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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

"Even Apple makes Windows versions of Safari. So, why would Microsoft chose to isolate the primary application delivery mechanism (browser) to only their OS?"

1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of doing so.

2.) Safari is based on WebKit so a lot of the cross-platform compatibility bitchwork is already done by the WebKit project, not really Apple.

3.) It appears that Safari for Windows is dying if not already dead.

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On #3 it does seem that Safari for Windows is either dead or very late. As a Windows web developer this means I can't test on the latest Safari anymore. At least with IE it's possible for Mac or Linux users to run IE in a VM.

I'm pretty sure that nobody but web devs actually used Safari/Win, so I understand why Apple want to spend the engineering time porting something that users didn't care about. But how is Apple not shipping Safari on Windows (or Android for that matter) different than Microsoft not supporting IE on Macs or Linux?

1.) Maybe because it would be pretty hard to port IE to an OS with a pretty different architecture and I'm not even sure what would be the potential gains of doing so.

The difficulty of porting the application is not the issue at all. There was a Mac OS X version of Internet Explorer, and it was even the default browser in OS X. Microsoft deprecated it in 2003 shortly after Apple released Safari. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

The potential gains, of course, would be browser market share.

The Mac version of IE was basically a completely different browser. It had its own rendering engine, called Tasman, which was developed separately from Windows IE's rendering engine, Trident.

From the Wikipedia article I linked to in my comment:

Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows. Later versions diverged, particularly with the release of version 5 which included the Tasman layout engine.

Again, the difficulty of porting the browser code over to OS X is not the issue. If Microsoft still wanted to have a cross-platform browser, they would have one. The reason they don't is a business decision, not a technical obstacle.

No one said that it was technically impossible to port it. But it's not exactly easy either and it's not a problem worth solving since it's a wasted endeavor. And yeah I'm sure RMS can't wait to run IE on his machine.

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