Given that IE hasn't run on anything other than Windows since version 5 (when it ran on Solaris, HP-UX, Xenix, and, I've heard Linux as well - up to 5.5 on Mac OS), I'd say they probably don't have any plans for it.
Though IE8 and possibly IE9 work in Wine, yes, that's not what I meant. I meant that Microsoft was actively developing and supporting native ports of IE 3 through 5 on Solaris, HP-UX, Xenix, and maybe possibly Linux (I couldn't find evidence, but I remember seeing something about it.)
For crying out loud, this comparison is apples to oranges, will people please stop making it? Microsoft have closed source operating systems and are leveraging that to stop competition. Mozilla is developing an open platform where anyone can modify it to run on a different browser.
I agree with your basic arguement reptile83. Companies that start whining are on their way down. A company that looks at how to overcome obstacles or create new opportunities is who succeeds. Thats how they started, now that they are large and employees start running the show in various ways, out comes the whining.
Mozilla are a non-profit. They came into existence because round about the year 2000, Microsoft had a monopoly in browsers and operating systems.
It's hard to express how extreme this was, if you didn't live through it. Basically, the rest of the IT industry was being strangled to death.
Two companies turned things round - Google and Apple. Both depended on, and encouraged, the open web. Google fundamentally built all their products on the web, and Apple relied on the web being open so that OSX and iOS could compete with Windows. (Would people really have brought the original iPhone if 99% of websites hadn't worked on it?)
The only reason the web was good enough to allow new companies like Google and Apple to thrive against Microsoft, was because of Firefox (which created Mozilla-the-non-profit).
Firefox was THE project. It was a non-profit project. It could not have been a for-profit project (well actually, someone like IBM or Sun or the like could have done it in a visionary way, but they didn't).
Firefox was basically run by volunteers, including a massive, complex marketing campaign, which involved not just geeks persuading their friends and parents to upgrade to Firefox, but also people asking website owners to make their websites work with web standards, and hence with Firefox (at the time many websites only worked on Internet Explorer).
So apedley, your criticism utterly misses the mark. Sometimes there are factors outside of the control of the entrepreneur. Microsoft's monopoly of the operating system and web browser was such a factor.
It can happen again. (Likely some kind of oligopoly of Apple and Google :)
