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.'"

Comments

Thats ok , as an XP user

[rossdee]

I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Firefox

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Firefox

So do I (plus I don't use MS-Windows).

But the real problem is that there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer (and at our nearly 100% Linux shop at work, we know VERY WELL that this is the truth). We can all agree how horrible that is, but it doesn't change anything. So, those wanting to or forced to use IE-only websites might also be forced to upgrade from XP. Welcome to the effects of proprietary lock-in.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[sopssa]

So, those wanting to or forced to use IE-only websites might also be forced to upgrade from XP. Welcome to the effects of proprietary lock-in.

Forced to upgrade? IE8 works just fine on XP and will continue to do so. It also doesn't have any of the exploits that IE6 has.

Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really a genuine problem anyway? Given the number of web sites in existence someone can probably claim "many, many, many" that do any given weird thing. I'm sure there's ones out there that still demand Netscape Navigator. But in real world web browsing does anyone really find that internet explorer is required? It doesn't happen to me. Company intranets are a different matter but that's a choice the company makes and burdens itself with (if it is a burden).

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[krapski]

I fully agree. But even so, there is nothing wrong with IE6. I like it is well integrated and I can type address from windows explorer and go to internet from there.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[PopeRatzo]

I use Firefox

And, since learning just a few moments ago that Google is developing 3D support for Chrome, I may never need to use IE again.

Hell, if a certain mock-turtleneck wearing pud-hugger would just take the enormous rod out of his ass and release OSX for non-Apple hardware, I'd never use anything of Microsoft's again.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[superskippy]

Meh, it's not that much of a problem. I can't see there being a subset of websites in the future that only work in IE9, but not IE7 or IE8, So you can keep doing what you do now- run Firefox except for the few times you need a craptacular website, in which case you can carefully an old IE.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Inda]

The main issue I have is not that a website requires IE, it's a website doesn't support the latest version of Firefox.

Natwest - I'm looking at you.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Artifakt]

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.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>Forced to upgrade? IE8 works just fine on XP and will continue to do so.

It is true that IE8 works on XP, so it will really only be a problem when an IE-Only site also requires 9 for some reason. And that is probably far in the future. By that time, XP really will be VERY old, indeed.

>Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then?

Because I can choose to upgrade Linux when I choose to, and at no cost. And when I upgrade, it is not going to suck in tons of DRM and licensing restrictions like MS-Windows upgrades typically do. Also, it is almost certain that MS will use such stuff to try and kill off XP so they can continue upgrade fees and further lock-in. Motivations like that rarely (if at all) exist in the FOSS world.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[PopeRatzo]

But the real problem is that there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer

Is this true?

The only time I run IE is about 5 minutes after I build a computer and only then to download Firefox.

Can you give a partial list of these "many, many, many" websites, and by chance are any of them fur-fag sites?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>What websites? I've been using Firefox on Linux exclusively for a long time,

You are obviously a home user and not a business user. There are at least 3 critical website apps that we have to access at work that will not work under anything but MS-Windows + IE.

There has been a TREMENDOUS progress in making websites cross-platform and more standards-based over the last several years. Most home users will now rarely, if ever, find a website that requires MS-Windows + IE, except for that horrible Silverlight stuff. But proprietary business stuff is often just as bad as ever... and that continues the lock-in. We just demoed yet another application-as-a-service last week.... when I asked, they didn't even know the answer to my question, but it was obviously MS-Windows + IE only.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[icebraining]

Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.

If you have the source, you can port it to the newer version even if it's not profitable for the developer.

For example, the free drivers for the ATI cards based on the Mach64 chip (released in '92) are still supported in current Debian.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Jaysyn]

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix & I cannot remember the last time I've stumbled across a public website that you *had* to be using IE to view. My bank, credit union & insurance company all render just fine with Firefox.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>so you can keep doing what you do now- run Firefox except for the few times you need a craptacular website,
>in which case you can carefully an old IE.

