Re: Mac OSX and IE

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I have been reading about the life and times of Apple, and have recently 
>noticed some interesting things about Mac OSX. It seems that it runs on the 
>BSD kernel (Darwin) and is modified to support existing Mac apps. Among these 
>is IE5 and M$ is planning on porting Office to it too. 
>My question is this, if IE is ported to a BSD, won't it be easy to port it to 
>Linux?

Not neccesarily, there is much more involved in porting something like a browser across platforms than a kernel (in fact, the kernel is almost irrelevant, as a well written app will make close to zero system calls).  The MacOS API/model and MacOS UI all exists on Mac OSX,  which is how they maintain backward compatibility with existing Mac applications.  

But IE is already available for Solaris (not x86 Solaris), which means porting is not an issue.  Microsoft would only be injured by having IE available on an x86 OS other than Windows,  the same goes for Office.  You won't see it happen.  Microsoft is clearly using IE as a wedge against other operating systems, and with a fair amount of success.

Some recent statistics show that there may now be more desktop Linux installs than MacOS installs,  but this isn't about market share because Microsoft is a monopoly.