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Comment by pdknsk | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter unless they make it open-source or at the very least cross-platform. I'm not downloading a 4GB VM from http://modern.ie to try it.

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We created http://remote.modern.ie so you can stream Internet Explorer to your Mac. Even to your iOS device :)

Please, let's not pretend remote.modern.ie OR the VM's are ANYTHING close to running the browser locally. They are, at best, a band-aid. Yes, pjmlp, safari is OS X-only now but just because I'm a Mac user does not mean I support that decision, I don't. Also you know how many times in the past 10 years I've heard someone say "Well it works in Chrome/FF/IE but not in Safari?" Never. That's not to say it never happens but I've spent many agonising hours trying to make IE behave when it works PERFECTLY in Chrome/FF/Safari. I've had a handful of "It works in FF but not Chrome" and "It works in Chrome but not FF" but I've got a landfill full of "It doesn't work in IE".

Things I need before I'm going to pretend IE isn't a steaming pile of shit, hell I'd settle for just 1-2:

* Evergreen browser (I'm sick of dealing with 7/8/9, I don't look forward to playing the same song and dance with 10/11/12/etc)

* Cross-platform (Testing on Linux or a Mac is painful)

* Open source (IE is the ONLY major browser that is not OS, and yes I know Chromium != Chrome but I'd be fine with IE doing the same sort of thing)

Actually IE11 isn't too bad.

Still a bit worse than the others, but Safari has also lagged lately (and Safari also isn't evergreen).

(I agree with all of the above for the older IE < 10)

What about to my Mint pc?

From the instructions it appears it works with a current RDP client (likely the version required for connecting to Windows 8 or 2012R2)

Interesting, as their partner for Modern.IE, BrowserStack, uses a Javascript based remote desktop. (It may also support Flash on certain browsers, but I'm not sure about that part.)

Honestly, with as much OSS as they've been putting out there recently, I wouldn't be surprised to see this browser go that route too.

Maybe.

They can't. They said in a court of law that IE can't be separated from Windows.

But this is another Browser:

> This new rendering engine was designed with Project Spartan in mind, but will also be available in Internet Explorer on Windows 10 for enterprises and other customers who require legacy extensibility support.

This is a good point. While I have my doubts that it will be an entirely new browser, by simply renaming it they might be able to offer a version for non-Windows OS-es without making earlier statements seem ridiculous. And they should.

Spartan isn't IE.

I know this is this is the narrative they are trying to promote but I remove code from my projects all the time but don't feel it makes it a different project.

Spartan isn't a subset of IE either. We've added support for nearly 50 standards, and more. The delta between IE and Spartan is massive, and growing quickly.

Interesting, if it's a complete fork does that mean IE is not going to be maintained? I thought IE was going to continue on for the time being. If there isn't a common codebase does that mean you're going to be duplicating work? Why?

Internet Explorer will stick around for legacy applications, but Project Spartan uses EdgeHTML (a fork of MSHTML) and is meant to be used with the web moving forward.

Citation? IE shipped on Mac until Safari was released.

Mac IE used a different rendering engine than Windows IE. Windows' is (was) called Trident. Mac IE's was called Tasman[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

“Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free. Those who opposed Microsoft's position countered that the browser was still a distinct and separate product which did not need to be tied to the operating system, since a separate version of Internet Explorer was available for Mac OS.”

— from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

This isn't legacy IE but a new engine. It's like saying Chrome can't run on Linux because MS said IE can't be separated from Windows. Nonsense, but I get your point ("MS lied back then").

That had more to do with the fact that Windows depends on the Trident than the other way around. Stuff like the help files used mshtml.dll.

The actual court case you're referring to has to do with the bundling of IE with Windows and how it can't be pulled out. Remember that IE actually used to be cross-platform until version 5 with IE for Mac although it used a different rendering engine (Tasman vs Trident).

And I am not buying a Mac to try out Safari.

To try WebKit you don't need to. It builds a very basic browser, either GTK+ or Qt based.

Webkit != Safari, specially when tracking down rendering issues.

They also use different JavaScript engines and that can bite you hard.

I think the point is that you shouldn't need to try it. If you write standard code, it should work.

That would be a first.

It is always write once, debug everywhere and always will be.

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