Unless you don't want to use MS-Windows. (And no, I don't count IES4Linux, which is now not stable nor updated anymore)

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Jaysyn]

We're talking about the Internet. We really don't care about your companies intranet.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Sique]

Which is good by the way, because one of my boxes still has a Mach64 card, as many servers do which just have 1024x768 graphics just to support a graphic installation process.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[websitebroke]

You're not in school either. I'm stuck with a bunch of online courses that require the use of Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Blackboard mostly works under Firefox and IE8, but not completely. MyItLab absolutely requires IE7.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Z00L00K]

Moving away from IE will certainly be the case for more and more users in the future. If that means that they will move away from Windows is a different issue.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>We're talking about the Internet. We really don't care about your companies intranet.

I am not talking about "my company's intranet". While the sites I am talking about are not public sites, they are on the Internet, not a private network, and not an Intranet. And they aren't "mine", because if I designed them, they certainly wouldn't require using MS-Windows and/or IE. Finally, while I can understand your not caring, you really should care, because most people do work for some type of company. Being "free" to use what we want at home but forced lock-in at work isn't good for the computing environment at-large.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[TheRaven64]

But the real problem is that there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer

Perhaps you can provide some examples. I can't think of a single site I've been to for several years that didn't work on my Mac. The only sites that don't work on my FreeBSD box are ones that require flash (which does work on FreeBSD, I just never got around to installing the plugin on that machine).

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Enleth]

Maybe use virtual machines, with pre-packaged disk images specially prepared for those websites (like, IE pre-configured to only connect with their servers, only accept their SSL certificates and completely locked down to any configuration changes), and a policy of returning the VM to the initial state (requires a VM with snapshotting) after each use? Most decent VM engines support RDP too, so the actual hypervisor with its VM images doesn't even need to exist on the workstations, you can put it on a secured server somewhere in the company and make some scripting that would start and present to the user a new, clean VM instance each time they connect. Should be easily hackable using VirtualBox OSE. Alternatively, VMware might offer something like this sytem out of the box, should you decide to pay someone to do this for you.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Jaysyn]

If they aren't public websites then they are of little concern to the rest of us. Firefox still works just fine for 99.9% of the Internet, not including little walled gardens like you are referring to.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Eskarel]

You're always forced to upgrade software eventually if you want to continue to use new features, that's no different on Linux. You'd have a hell of a time getting Compiz on the 3.0 release of Xfree86 as well. I suppose you could do it if you really really wanted to, but what you'd end up with would resemble the new version an awful lot more than it did the old version.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[DRJlaw]

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.

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.

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.

Yes... on your part. The vendor is not Microsoft. The vendor is your financial partners. Microsoft is not imposing version checking. Microsoft has long provided alternative interfaces which negate the need for ActiveX controls. It is your financial partners who are refusing to support later browsers and alternate browsers. It is your financial partners, and not Microsoft, who control the gateways to the services that you want.

So we will probably upgrade the machines that still run Windows in every office, yet again.

Thank your financial partners, not Microsoft. If those financial partners only provided service through the old CompuServe interface, you wouldn't be blaming CompuServe for failing to completely overhaul their service to be web and HTML based. If those financial partners only provided service by telegraph, you wouldn't be blaming Western Union for failing to upgrade your telegraphy machines on demand.

The machines that still run Windows in every office should still work. The machines are even security supported for four more years (assuming that they're on XP). If you're bitter that you can't replace them with the new shiny exactly in the manner that you want, then suck it up and blame your financial partners, not Microsoft. You're obviously no longer Microsoft's customer, so why should they solve your problem in a way that doesn't generate revenue rather than telling you to pound sand?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jellomizer]

As a Mac User I havn't found many sites that will not run off of safari. The ones that do not work in safari will work with firefox.
I havn't ran into an IE Only page in years.
I have ran into some pages which render better in IE. But it is usually some very small minor details.

