Way back when, there were versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 for non-Windows OSes such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Mac OS (Classic and X both). It is not unreasonable that they could do it again.

Note those releases were based on an entirely different codebase to the Windows version of IE.

Internet Explorer for Mac was a separate codebase from the Windows version.

The Unix workstation versions (HP-UX, AIX, etc.) were built with a commercial equivalent to Winelib: a library that implemented Win32 APIs on top of Unix and X11.

I have no idea how they managed to build the IE code on a compiler that wasn't MSVC.

When you say "entirely different" you mean they didn't even share the same rendering engine?

The sibling suggests that non-Mac ports shared the Trident rendering engine with IE/Win. IE/Mac used Tasman, which was totally different (and was the first implementation of many CSS 3 features); as far as I'm aware there was no code shared at all between IE/Win and IE/Mac.

Those were basically just independent pieces of software, and had their own set of features and bugs (IE5.5 on mac was notoriously buggy)

5.0 and 5.1 were pretty bad. 5.2 was surprisingly standards compliant for the time (apart from `clear` inheriting, that was painful). 5.5 was a Windows only version of Trident, never available on the Mac (the Mac’s rendering engine was Tasman).