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Programming IT Technology

IE For Mac OS X == MS Apps For UNIX? 29

Posted by Cliff from the things-that-make-you-go-'hmmmm' dept.
A nameless mouse slipped this one under the door a bit ago: "Just a quick question ... If Mac OS X is based on Unix, and Microsoft creates applications eg IE for Mac OS X, how much work is involved in getting those applications working in *nix??" Y'know, I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I bet you Microsoft has. What do you think?
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IE for Mac OS X == MS apps for UNIX? More

IE for Mac OS X == MS apps for UNIX?

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  • There already is IE for UNIX (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They have HP-UX and Solaris binaries for IE. Yuck.
  • (See my previous post)
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • ...they feel so fucking slow -- even on the latest Ultra hardware -- that I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Microsoft ported a _great_ deal of Windows itself in order to get them to work. Take a look at the shit it installs sometime - libtcpip.so? Um, gee, isn't the standard TCP stack that comes with Solaris good enough? As if that's not scary enough, the color picker is straight out of Windows 3.1 (and it's slooooow.)

    Oh well. I'm still waiting for the Linux Media Player which will be released "in a few weeks"!!! I can HARDLY wait!

    (don't bother if you don't get the joke.)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • And, the likelihood of Apple making their GUI available, is the same as the likelihood of MS Office for KDE.

    Not so. MS Office for KDE is quite a bit more likely, especially if there's an MS breakup but even if there isn't. MS is NOT utterly opposed to writing software for other platforms. They're not entirely stupid. If there becomes a significant market for it, it'll eventually happen...

    --

  • Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:3)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @01:48PM (#1062148) Homepage
    They didn't port Win32 - far be it from Microsoft to do something truly challenging and innovative. Rather; they bought a competing API called MainWin IIRC to do the trick.

    On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...

    --
  • As another poster said, it's not quite that simple. IE5 for MacOS X is Carbon-based, which basically means that it is based on a rewritten set of traditional MacOS APIs (basically MacOS stripped of the stupid code that has held it back).

    It technically runs on a Unix, but so do some Windows apps in Wine. About the same kind of thing, but it's an officially blessed API. You won't be seeing Apple release their APIs any time soon (I wouldn't blame them), and stuff would still need to be recompiled to X86 for most Unix/Linux people to make use of it.

    Of course, it doesn't use stuff like X anyhow, so Microsoft would be in for quite a rewrite...

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • OS X is not Unix (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday May 18, 2000 @07:27PM (#1062150) Homepage
    Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.
  • I doubt that Microsoft will write X apps for Mac OS X.

    They'll use Apple's GUI system.

    And, the likelihood of Apple making their GUI available, is the same as the likelihood of MS Office for KDE. :-)
  • Yes!

    This is the MacOS9 version of IE which is carbonized. It has nothing to do with UNIX. It is MacOS9 running in avirtual machine on MacOSX
  • Under MacOS X, Carbon and Cocoa run with full BSD creamy goodness and with juicy Aqua and the rest of the good services OS X brings... for the "normal" MacOS apps written in less enlightened times, they'll have the Classic Environment. It's not quite as glitzy (as of DP3, it still looked like MacOS 9), but it will allow older programs to run completely unmodified.

    I think that's what you're thinking of. Carbon is the updated set of APIs. Applications will still have to be recompiled to use Carbon; it's not automatic.

    Cocoa is what Apple will be pushing after everyone's made the transition, but both Cocoa and Carbon will be "native" and "true" OS X.


    --

  • Re:Carbon... (Score:3)

    by The Happy Blues Man ( 35927 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @01:29PM (#1062154) Homepage
    Well, you're mostly right. Carbon is the Mac Toolbox with all the stupid code gone (like munge, I hope). I do believe that Apple will be phasing Carbon out, but not after a looong time.

    Carbon is there so Developers don't have to do a complete rewrite to get well-performing apps in OS X. I don't see them getting rid of it for years, simply because it's *that* much easier to make real OS X apps.

    As for the CarbonLib for OS 9 and 8.5, that's just so developers who don't have a developer preview can still build Carbon apps... and it also allows Carbon apps that would normally only be able to be run on OS X to be run on OS 9. It's not stripped down at all (any more than is due to the limitations of OS 9 anyway, but on OS X, it rockets on like it should), just an abstraction layer.

    As for Microsoft, I don't see them doing any pure Unix stuff anytime soon (aside from what they have done). OS X isn't exactly the stepping stone its BSD layer makes it out to be.

    ... just in case anyone cared.

    --

  • Of course MS has thought of it... (Score:3)

    by mcmay ( 59905 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @02:00AM (#1062155) Homepage
    It's probably a part of the reason why work on Mac IE is finished, after they put out the version for Mac OS X.

    Yes, completely.

    The story circling on sites like Macintouch [macintouch.com] is that, despite press releases [apple.com] suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.

    I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.

    Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris [microsoft.com] and HP/UX [microsoft.com], in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.

  • Re:GUI (Score:1)

    by lamz ( 60321 )
    True enough. Somewhere in my basement is a copy of MS Word for Atari. Hasn't been updated lately...

    Mike van Lammeren
  • I have an Ultra 10, 440MHz. Although it's a little bit slow loading, it's a heck of a lot faster than netscape loading. The page renderer is also a lot better than netscape 4.x's (however mozilla's page renderer is vastly superior). Outlook express is also a lot more functional than Netscape messenger, which doesn't even support multiple pop accounts under UNIX.
  • Well this was just posted in the AskSlashdot area, so you'll get nice responses.

    I've tried IE in Solaris. It was ugly at first but survivable later, enough so I don't mind using it too much when I rember I have it :-)

  • Apple is supporting the carbon api for maintaining compatibility with "classic" apps. The cocoa api is supposed to be for Mac OS X natively.

