Microsoft, the world's largest Open Source player, has announced the release of Internet Explorer 10 for Linux. IE 10 was developed using WebKit, which Microsoft bought from Apple and donated to the KDE community, where it was born.
IE 10 brings many privacy protection featured targeted at blocking Google's ad services. The company has also implemented many open standard and open source technologies such as WebRTC and VP8.
Microsoft refused to support H.264 and Adobe Flash in IE. Steve Ballmer said in a statement, "Developers, developers, developers, developers. We want open source developers to build for IE 10. They don't have to worry about patent incumbent and insecure technologies like Adobe Flash and H.264."
Microsoft legal counsel Brad Smith wrote in a blog post,"We are lobbying the government to bring massive patent reform in the US and invalidate software patents. Another area we are going to focus on is elimination of FRAND which is nothing more than an evil practice. And IE 10 is going to play a major role in that direction as we won't support any patent incumbent technologies."
IE is currently available only for Ubuntu 13.04 from official repos but Arch users have managed to port it to Arch and you can easily install it by running this command:
$ sudo packer -S internet-explorer-10
Source code of IE 10, which is released under GNU GPL v3, will be hosted on Savannah.