If strip your browser too much say you are on an Anti-Flash campaign, Or anti-Javascript even add blocking you will see more problems but those are self induced problems not an IE only thing.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[hairyfeet]

Yes, but are these 3 websites IE8, or are they more likely the old busted IE6 ActiveX crapola? Because most of the "IE only" mission critical crap I've come across has been IE6 and NOT any newer version, which means IE9 not working on XP will mean jack and squat.

And lets be honest folks-if a bunch is so ass backwards that in 2010 they are designing their websites for IE only, when you have Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opers, all these choices? Well then I'd be a hell of a lot more worried about what kind of code monkeys they are using and how shitty the rest of their security is than whether or not I can get to them in XP.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jafiwam]

If you use FireFox and mess with the browser identification, things like Google Docs / Gears and some online editors (like WordPress, not WordPress, but LIKE Wordpress) won't work properly because they get obsessed with checking what you've got and don't try anyway.

That's the only situation I have found. And, I did it my dumb-self so it's not really something I'd blame the services for.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[daveime]

Just because a corporate intranet is accessible via public IP, it's still sitting behind htaccess and/or other login protection. For all intents and purposes it is *still* an corporate intranet in form and function.

And if you can't login from home, then maybe you should do your work *at* work ?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[KingMotley]

Most decent VM engines support RDP too

Really which ones? Because most don't.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[FlyingGuy]

Ever use ADP? It requires IE for the time card entry.

You have to import a certificate into IE and for some reason which I have not bothered to dig that far into, FF can't handle this.

Lots and lots of companies require this.

But it is not just that. Like it or not, the ActiveX model allows you to do things that your just cannot do with the JS/HTML/CSS mashup and no one has yet to duplicate that in any serious way. Java Applets, to slow, to clumsy. ActiveX has all the facilities of the OS at its disposal.

I am not saying that is a good or bad thing. But when you want that level of control and interoperability with the OS, thats where you go.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Jurily]

there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK

Name one I've already heard about.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[kill-1]

Just because a corporate intranet is accessible via public IP, it's still sitting behind htaccess and/or other login protection. For all intents and purposes it is *still* an corporate intranet in form and function.

That's called extranet.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

You are wacked. I am certainly NOT defending IE/Windows only. I aggressively support FOSS & Linux. You can call me whatever you want, but posting the products that we are forced to use that are IE-only will be totally meaningless here, because they are private sites that you cannot access without a login.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[markdavis]

>And if you can't login from home, then maybe you should do your work *at* work ?

You are missing the point... we WANT to use Linux/FOSS at work; and we mostly do. That is not a problem for MOST sites. But there are sites, mostly login-access-only that absolutely require IE+MS-Windows. Those sites we cannot control and have nothing to do with our infrastructure except that we HAVE to use them, and thus are forced to have some MS-Windows machines to deal with them.

It is not an "Intranet" unless they are apps we installed and/or control and/or for our use only. These are other companies that we need to work with.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Xtravar]

And how many South Korean bank accounts do you have? I swear I haven't seen an IE-only site in several years now. Except on my work's intranet, but that's a different story.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[drinkypoo]

Thank your financial partners, not Microsoft.

But this is precisely what Microsoft was trying to make happen. It did, and now you want to remove all blame from them? I don't think many of us would agree.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[HouseOfMisterE]

I use Firefox 100% of the time and surf the 'net like a madman, and have no compatibility problems with any websites. That includes online banking, merchants, pr0n, news sites, etc. "IE-only" is really a thing of the past as far as publicly-accessible websites are concerned.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[dave420]

Sun VirtualBox definitely does.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If those financial partners only provided service by telegraph, you wouldn't be blaming Western Union for failing to upgrade your telegraphy machines on demand.

If Western Union had been shown in court to be illegally abusing a monopoly in order to make sure it was in companies' best financial interest to only provide service by telegraph, then yes I'd blame Western Union. Did you even read the "embrace, extend, extinguish" documents?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[KingMotley]

VMWare Player, Virtual PC do not. So for most, name at least 2 other desktop VMWare packages that support RDP.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Vancorps]

XenServer and Virtual Box both do, and they are both free

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Vancorps]

I think you're confused. Microsoft could not control how people use their products. Obviously Microsoft likes the idea but there is a reason this is really only a problem in the financial industries which move the slowest with technology.