    The fact that the Mac remains a "mainstream alternative" to windows lies in it's developer support. Once those companies start to make the transition to designing apps for the FreeBSD environment, I don't see a very difficult time writing an appropriate GUI API (perhaps working with Eazel) to be able to easily port over applications to other *nix platforms.

  • Microsoft is porting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express to Carbon, the updated version of the Mac OS API. Carbon is Apple proprietary code and I doubt that you will ever see it on a non-Apple Unix box.

    But remember that IE also runs on Solaris and HP-UX... in fact I've heard that rather than porting the IE code, they ported the Win32 API. If this is true, then it's certainly possible (though unlikely IMHO) that they might release Office, Outlook, etc, for Unix as well.
  • On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms?

    Please don't get the impression that I care one way or another whether or not I can get MS products on Unix. I stongly prefer Netscape (probably since the first graphical browser I used was Mosaic) for browsing, pine for mail, and LaTeX or flat ASCII for papers and presentations, and, oh, yeah, Unix for my OS. So MS really doesn't have anything to sell me (or that they could give away to me, for that matter). Especially in the case of Office vs. LaTeX, I find my self being absolutly horrified at the formatting Office produces. I was helping one of my housemates proofread a 30 page paper for one of her classes, and the formatting was just awful!

    Though it might be good thing if Office was ported to Unix, just to provide competition with the free {beer/speach} Office-clones. That'll make both the free versions and MS's better (well, assuming MS doesn't just crank up the FUD instead). I think competition is a good thing. Hell, it made IBM into a pretty decent company (though I wasn't around in the old days to know for sure how bad they were in their prime). Maybe it'll eventually do the same for MS.
  • in fact I've heard that rather than porting the IE code, they ported the Win32 API

    Close. Except MS didn't port the Win32 API, they used MainWin from MainSoft [mainsoft.com].

    More info can be found here. [microsoft.com]

  • The've had IE for UNIX for quite a while now. They are just trying to place a monopoly on everything they possibly can. My suggestion: get Netscape/Mozilla.
  • I suspect that for IE 5, MS has used the Carbon API, because it's quicker to port the current Mac version of IE to Carbon.

    But, Carbon is essentially a stepping stone to Cocoa, which is the real POSIX stuff, IIRC, and likely Apple intends to slowly supplant Carbon - it was introduced with OS 9, downloadable for OS 8.5 +. This presumably means that it doesn't use the full power of Mach, BSD, etc.

    So, my (highly uninformed) guess is this will mean IE 6 for UNIX, since that will likely line up with Mac OS XI or 11 or whatever they decide to call it, which will be the one where they're really phasing out Carbon.

  • This is true. Not only IE for HP [microsoft.com]/Solaris [microsoft.com], but Microsoft offers Services for Unix 2.0 [microsoft.com]

    My guess is that IE 5 for Linux/BSD is a compile away. But the greatest barrier won't be technical...

  • Yup, bsd, despite all the POSIX support that Wilfredo Sanchez has been building in.

    IE5/MacOSX will be/is a Carbon app. As others have mentioned, this is a technology added by Apple so that people with existing MacOS projects can protect their investment by porting to the environment with "less than ten percent" change required to the codebase.

    There are other, more exciting rumours about a version of Office being built on the (new, exciting, NEXTSTEP-derived) Cocoa APIs. This is only a wild rumour, which I personally do not believe, but either way, as with the Carbonised IE5, it would be only an infinitesimally small step on the way towards having it up and running on any sort of *nix other than MacOSX.

  • I prefer NS6 over Communicator 4.7, and either one over IE5. This, however, isn't just flat out hating MS. First off, I haven't used Windows in months, second, NS6 is much faster, and third, IE is just too vulnerable (I have a Pentium w/ the f0 0f bug, which is prob. under Linux, but windows, which doesn't have the workaround, with IE, which allows the bug to be put into effect with a simple ActiveX control, is not a good combination. As for the appearance, it doesn't look all that bad to me, but then again, I need a new monitor (a wire broke, so now everything is blue). In regards to Unix ports of MS apps, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon, one of the reasons being that MS won't have anything to do with aything htat is open source, unless it's under an NDA.
  • Bottom line: it wouldn't be very hard to port IE to any flavor of Unix/Linux -- but MS seems uninterested in anything beyond Solaris and HP/UX. Why those two, I wonder? Corporate nose-tweaking?

    Incidentally, MS didn't just work on Xenix -- they used to own it. SCO was originally just a VAR. MS went through a "DOS as junior Unix" phase in the early 80s.
  • Somewhere around I have a Microsoft Multiplan cartridge for the TI99/4A...
  • Just wondering if anyone has used the HPUX or Solaris versions of IE5? If so, how do they compare to the Mac and Win versions? I was a die-hard Netscape user until AOL turned it to crap. (here come the flames) :-)
  • Thanks for the comments. Sorry for almost being a butt-head with my NS quibble. It just felt like I was hit with a brick after I fired up Netscape 6 for the first time. All they had to do was fix it up a little bit, to bring back the faithful, but instead it looks like it belongs on a set-top box connected to a Barbie TV! :-)
  • I agree with that last post about "look and feel" of the host OS. It's funny that you picked on Quicktime, as I dislike it also. Usually, the first thing I do when I get a cool quicktime movie is to convert it to an mpeg, so I can enjoy it on a better player. My original beef with NS6 was it's ugliness, but also with it's size. It's still almost as bloated as IE5. I have, though, found the solution for those strapped for size and speed: Opera! If you haven't used it in awhile, check it out. It's still in the "rather stinky" stage on Linux, but the Win32 version is really starting to kick ass. (and it's only 2MB!)

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