Hacker News Reader

Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux

Office maybe, but is there any demand for IE on Linux?

Both times I booted in to Windows over the last ~18 months were to apply for Visas on sites that wouldn't work properly with either Firefox, Chrome or Opera in Linux. With most sites I'd just move on, but for a visa application with no viable alternative...

Sure, that's a problem that ought to be addressed by those sites, but it's still a possible use case.

If you assume the goal of the IE team is to just have as many users as possible then porting IE would be a huge step forward. If you use anything in addition to Windows then you're going probably going to limit your browser choices to ones that are cross platform which right now basically means Chrome or Firefox.

Web development, but you can try to use a few virtual machines to run IE 11 & 9

Wouldn't you still need to use VMs even if IE were available for Linux? Aren't sites supposed to be tested for browsers and platforms? E.g., a site may show an undesired behaviour under Chrome for Windows but not under Chrome for Linux (or vice-versa).

N.B. not a web dev, so please put me straight if I'm wrong.

You can actually just go grab the wms from MS of modern.ie the only limitations is that they can't run for more than one hour.

If the new IE any good, I'd be willing to try it on my Linux box.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com