It seems that someone recently got Internet Explorer 7 to run under Linux. Now, my first thought is, “Why?”
I personally use both operating systems on a regular basis (Ubuntu being my current Linux distro of choice, though I’m considering moving to Debian, or possibly one of the BSDs [I’m looking into FreeBSD at the moment]), and I believe both have their strengths and weaknesses (I don’t think I’ll go into that at them moment, it could surely fill up a whole blog post).
Now, I’m sure this could be useful in some fashion to web developers who want to test their work in the operating system they’re most comfortable with, but still, there are many pit falls when using this method:
The following documents the relatively short process needed to get Internet Explorer 7 running on a Linux system. So far, I have found one (two) problems with this method: it seems transparent GIFs appear as filled-black boxes in IE7, and secondly (this is actually a good thing for me), this won’t give you the IE7 interface running in Linux, but rather the IE7 rendering engine inside the IE6 interface. What this means is that you won’t be seeing IE7 tabs or the RSS reader, but you will be able to debug webpages and fix layout problems.
And personally, if I’m in Linux, I don’t even want to see any traces of IE (I barely want to see it in Windows), and I’m not even one of those “Hardcore” Linux users. Give me a browser that supports the standards (by and large) instead of that piece of crap IE. I do realize that IE is the dominant browser (even with all the inroads Firefox has made into IE’s market share), and that if it doesn’t work right in IE, then there’s a lot of people who, if the site doesn’t work right in IE (even if it’s written by the standards to the book), they’ll just move along to the next site.
Personally, I think Microsoft should give up on IE (at least in its current form). They should just scrap the current code base, and re-write it completely. Maybe not the interface, since that’s what a majority of the people are familiar with, but the rendering engine needs to die a quick death. The likelihood of this happening?
Almost nil, but one can dream, neh?