What Microsoft's IE and North Korea Have in Common | Hacker News Reader

What Microsoft's IE and North Korea Have in Common

padgeblog.com

6 pointsjbpadgett14 comments

The author argues that Microsoft should create an open source version of IE so that it's marketing for IE would be more successful.

The commercial goal of the advertising is not to drive IE usage vs Chrome/Firefox on Windows - it's to get people to buy windows machines. They're [re]building the IE brand, dispelling negative perceptions around IE (and Windows, by association) and presenting IE as a superior browser to drive OS/computer purchasing decisions.

None of those goals are served by a cross-platform version - in fact, it would only present a risk if the quality and experience was not similar or better to the native version.

So, how's that going for them?

Didn't the last little video propaganda just note that IE "sucks less" than it used to, and that all people who dislike IE are trolls? Wow, that's really effective. IE propaganda like that surely makes me want to give up my browsing experience and switch to Windows.

Weeeell it's a brand campaign, right, so they'll be measuring it in all sorts of fuzzy terms that provide resistant to boring stuff like "numbers" and "statistics". :P

Don't forget that you are not likely to be the target audience. I'm not a marketing person, but my guess is they're looking to staunch the flow of home users away from windows, and assuring CTO's that the browser won't continue to hold the ecosystem back.

Attracting back Apple users or trying to convince Ubuntu fans to switch to the dark side probably doesn't feature in the plan, for now.

This is one of the most nonsensical posts I've seen in a while. Microsoft has no substantial commercial interest in getting people to use IE. I'd guess it's most important to make IE relevant so that people don't run away from Windows Phone because of it's presence, but other than that, there's not much in it for them. Sure, some ecosystem control, some ability to add proprietary extensions to the web, but on the whole, saying Microsoft's software being on only Microsoft's platform being like a dictatorship that puts it's leader's status above it's civilians having food? I'm not sure I understand.

Apple has actually stopped updating Safari on Windows months ago: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/07/25/apples-removes-mentions-...

Filed under link bait, IMHO. There are so many better opportunities, even Windows Media Player for Mac would make more sense, if it was everything that people want iTunes to be, and you could use it as a Trojan Horse for Windows Phone sync, online services etc...

To my knowledge Apple has discontinued Safari for Windows, so I'd say Microsoft is not alone in tying their browser to their OS.

"Even Apple makes Windows versions of Safari. So, why would Microsoft chose to isolate the primary application delivery mechanism (browser) to only their OS?"

1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of doing so.

2.) Safari is based on WebKit so a lot of the cross-platform compatibility bitchwork is already done by the WebKit project, not really Apple.

3.) It appears that Safari for Windows is dying if not already dead.

1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of doing so.

The difficulty of porting the application is not the issue at all. There was a Mac OS X version of Internet Explorer, and it was even the default browser in OS X. Microsoft deprecated it in 2003 shortly after Apple released Safari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

The potential gains, of course, would be browser market share.

The Mac version of IE was basically a completely different browser. It had its own rendering engine, called Tasman, which was developed separately from Windows IE's rendering engine, Trident.

From the Wikipedia article I linked to in my comment:

Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows. Later versions diverged, particularly with the release of version 5 which included the Tasman layout engine.

Again, the difficulty of porting the browser code over to OS X is not the issue. If Microsoft still wanted to have a cross-platform browser, they would have one. The reason they don't is a business decision, not a technical obstacle.

No one said that it was technically impossible to port it. But it's not exactly easy either and it's not a problem worth solving since it's a wasted endeavor. And yeah I'm sure RMS can't wait to run IE on his machine.

On #3 it does seem that Safari for Windows is either dead or very late. As a Windows web developer this means I can't test on the latest Safari anymore. At least with IE it's possible for Mac or Linux users to run IE in a VM.

I'm pretty sure that nobody but web devs actually used Safari/Win, so I understand why Apple want to spend the engineering time porting something that users didn't care about. But how is Apple not shipping Safari on Windows (or Android for that matter) different than Microsoft not supporting IE on Macs or Linux?

I would hate to hear what the author would compare Microsoft to when it came to silverlight, netflix and linux.

Really? Not going cross-platform makes you North Korea? Linkbait... Surprised it made to the HN homepage.

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