userbase.

No-one is going to say "I'm not setting up a Windows machine just to test a niche browser like IE. Screw that".

Wasn't the historical answer that apple wanted Web Developers to be able to test their sites in a web-kit browser? If Chrome already existed - I wonder if Apple would have bothered.

IE was available for Mac and Unix earlier.

Possibly made sense back in the day of MS-only web technologies. Now, not so much.

Made sense back in the day when they were trying to muscle Netscape out of business.

IE/Mac had completely different engine, and different UI.

Tasman supported — in it's own buggy way — properties like display:inline-table that Trident didn't support until IE8.

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