THINGS THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST: Internet Explorer for UNIX

An exploration of how and why Microsoft ported Internet Explorer to UNIX systems like Solaris using Mainsoft's translation engine.

If you know anything about early Microsoft, it seems very odd to think of them having anything to do with UNIX in any form. After all, one of the main goals of Windows NT was to make Microsoft a viable competitor in the workstation and server fields. It thus begs the question of just why Microsoft took the effort to port Internet Explorer to their most fierce competitors. After teasing my IE for UNIX during my Solaris 7 video, I felt dig need deeper. My socials: Patreon: patreon.com/ncommander Twitter: twitter.com/FOSSfirefighter Discord: discord.gg/Z4mbuGtwfq​​ Blog: casadevall.pro Chapter Marks: 00:00 - Intro and Installation 02:28 - Struggling With Solaris 7 Patch Madnesss 05:10 - Exploring Internet Explorer for UNIX 09:46 - Outlook Express on UNIX 13:00 - What Actually Makes Up IE/UNIX? 14:29 - Introducing Mainsoft and the Windows Integrated Source Environment 17:30 - Visual SourceSafe for UNIX 19:09 - Why does IE/UNIX Exist? 20:32 - Closing In truth, this wasn't my first experience with Internet Explorer for UNIX. Back in 2012, I had an opportunity to explore it remotely via X11 forwarding, and I learned enough to keep me interested. However, because IE for UNIX required either a HP-UX install, or old Solaris to work, I didn't really have much opportunity to research it further. Digging into Solaris 7 gave me the excuse I needed dig in deep, and begin putting this mystery together. From struggling through finding old Solaris patch sets, kernel panics, and more, I finally managed to get Internet Explorer for UNIX to load up. It quickly becomes apparent that there's quite a lot more here than just a simple port of IE. Through testing IE for UNIX appears to incorporate a lot of specific Windows technologies. Through testing, VBScript and more works, showing that is a true port of the Trident rendering engine to Solaris, and that raises even more answers than it answers. By doing some simple reverse engineering, and a lot of searching, I eventually learned that IE for UNIX was made by company called Mainsoft, who, rather notably,was responsible for the Windows source code leak in 2004. Mainsoft had been part of a program from Microsoft known as the "Windows Integrated Source Environment" or WISE where Microsoft licensed the source code of Windows to various companies to create third party products. This lead to the creation of Visual MainWin, a toolkit that exists to help port Windows software to Linux. What I found shocked me. Mainsoft had ported the core Windows API and more to run ontop of UNIX. Infact IE for UNIX ships with a fairly complete set of files that won't look out of place in Windows system32!. This finally began to let me put the pieces of the puzzle together, and by digging through their website on the Internet Archive, I finally put all the pieces together. I ... also managed to find Visual SourceSafe for UNIX, whch tells me some ancient horrors should just remained buried. Afterwards,