Technical challenges to porting IE to Linux?

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I was just wondering whether there were any specific challenges to porting IE
to Linux (Besides the political issues). IE was succesfully ported to OS X,
and as it is on a BSD base, I imagine the port to linux would be relatively
painless. I know that a lot of linux users don't like IE, but there are
plenty of websites that REQUIRE it. Any ideas/comments?
 
theseer540 said:
I was just wondering whether there were any specific challenges to porting IE
to Linux (Besides the political issues). IE was succesfully ported to OS X,
and as it is on a BSD base, I imagine the port to linux would be relatively
painless. I know that a lot of linux users don't like IE, but there are
plenty of websites that REQUIRE it. Any ideas/comments?
Click to expand...

I would guess that the major challenge to porting IE to Linux is that
Microsoft has no interest in doing so or in allowing anyone else to do so.
The next greatest challenge would be the extreme integration of IE into
Windows. Making it work independently of the operating system would be a
big job.
 
I understand how IE has been integrated into Windows, but I guess my point
is, then how did they port to Mac OS X ?

On another note, one of the strengths of IE over firefox is that it loads a
LOT faster than firefox on Windows. Why? Is this because because the code is
heavily optimised for Windows, or because the Gecko rendering environment is
inherently slower than IEs ?
 
Partly, but I think the major reason is that, because of the intergration of
IE in Windows, Windows will not function normally unless the required part
of IE is loaded at startup. (Just remember some rumors that Windows will
drop some percents of performance if user removed IE from Win98, and believe
that still hold true for newer Windows OSs) And that creates a difference.

Think of some software that includes a startup icon that partial loads
itself at startup. They really seems to take shorter loadtime than others
don't.
 
Hi,

Firefox (and thundebird and mozilla) don't use the os native widgets all the
time. Most of them are drawn using gecko (mozilla rendering engine). This
explains some of the symptoms.

Eventually firefox is a "xul application", meaning that the whole interface
is rendered using some kind of special htm dedicated to application
interface rendering. This is a verbose language that needs more power to run
(remember that sometimes it has to run on the fly, eg: code isn't
necessarily compiled) and more ram.

Now about page loading time.. well i think it deals more with the way gecko
renders things, eg: not in the same order as ie or opera would, not
"painting" any border unless a background has been defined, only rendering
text once every table has been drawn, etc.. (that's a guess based on
personal experience though). That would explain why one would feel
firefox/opera/konq/safari being different from other browsers.

If you wish to compare gecko with ie you can try various "dual display"
browsers or simply have a look at kameleon. Once there even was an option in
maxthon/myie2 to use gecko (this was experimental though).
 
theseer540 said:
I understand how IE has been integrated into Windows, but I guess my point
is, then how did they port to Mac OS X ?
Click to expand...

IE for OS X was based on IE for the MacOS, which was developed
independently of IE for Windows, so is basically a different browser
than IE for Windows.

Note that Microsoft has ended support for IE for the MacOS and OS X,
except for critical security updates.

Note also that Microsoft used to support IE for Sun Solaris and HP-UX.
On another note, one of the strengths of IE over firefox is that it loads a
LOT faster than firefox on Windows. Why? Is this because because the code is
heavily optimised for Windows, or because the Gecko rendering environment is
inherently slower than IEs ?
Click to expand...

On my PC Firefox is about as fast as IE.
 
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