I know it's fun to blame Microsoft but they have only made weak attempts at vendor lockin especially since the antitrust case. As a Sysadmin who runs Windows and Linux servers together happily I'd say there has been a lot of success in the interoperability world. The only machines which consistently provide us with issues are ones produced by that fruity company which refuses to play nice with anybody but themselves.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Vancorps]

While yes there are different licensing restrictions by Ubuntu box certainly does support DRM just like Windows 7. I'll grant its not nearly as widely support but who cares? Seriously? That tired argument needs to go away, the DRM in Windows gives it the ability to play DRM content and without DRM content it doesn't do anything. I have no idea where that bit of fud came from.

I also think there is a very tiny chance that you will ever see a site that says IE 9 only except in Intranet situations where corporations can specify which browser they want to standardize on. With web standards and HTML 5 most of the browser specific add-ons will not be required. As long as your browser is W3C compliant most of the web should be available to you in the coming years.

As for motivations in the FOSS world, that's mostly irrelevant when it comes to the mainstream distros. Most of them have non-free add-ons to make them useful. Ubuntu without Flash and mp3 support would be seriously lame. Same with Mandriva, Fedora, or any of the big guys. Oracle, SUSE, and Red Hat enterprise distros even require current support contracts to receive updates. Since they have to release the source you can always compile them yourself for free but unless you have staff dedicated to this task that is a huge waste of effort. Most people like to make money. Many understand that lock-in is a waste of effort although the strides Apple has made suggests otherwise. Even Microsoft is learning to play nice with others. My Windows and Linux servers have no trouble communicating. Hell, Ubuntu is my main desktop and it works fine even with Exchange.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Tharsman]

Thank your financial partners, not Microsoft.

But this is precisely what Microsoft was trying to make happen. It did, and now you want to remove all blame from them? I don't think many of us would agree.

Off course no one here would agree!!! This is Slashdot, Bashing Microsoft for anything and everything is what people do when there is no iPhone/iPad discussions to bash Apple for having closed devices.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[sopssa]

If you're doing a lot of server installs, you should get one of those screens with keyboards you just carry with you and plug-in. Server staff in the company I work at use such and they're really convenient.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Windwraith]

Why yes, any government-related site or service in my country requires the use of IE. Having a little virtual machine for those cases helps.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[TBoon]

I recently stumbled across a website telling me my browser (FF3) was too old, suggesting I upgrade to a more modern browser, namely IE 5.5 or whatever version Netscape was at at that time...

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Blakey Rat]

Thank you.

Not only that, but Microsoft has been discouraging the use of ActiveX as much as everybody else... they've done absolutely nothing to improve it in ages, other than the required security patches. They've moved all their own sites off of it. (Except perhaps Windows Live-- it was still using ActiveX as of about a year ago.)

If their developers were actually good, they'd know that ActiveX is a dead, dead, dead technology-- dead to users, dead to developers, dead to its inventor. It's dead.

I'd recommend you switch to a bank/broker with good software developers, but sadly I don't think such a beast exists. For some reason, some industries (financial, healthcare, insurance) just can not get their shit together when it comes to technology... someone should study that.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[thetoadwarrior]

Sorry but considering we're still trying to get rid of IE6, I do actually welcome the fact IE9 is Win 7 only. Don't like like? Don't use IE. There is no site worth looking at that will only be viewable in IE.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Miseph]

Unless you think that the Citicards' website (which just recently started to allow FF from Windows, but still bugs out with Linux), Charter's cable internet activation website (which needs to be accessed at least once per service installation, and absolutely will not work under any other browser), a plethora of banking websites, a huge number of regional MLS sites (used by real estate agents to communicate between agents and agencies), and many other websites used for the large-scale management of data, finances and utilities are somehow irrelevant, such sites are pretty commonplace.

