Internet Explorer for UNIX
Encyclopedia
Internet Explorer for UNIX was a proprietary
graphical
web browser
that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft
for use in the X Window System
on Solaris or HP-UX
. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5
in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.
, then executive vice president of Microsoft, had shown an interest earlier in the month for a Microsoft browser to run on Unix as part of the strategy to wage the browser wars
:
In June, Microsoft entered into a contract with Bristol Technology Inc.
to develop a version of Bristol's porting application
Wind/U (archived) to port IE for Windows to Unix. At this time Bristol also had a contract with Microsoft allowing it access to Windows source code from September 1994 to September 1997. The project was officially announced by Microsoft at the end of July 1996 that a native version of IE for "Solaris and other popular variants of UNIX" would be finished by the end of the year, which would have "equivalent functionality as that provided in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0", thus "delivering on its commitment to provide full-featured Web browser support on all major operating system platforms" as well as "supporting and promoting open standards, including HTML
, ActiveX
and Java
".
However, following a dispute in March 1997 concering each other's performance and because of contract negotiations with Bristol to access Windows source code after September 1997 failing, Microsoft reversed course and decided to directly port the Windows version in-house using the MainWin XDE (eXtended Development Environment) application from Mainsoft
, the main competitor to Bristol Technology. (Microsoft would later also use MainWin to port Windows Media Player
and Outlook Express
to Unix.) Now well behind schedule, the 3.0 branch was apparently scrapped in favor of 4.0 (that was released for Windows half a year earlier), which used the new Trident rendering engine
. A beta
of the Solaris version was made available on November 5, 1997, with a final version expected by March 1998.
Tod Nielsen, general manager of Microsoft's developer relations group, jokingly declared that he wanted to hold the launch of the browser at the Ripley's Believe It or Not
museum in San Francisco due to the skepticism by those who believed the project was vaporware
. It was further reported that versions for HP-UX
, IBM AIX
, and Irix
were planned (note that at the time MainWin XDE 3.0 was only available for the "Solaris SPARC
2.51 platform", but MainWin XDE 2.1 was "available on Solaris SPARC 2.51, Solaris Intel 5.5.1, SunOS
4.1.4, Irix 5.3, Irix 6.2, HP UX 10.2 and IBM AIX 4.1.5".) IE 4.0 for Unix on Solaris was released on March 4, 1998. Later that year a version for HP-UX was released.
However, archived copies of Microsoft's IE for UNIX website indicate that Service Pack 1 was released (presumably in finished form) for both Solaris and HP-UX. It is not known why Microsoft omitted references to these from its official list; Microsoft only hosted 128-bit encryption SP1 patches, so it is likely that there are three other versions as well:
:
was that "low customer demand for this download did not justify the resources required for continued development".
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
graphical
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
for use in the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
on Solaris or HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5
Internet Explorer 5
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 was a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. It was one of the main participants of the first browser war...
in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.
Development history
In May 1996, it was reported that Steven Guggenheimer confirmed that they were looking into porting Internet Explorer to run on UNIX-like platforms, but were looking into how exactly it should be done. It was further reported that Steve BallmerSteve Ballmer
Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American business magnate. He is the chief executive officer of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. , his personal wealth is estimated at US$13.9 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.-Early life:Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to...
, then executive vice president of Microsoft, had shown an interest earlier in the month for a Microsoft browser to run on Unix as part of the strategy to wage the browser wars
Browser wars
Browser wars is a metaphorical term that refers to competitions for dominance in usage share in the web browser marketplace. The term is often used to denote two specific rivalries: the competition that saw Microsoft's Internet Explorer replace Netscape's Navigator as the dominant browser during...
:
In pursuit of a larger share of the mammoth browser market, Microsoft has been dealing with PCIBM PC compatibleIBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
and workstation makers to have its IE browser bundledProduct bundlingProduct bundling is a marketing strategy that involves offering several products for sale as one combined product. This strategy is very common in the software business , in the cable television industry Product bundling is a marketing strategy that involves offering several products for sale as...
with newly shipping hardwareComputer hardwarePersonal computer hardware are component devices which are typically installed into or peripheral to a computer case to create a personal computer upon which system software is installed including a firmware interface such as a BIOS and an operating system which supports application software that...
. Ballmer hinted, however, that not having a Unix browser was posing an obstacle to this OEMOriginal Equipment ManufacturerAn original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
-based strategy to try and catch up with No. 1 browser maker Netscape Communications Corp., which holds some 85 percent of the worldwide browserWeb browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
market with its NavigatorNetscape NavigatorNetscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
product line. "We might just have to get one of those", Ballmer said of a Unix-based browser.
In June, Microsoft entered into a contract with Bristol Technology Inc.
Bristol Technology Inc.
Bristol Technology Inc. was a software development company founded in January 1991 by Keith, Ken, and Jean Blackwell. The company's original product idea, Wind/U, was an implementation of the Windows API on non-Windows operating systems...
to develop a version of Bristol's porting application
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
Wind/U (archived) to port IE for Windows to Unix. At this time Bristol also had a contract with Microsoft allowing it access to Windows source code from September 1994 to September 1997. The project was officially announced by Microsoft at the end of July 1996 that a native version of IE for "Solaris and other popular variants of UNIX" would be finished by the end of the year, which would have "equivalent functionality as that provided in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0", thus "delivering on its commitment to provide full-featured Web browser support on all major operating system platforms" as well as "supporting and promoting open standards, including HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, ActiveX
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
and Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
".
