Once upon a time, IE was the best browser available on Mac -- mostly due to being actually quite good. If that quality would return, I can see some people switching. Maybe not the "rockstar Ruby/Go developers", but a lot of the people who just need their $1k facebook machines.

As for Linux, well, I don't think you'll go far there with proprietary programs. But let's assume a .NET like open source initiative. I'd give IE the application a pretty small market share then, but see no problem at all with programs using the rendering engine, i.e. a common "libIE" dependency.

(And, of course, if it actually is the same engine as on Windows, testing alone would guarantee a lot of installations)

IE on Mac was a completely different beast to IE on Windows; it had separate rendering[1] and Javascript engines. There was an IE for Unix[2] which shared the Trident engine, but it never got significant traction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

There was a brief moment in time where IE 5 for Mac had the best CSS support of any browser on any platform (IE on Windows was a completely different engine). However part of being on the bleeding edge was that when development stagnated it had the weirdest bugs that we had to deal with for years.

> Once upon a time, IE was the best browser available on Mac -- mostly due to being actually quite good.

Huh, really. When was this then? I remember from during my veteran days of the browser wars (2005-2008 or so), IE for Mac was the only browser that PPK (of the Quirksmode.org compatibility tables) actually outright dismissed and at some point stopped testing for. If I remember correctly, his words were "bug-ridden crash-prone piece of trash".

>mostly due to being actually quite good

While I wouldn't generally praise (any of) the browsers of that time, Macs really didn't have much competition at that time when it came to web browsers.

.net cross-platform is called Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platfo...

In the mid 90's, before Linux had gained any traction in corporate environments, IE was available for some flavours of Unix such as Solaris and HP-UX. In the Solaris shop I was working at the time, I remember we had a great laughs at the slogan they were using: "Bringing the internet to Unix". I don't believe it was particularly popular and it dissapeared quietly a few years later:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

That is laughably ballsy. Bringing coal to Newcastle, as they used to say.

Hey Michelangelo, sign up for my art class and I'll show you how it's done.

I would. I installed IE7 thought wine. Partly because masochism, partly because if I could make my website look good in IE7 running through wine then it would look good on any browser.

I would, if only for testing. I regularly cycle browsers to gain familiarity with them.

I'm regularly using IE for testing with VirtualBox and images from Microsoft's official site [1]. Though I doubt there is a possibility to do the other way around with Safari on Windows.

[1] http://modern.ie/

i was using this to run application loader on windows...https://atlas.hashicorp.com/jhcook/boxes/osx-yosemite-10.10