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A comment on When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and nobody cared. Parent comment

Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by mhd on Friday March 13, 2015 @02:06PM (#9198720)
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)

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Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by robin_reala on Friday March 13, 2015 @02:33PM (#9198957)
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

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Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by dasil003 on Friday March 13, 2015 @03:57PM (#9199611)
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.
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Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by tripzilch on Sunday March 15, 2015 @01:27PM (#9207249)
> 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".

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Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by exprL on Friday March 13, 2015 @03:57PM (#9199613)
>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.

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Re:When IE gave us beautiful, fast touch interactions, and n... by seanp2k2 on Friday March 13, 2015 @02:11PM (#9198755)
.net cross-platform is called Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platfo...
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