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Microsoft Operating Systems BSD

IE For FreeBSD 33

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Walk-like-an-Egyptian dept.
Moderator writes: "Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to FreeBSD? Apparently, someone else thinks so, and set up a petition for Microsoft to port IE to FreeBSD. Hey, I'm no Microsoft lover, but IE is better than Netscape." Hmm. Personally, I'm more of a "xterm -geometry =120x50 -e w3m" man, but to each his own I suppose.
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IE for FreeBSD More

IE for FreeBSD

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  • To bad no-one will see this because:
    A: BSD threads seem to get about 2 moderator points, total.
    B: this is off from the home page.

    That being said..

    Microsoft didn't really port IE to anything but Windows or Mac; they use MainSoft's Win32 port to port it to Solaris. MainSoft does not support Linux or FreeBSD (last time I checked). Therefore it would take a great deal more work to port.

    So it seems unlikely Microsoft is going to go out of their way to support FreeBSD or linux and time soon. The only reason they ported it to Solaris is because MainSoft made it relatively painless for them.

    People should petition for MainSoft to port their Win32 layer to other unix's, instead.

    -Jon
  • IE is not faster than netscape

    Oh please! There's no contest! For loading pages, they might be fairly even (not that it matters on fast connections anyway) but for rendering pages, IE is *MUCH MUCH MUCH* faster.

    Even a Netscape coder working on Mozilla answered a question regarding Mozilla's speed vs IE's speed with:

    "When is Mozilla going to be faster than IE? Probably never.. Why? Because of the full standards support."

    So yeah, while Mozilla is going to have better support for standards than the current IE versions, as far as speed goes - there's no question about which browser is the fastest one at the moment.

    BTW, the new IE for Mac OS X seems to be very solid both in terms of speed and standards support! This is good news because it further forces Mozilla into harder competition and it gives some hope that maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is going to release a browser that supports standards after all.. at some point...

  • Wrong. You obviously haven't tried IE on Unix yet. Using IE on Solaris is awefull. Netscape is bad, but this is far worse. Besides, the binary version for download is not optimized. If you want it to be faster, download the source, and compile with optimizations on and debugging symbols off. You'll get a much faster mozilla.
  • bsd doesn't suck, it's proven to be better than linux (or else yahoo, hotmail, cdrom, etc... would use linux

    :) Oh, but how about the 100000 sites that run Linux? Don't they prove that Liunx is better than BSD? No? Didn't think so.. Maybe it's just a BIT more complex than that. :)
  • Sure people will see it. Check out this idea. Port KDE to M$windows. All of it not just the file manager/browser.

    Netscape is ok for the graphic/media browseing, however, I like lynx. IE can burn in hell.

    -d

  • I hate to say it ... but this is a good idea.

    Netscape is total crap, and Mozilla M15 runs like a dog. And this is on a Dual PIII-500 w/192mb ram !!!

    (I'm not even gonna mention how mozilla runs on my P166 Laptop w/32mb ram, except that it took 10 minutes to start!)

    I'm really looking forward to improvements in Mozilla, and hopefully by M16/M17 it will be faster and more usable (at least the crashing has gone away), but IE for FreeBSD (and Linux) would be pretty good. ATM it is the only decent browser available.

    The chances of this happening, however, is slim. MS apparently refuses to develop software for alternative OS's that run on x86. (Maybe FreeBSD/Alpha, FreeBSD/ppc and FreeBSD/IA64 have a chance...)

    D.

  • Whuuu? M14 runs like a champ on my PII-233, even with Windows on 64 MB. Suffice it to say that your experiences don't jibe with mine. Have you tried looking at Opera [opera.com] as an alternative? I know that quite a few people are very pleased with it.

  • While your talking about browsers on FreeBSD, can anyone else get Netscape4.72 with FreeBSD3.4 working on Slashdot.. it consistently crashes with me, works fine on linux though.
  • At my old job they had IE for Solaris running on UltraSparc 60's and it was slower than hell. I can't imagine how it would run on my poor little K6-2.

    If they want to port it thats fine with me as long as it runs at comparable speeds to the windows version or at least faster/more reliable/less memory than Netscape. I doubt it will ever happen.

    Andrew
  • bsd doesn't suck, it's proven to be better than linux (or else yahoo, hotmail, cdrom, etc... would use linux, and besides the linux and BSD communities would be better off working together than posting flamebait like this). However, I do not wanna see anything MS ported to FreeBSD. That would pollute it too much.
  • It's a conspiracy!

    No, not really. Part of the problem is Netscape won't offer an ELF binary of Netscape for FreeBSD.

    Try the Linux Netscape under FreeBSD's Linux ABI Compatibility or try the BSD/OS version.

    I've tried the former, and it works great. It's a better choice since you can use all the plugins for Linux then too.

    I don't know how well the BSD/OS Netscape runs, but someone's working on getting it into the Ports Collection.

  • The best way to make mozilla move zippily is to compile it yourself. Just download a source tarball, run the build configurator and do it yourself. Strip out all of the debug crap because you don't need it.

    --
    Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess
  • I had to turn off the Java script. That fixed the
    crashes. But of course no Java. Which maybe a good thing :|

    -Scott
  • MS apparently refuses to develop software for alternative OS's that run on x86
    After the MS breakup is complete, MS-Apps is going to be able to, nay, encouraged to port their software to other platforms. And where do they go after they make the IE MacOS port? If there's already a petition and demand for the product, MS-Apps would probably be more than willing to write the port to BSD. Especially if they could put it under some sort of semi-restrictive open source licence so that the community would maintain it, at no cost to them. Same with ISS (Gotta love BSD TCP stacks), Word (Bring all of those Microsoft users over to a stable platform), etc...