However, following a dispute in March 1997 concering each other's performance and because of contract negotiations with Bristol to access Windows source code after September 1997 failing, Microsoft reversed course and decided to directly port the Windows version in-house using the MainWin XDE (eXtended Development Environment) application from Mainsoft
Mainsoft
Mainsoft is a software company, founded in 1993, that develop interoperability software products for Microsoft Windows and Linux/Unix platforms.-History:Mainsoft was founded in 1993, mainly to propose integration solutions between Windows and other systems....
, the main competitor to Bristol Technology. (Microsoft would later also use MainWin to port Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player
Windows Media Player is a media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices...
and Outlook Express
Outlook Express
Outlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...
to Unix.) Now well behind schedule, the 3.0 branch was apparently scrapped in favor of 4.0 (that was released for Windows half a year earlier), which used the new Trident rendering engine
Trident (layout engine)
Trident is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer.It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4.0 in October 1997; it has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today...
. A beta
Development stage
A software release life cycle refers to the phases of development and maturity for a piece of computer software—ranging from its initial development, to its eventual release, and updated versions of the released version to help improve software or fix bugs still present in the software.- Pre-alpha...
of the Solaris version was made available on November 5, 1997, with a final version expected by March 1998.
Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Ripley's Believe It or Not! is a franchise, founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims...
museum in San Francisco due to the skepticism by those who believed the project was vaporware
Vaporware
Vaporware is a term in the computer industry that describes a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually released nor officially canceled. Vaporware is also a term sometimes used to describe events that are announced or predicted,...
. It was further reported that versions for HP-UX
HP-UX
HP-UX is Hewlett-Packard's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on UNIX System V and first released in 1984...
, IBM AIX
AIX operating system
AIX AIX AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive, pronounced "a i ex" is a series of proprietary Unix operating systems developed and sold by IBM for several of its computer platforms...
, and Irix
IRIX
IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. It was based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. IRIX was the first operating system to include the XFS file system.The last major version...
were planned (note that at the time MainWin XDE 3.0 was only available for the "Solaris SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
2.51 platform", but MainWin XDE 2.1 was "available on Solaris SPARC 2.51, Solaris Intel 5.5.1, SunOS
SunOS
SunOS is a version of the Unix operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The SunOS name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4 of SunOS...
4.1.4, Irix 5.3, Irix 6.2, HP UX 10.2 and IBM AIX 4.1.5".) IE 4.0 for Unix on Solaris was released on March 4, 1998. Later that year a version for HP-UX was released.
- March 5, 1998: Microsoft reached a settlement with Bristol which "provided mutual releases for any claims arising out of the IE Agreement".
- 1999 IE 5.0 for Unix on Solaris and HP-UX released.
- 2001 IE 5.0 for Unix Service Pack 1 released for Solaris and HP-UX.
Versions
There are nine versions officially listed by Microsoft:- 4.01 40-bit on Solaris
- 4.01 40-bit on HP-UX
- 4.01 128-bit on Solaris
- 4.01 128-bit on HP-UX
- 5.0 40-bit on Solaris
- 5.0 40-bit on HP-UX
- 5.0 128-bit on Solaris
- 5.0 128-bit on HP-UX
- 5.0 SP1 Beta 128-bit on Solaris
However, archived copies of Microsoft's IE for UNIX website indicate that Service Pack 1 was released (presumably in finished form) for both Solaris and HP-UX. It is not known why Microsoft omitted references to these from its official list; Microsoft only hosted 128-bit encryption SP1 patches, so it is likely that there are three other versions as well:
- 5.0 SP1 Beta 128-bit on HP-UX
- 5.0 SP1 128-bit on Solaris
- 5.0 SP1 128-bit on HP-UX
5.0 Readme highlights
Notable items from the IE for Unix 5.0 ReadmeREADME
A readme file contains information about other files in a directory or archive and is commonly distributed with computer software. Such a file is usually a text file called README.TXT, README.1ST, READ.ME, or simply README, although some Microsoft Windows software may occasionally include a...
:
- "Internet Explorer 5 for UNIX supports most of the features and technologies of Internet Explorer for Windows, but also differs in some respects. For example, Internet Explorer for UNIX does not support downloadable ActiveX controls or browsing and organizing your local files and folders within the browser window. Other unsupported features include filters/transitions in CSS, the DHTML Editing component, and HTML Applications (HTAs). [...] Internet Explorer for UNIX offers some features not found on the Windows version as well, such as Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts and external program associations."
- Microsoft had a newsgroupNewsgroupA usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
named "microsoft.public.inetexplorer.unix" on its public news serverNews serverA news server is a set of computer software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. A reader server provides an interface to read and post articles, generally with the assistance of a news client. A transit...
msnews.microsoft.com
- "The User AgentUser agentIn computing, a user agent is a client application implementing a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system...
String for Internet Explorer 5 is static except for the third field which depends on the Operating System and the processor you are using. Here are some common configurations and the user agent strings generated by Internet Explorer on these platforms:"
| SPARC SPARC SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987.... 5, Solaris 2.5.1 |
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4m; X11) | |
| Any Ultra, Solaris 2.5.1 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.5.1 sun4u; X11) | |
| Any Ultra, Solaris 2.6 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; SunOS 5.6 sun4u; X11) | |
| HP 9000 C-180, HP-UX 10.20 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/780; X11) | |
| HP 9000 K-250, HP-UX 10.20 | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/802; X11) |
Disappearance
The homepage for IE for Unix was removed from Microsoft's website in the third quarter of 2002 without explanation, replaced with the message: "We sincerely apologize, but Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX are no longer available for download." It was noted however, that while the homepage had been removed, the actual download page remained up for a time. The reason given by Microsoft's PR firmPublic relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
was that "low customer demand for this download did not justify the resources required for continued development".
See also
- List of web browsers
- List of web browsers for Unix and Unix-like operating systems
- Comparison of web browsersComparison of web browsersThe following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.-Historical web browsers:...