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Internet Explorer 9 Will Not Support Windows XP
MojoKid writes "As it turns out, news this week is that the same features that made IE9's hardware-acceleration possible probably aren't compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won't be XP-compatible when it launches. This has created a small tempest of protest from those users still using XP, but this is less of an arbitrary decision than some appear to think. It's literally impossible to port Windows Vista/Win 7-style hardware acceleration backwards to XP. Microsoft would have to either develop a workaround from scratch or create a CPU-driven 'software mode.'"
Yes, there are a significant number of them. Unless something has changed recently, all South Korean bank sites for instance require activeX and as such have to be used with IE. And quite a few sites still use plug ins that aren't available for other browsers. It's obnoxious and annoying, but it's becoming less common as people get sick of IE and jump ship for something that works in a somewhat sane fashion.
I'm using a three months old version of a 'Linux OS', with Firefox 3.6. I know of several dozen websites that deal in financial transactions and related, and which will all check for software versioning and require downloading active x controls onto the user's machine for at least some functions. I have been informed by a large corporation's legal dept. that attempting to spoof those sites into thinking I was browsing with IE/Windows from a Nix box would not just be a TOS violation, but in at least some of those cases, securities fraud, a violation of Sarbanes-Oxley, or otherwise just not done, and all we can do is use a Microsoft product to visit those sites and perhaps ask them to broaden their website's support. Yeah, in some cases, there's probably a bunch of crooks easily defeating those sites version checking, they're being idiots, and some of them probably get ritually abused by 14 year old script kiddies every weekend, but these are not fly by nights, they are major financial partners in stock trading, banking, sale of treasury securities, and such, they pay a small fortune every year for VPN security and encryption, and everyone else in the financial industry has to occasionally deal with them. For my company, which has begun transitioning to FOSS by adopting Open Office, this is an impediment to completely dropping either Windows or IE completely.
So we will probably upgrade the machines that still run Windows in every office, yet again. While those are getting fewer, it's still vendor lock-in with bells on. Your comment about 10 year old OS versions isn't just a red herring, it shows a complete lack of understanding.
Who is John Cabal?
Time will tell whether Windows 7 manages to convince a majority to upgrade again, but it will be a long time before there's the kind of critical mass that happened with XP.
Current Market share (March 2010):
Windows XP 32 bit (-3.48%) 40.33%
Windows 7 64 bit (+3.95%) 22.99%
Windows Vista 32 bit (-1.51%) 16.88%
Windows 7 (+1.16%) 10.92%
XP is losing 3.48% of it's market share each month, and Windows 7 is gaining nearly 4.64% market share each month. How long exactly at that rate will it take for Windows 7 to reach this critical mass point?