  • Netscape 4.72+ are much stabler than any prior version provided you don't leave CSS on. (sometimes JavaScript crashes the browser, but I haven't seen this happen in 4.73)

    --
    Eric is chisled like a Greek Godess

  • Bad original subject line! (Score:3)

    by #FF6600 ( 179635 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2000 @09:49AM (#1023188)
    The subject of this news item makes it look as though there is something actually happening with IE and BSD. (In fact there isn't and probably will never be.) A better subject line would be "IE for BSD???"
  • Heh heh heh, I spoke too soon. But honestly, Microsoft isn't *really* gonna split.

  • What? Hell no... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IE is not faster than netscape. IE is loaded when windows loads, and as such loads faster in windows. On BSD I dare say it would be slower than Netscape. This is something I adamantly oppose.
  • Alright genius, where did I say one way or the other how I felt about whether it was acceptable or not?

    Making an application work with an OS and its base is the best way of development. My statement illustrates that bringing in a port of a huge bloated static IE is pointless. Using a browser built with our libs and toolkits is the *idea*.

    IE for Unix is a pointless exercise and is as much a kludge as the old Netscapes have been, most likely even worse.
  • Its not true that IE, Netscape/Mozilla are the only choices out there (for X), There is also Opera. True that at the current moment that releases are only found for Linux, but it wont be long before it gets ported to BSD.

    On a side note, a update of how the software is going can be found on http://www.operasoftware.com/linux/ind ex.html [operasoftware.com]

    This isn't ment to be flame or anything, its ment to be informitive. It would be nice to see more options available for any OS.

  • Netscpae is still the browser of choice in the Macintosh community. But if MS stopped porting IE, Outlook (shudder), Office, and other productivity apps to the mac, then they would really have been blatantly monopolizing and the government lawsuit would have come a lot earlier. (macs are the only 'real' competition to Windows. Nobody makes money from BSD/Linux and Judge Jackson called them "fringe" OSes anyways)
  • It may run good for you but people always seem to forget mozilla is hardly even BETA yet. People want production quality, not a beta that was compiled the night before.
  • The key is that you start and exit IE much more than you reboot. My Windows machines at work has been up just under six months without a reboot, and I start IE at least five or six times per day. It takes about 1 second. Now netscape takes about 10 seconds to start. Suppose, the overhead of IE is 15 extra seconds for the computer to boot. The cost of starting IE 5 times per day, on a computer booted once every six months is 915 seconds. The cost of starting Netscape 5 times per day on a computer booted once every six months is 9000 seconds. Case closed. This does not count rendering time either, which IE is also much faster at than Netscape.
  • MacOS X, while based on FreeBSD, is still very very different. And let us remember that MacOS X runs on PowerPC hardware. People who are buying Macs have a perfectly good netscape (which runs much much faster than it does on X11) to run.

    Since chances are those people who have the money to go for Macs instead of cheap PCs wouldn't be swayed by a mere browser, MS is just tossing in their support in hopes of getting more IE users so they can control the internet. that's secondary to getting everyone to run Windows though. If MacOS ran on Intel (and it won't as long as MS is a unified company, since they would threaten to pull Office) you can bet that MS would pull the IE port faster than you can say monopoly.

  • Its slow because instead of a native binary it makes a whole win32 subsystem or api or whatever you want to call it. The HPUX version is the same way.
  • FreeBSD's Netscape dies because of some bug which is tickled by a 1x1 image in the JavaScript SlashDot uses.

    Even 4.73 still dies on me. It is sad that Netscape won't compile an ELF version. Anyone know why they won't?
  • How about that worlds busiest ftp site that runs linux, oh wait.....
  • Great and what about porting Window$ itself to FreeBSD !
    Really there are too many troll on slashdot to be interesting any more.
  • I've been reading some of the comments out there, and a lot of them resonate the following:

    "If only IE ran on {Linux,FreeBSD,OpenBSD}, I could ditch that crappy Windows {98,NT,2000} for a REAL operating system!"

    Well, let's do the math here: gain a non-paying IE customer and lose a paying Windows customer, or keep the paying Windows customer?

    I think it's clear they aren't going to port. Which of course, blows the whole IE-on-Mac argument out of the water... ;-)

    --jeddz
  • Nobody mentioned the reason IE runs better than NS on a Win box...it's built around and uses the loaded libs that Win uses. If IE were ported it would be similarly bloated as NS is now under linux or BSD's.

    Mozilla has made amazing leaps towards stability, and with Konqueror from KDE2 on its way...

    We'll be in good shape soon, and with something that is our own and not a kludgy port and a static bin.
  • Ahhh, but there may be... Just wait until the browser company has to start selling its products and then they'll try to get it anywhere they can to make a buck.

  • Therefore, Microsoft products don't belong in ***FREE*** (!) BSD. Hmm...

    (I mean Free as in Speech, that is)

    (-;
  • IE already exists for Solaris, it sucks. It's very slow (noticeably slower than Netscape) and there exactly 0 plugins available. There is no reason to expect that a FreeBSD port would be any better.

    Face it. The only reason IE runs well with Windows is because it is so tightly coupled to the OS. Port it to any other OS, and it's a dog.

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