Internet Explorer for UNIX

~ the obituary ~

I had Internet Explorer in 1998. What I did not have was a Sun workstation, which is the only class of machine this build ever ran on. It is a version of a browser everybody used that almost nobody used, and it survives mostly as a screenshot of a familiar toolbar sitting inside an X11 window frame that looks wrong under it.

The reason it was made is the browser war. Netscape held something like 85 percent of the market in the middle of the 1990s, and Steve Ballmer later acknowledged that not having a UNIX browser weakened Microsoft's position with the manufacturers it was trying to win over. Netscape had come out of the workstation world. Leaving that ground entirely uncontested meant leaving Netscape a place to be the only answer.

So Microsoft shipped one. A preview of IE 4.0 for Solaris appeared on 5 November 1997, and the full 4.0 and 4.01 releases for Solaris and HP-UX followed on 24 February 1998, in separate builds for 40-bit and 128-bit encryption. Internet Explorer 5.0 arrived in February 1999 on Solaris and in March on HP-UX. Outlook Express came bundled the way it did on Windows. The last thing ever released was Service Pack 1, on 30 October 2001.

The ending was not announced. Some time in the third quarter of 2002 the UNIX pages came off microsoft.com, and on 20 September 2002 OSnews noted that the links were gone while the direct download still worked. What replaced the page was an apology saying that Internet Explorer technologies for UNIX were no longer available for download. The reason given later, through a public relations firm, was low customer demand.

~ the case file ~

~ windows underneath ~

Microsoft never wrote a UNIX browser. It first contracted Bristol Technology, then moved to MainWin XDE from Mainsoft, which implements the Windows API on top of UNIX. The Windows source was licensed across and compiled against that layer, so what ran on a SPARC box was the Windows browser with a translator between it and the operating system, including the same MSHTML engine that rendered pages on a desktop in Ankara.

That decision is the whole product. It made the port cheap enough to justify and it capped what the port could ever be. A browser is judged on how it feels against the rest of the machine, and this one could only ever feel like Windows behaving politely somewhere else. Anybody choosing a browser on a Solaris workstation in 1999 had already made a decision about which world they lived in.

~ the two ssl builds ~

The February 1998 release came in a 40-bit version and a 128-bit version, and that split is a fossil of United States export rules on cryptography. Strong encryption counted as a munition. Shipping a browser abroad meant shipping the weak one, or proving to a government's satisfaction who was on the other end of the download.

It is easy to forget how recently the strength of a padlock icon depended on which country the person clicking it was in. The rules loosened at the turn of the millennium and the two-build era ended, leaving behind download pages that read like customs paperwork.

~ the emacs shortcuts ~

The readme is the best surviving document about this thing, because it lists what the UNIX version did not have. No downloadable ActiveX controls, and none of the file browsing that the Windows shell provided for free. Half of what made Internet Explorer strategically dangerous on Windows was missing here by construction.

It did have one thing Windows never got: Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts. Somebody on that team understood exactly who was going to run this, and put in the concession that mattered to them. An audience of a few thousand system administrators got a key binding that a hundred million desktop users were never offered.

~ the page that came down ~

There was no announcement, no end-of-support notice, no final version. The navigation links vanished, the download stayed reachable for a while afterward for anybody who had kept the URL, and eventually that went too. A product that shipped for five years exited by having its homepage deleted.

By 2002 there was nothing left to argue with. Netscape had been bought and hollowed out, Internet Explorer 6 held most of the web, and the strategic reason for a browser on Solaris had stopped existing about two years before the page came down. What is left is a curiosity for people who like knowing that Internet Explorer once ran on HP-UX, and a small reminder that products built to win an argument are abandoned the moment the argument ends.

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