[Sage]

I realize it's no trivial task, but it'd do wonders for thousands of Macintosh-based web developers if somebody made an OS X-native browser that had all of IE/Win's bugs and what not. Of course, I'm fully aware of VPC, but it seems like a waste to buy that just for the purpose of emulating IE (if I needed it for other uses, then I'd surely buy it, but using IE is the one and only reason).

In fact, as an idea, why not take the Gecko or Konqueror rendering engines, and "insert" the IE-specific way of rendering certain things into them? Again, I realize it's not as simple as that, but it'd be a huge boon...

[Turnpike]

That would be a huge PITA... not only in building, but in maintaining. Honestly, I doubt whether anyone at Microsoft is completely sure why the bugs are all there... most certainly not in new versions.

Aside from that, some of the bugs might be caused by IE's proprietary filters or something to do with the close integration with the OS that would be extremely difficult to hunt down... and, if it was to do with filters, there might be legal issues.

If they just have to recreate bugs... well, I don't know. Find a place that enumerates all of the rendering bugs and what code causes them to go off... then make a script that will scan a file and give a warning if anything buggy is there.

Overall, more trouble that it is worth... I just IM any windows-using friend and ask them to look at it for me. If it is something sensitive, I'll use a computer lab somewhere... if you don't have access to a lab, see if you can work something out with a friend to use their computer sometime for 15 minutes to check a batch of sensitive sites.

[wataru]

What kind of developer would want to duplicate one of the most reviled pieces of modern software?

[DeathMan]

Most software companies don't have 5000 full time programmers to throw on project for the small percentage of developers who would pay for this (browsers are free, who would pay for this app?)

(the 5000 is from a rumor I heard. Supposedly thats how many coders MS has working on IE. if this is true, its no wonder its so jacked up. 5,000 people working on any one project is going to fall in the crapper (read:linux desktop))

[Millennium]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
Most software companies don't have 5000 full time programmers to throw on project for the small percentage of developers who would pay for this (browsers are free, who would pay for this app?)

(the 5000 is from a rumor I heard. Supposedly thats how many coders MS has working on IE. if this is true, its no wonder its so jacked up. 5,000 people working on any one project is going to fall in the crapper (read:linux desktop))

Besides that, IE's system is so poorly documented that emulating it bug for bug would be extremely difficult. Microsoft's not exactly keen on actually producing that documentation, either.

The one person who knows enough about IE to even have a hope of beginning this task would be Dean Edwards, author of the godlike IE7 JavaScript system for patching many of IE's worst issues. From what little I've gleaned from his site, it looks as though IE7 is tied extremely closely to the Win32 API, and it seems that this is actually the cause of many of its bugs (the behavior fits a Win32 application model, not the W3C document model).