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Comment by confuzatron | Hacker News Reader

OK: There is no earthly reason why MS would want to add massively to the development effort of IE (test matrices, abstraction layers, etc etc), in ways that would in no way benefit their customers. Their goal is to provide the best browser tailored to the OS that they sell.

And the idea (by extension) that any app that works with standards-based content should be cross-platform is barmy.

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I understand there's additional effort needed. What I don't understand is, why you and some others keep repeating that it's such big problem to solve. It really isn't, based on my experience. There's nothing massive about it. If nothing else, they could open-source it, since it's already free and someone else will write a port. Layout engine(css+html) and js engine would suffice for most use-cases.

No, I am arguing that it is a problem which they have absolutely no incentive to solve.

They're trying to sell Windows licenses. They have no reason to sweat to make a hardware accelerated IE work on OSX, I'm baffled that people think it'd make sense for them.

Ok, question for you. Why do other browsers have a reason to make versions for different platforms ? Even Apple releases Safari for Windows and Apple is notorious for their closed ecosystem of hardware+software.

Apple has a strong incentive to make sure that people using OSX have a great experience. To make sure that OSX can browse the web well they need to make sure that Safari is viewed as a mainstream browser, and that it's easy for developers to test websites on it without having to go buy a Mac.

So by releasing it on Windows they can (a) gain marketshare so it's taken more seriously, and (b) make sure developers who use Windows will test with it.

As for why they didn't just use Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine), Apple also wants to be certain that websites look great on the iPhone/iPad. And my understanding is that Gecko is an absolute monster to get working well on mobile devices. Plus by having their own rendering engine they get to be certain that there'll be no problems adding features needed for touch-based apps to it.

>>Apple has a strong incentive to make sure that people using OSX have a great experience. To make sure that OSX can browse the web well they need to make sure that Safari is viewed as a mainstream browser, and that it's easy for developers to test websites on it without having to go buy a Mac.

>>So by releasing it on Windows they can (a) gain marketshare so it's taken more seriously, and (b) make sure developers who use Windows will test with it.

Exactly, and in my opinion, Microsoft should follow this logic for the same reasons.

Except the argument is not applicable to MS due to their large userbase.

No-one is going to say "I'm not setting up a Windows machine just to test a niche browser like IE. Screw that".

Wasn't the historical answer that apple wanted Web Developers to be able to test their sites in a web-kit browser? If Chrome already existed - I wonder if Apple would have bothered.

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