As Firefox and Safari become more prevalent, these are starting to switch out of IE-only into actual standards compliance (and often finding that the overall performance and stability of the site improves as they stop basing it, essentially, on bugs-as-features), but we're nowhere near 100% and aren't likely to be for many years.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[LainTouko]

Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.

1) Upgrading free software tends to cost less.

2) If we don't like some aspect of the latest version of free software, such as having DRM built into its foundations, we can fork it.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[sopssa]

For another, Windows XP is only two versions out of date. For comparison's sake, Windows XP was released in October of 2001. Red Hat Linux 7.2 was released in the same month. Since then, there have been three releases of Red Hat Linux, and twelve of Fedora. Red Hat Linux 7.2, despite being released at the same time as Windows XP, is a full fifteen versions out of date, while Windows XP is only two versions out of date.

You do know you cannot really compare software like this?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[sopssa]

How does the DRM affect you? It's merely there to enable/ you to play DRM'd files. It doesn't restrict you with anything. But if you have such files, it allows you to play them. How is that worse than Linux where you can't play them at all?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[BrokenHalo]

Having a little virtual machine for those cases helps.

Why not just spoof your user-agent?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[flappinbooger]

lol yeah, I recently had a customer run into something like that too.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Belial6]

You did not understand the OP. He is identifying a specific application "Microsoft Update" that does launch IE instead of the default browser. He is NOT saying that "Microsoft Update" will no longer launch the browser on his machine. He is saying that if the Microsoft site refuses to talk to anything less than IE9 then when "Microsoft Update" launches IE8, it will fail to work, and you will no longer be able to manually update Windows XP. I'm not convinced that we will ever see that happen, as that would be officially removing support for XP entirely since there is no way to force XP users to upgrade to IE9.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[ClosedSource]

I think Apple would like to stay in the Mac business. Perhaps if customers would be willing to pay 2-3K for their "open" OSX, Apple would go for it.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[rjstanford]

Unless you think that the Citicards' website (which just recently started to allow FF from Windows, but still bugs out with Linux),... are somehow irrelevant, such sites are pretty commonplace.

Hmm. I use the Citicards website, haven't had a Windows PC in many years, generally use Safari, sometimes use FF, and never had a problem. With them, or with pretty much anyone in fact. The last place I remember - and this was years ago - was having to switch into FF rather than Safari to deal with the MSDN Universal license key generating webpage.

People love complaining about this, but I'm really not sure that its a significant problem any more.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Windwraith]

If it was that easy, I wouldn't set a virtual machine for it :P
ActiveX components and IE-specific rendering, IE6-7 or you are out. No user-agent spoofing can alter a rendering engine.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[fishermonger]

If their developers were actually good, they'd know that ActiveX is a dead, dead, dead technology-- dead to users, dead to developers, dead to its inventor. It's dead.

I'm curious, what would you advise clients about SilverLight???

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[cbhacking]

As a side note, it's worth pointing out that openSuse is to Suse Linux Enterprise (commercial) as Fedora is to Red Hat - same codebase, but openSuse is typically running newer versions, is non-commercial (including for updates), and the base install does not include things like Flashplayer (although it includes an option to install them immediately after the system boots up for the first time, FlashPlayer and other non-F/OSS is not on the install media in most cases).

Back on topic, as with all IE versions there will be some features that other browsers probably won't support (such as Web Slices with IE8), but hopefully no page will actually require that browser version. IE8 already immensely cleaned up CSS compatibility,a nd it looks like IE9 is doing the same thing with JavaScript compatibility.

As for XP users, I can't really say I'm sorry to hear that. The OS is old, and missing many security features (such as the per-process security model that makes it possible to sandbox IE7/8 on Vista/Win7, or things like ASLR that make it so hard to write a working exploit even when a vulnerability is found in some program). MS doesn't want to extend support for it any longer than necessary. Heck, it would simplify things for ISVs if they could assume their customers were running an OS from this half of the decade.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[LtGordon]

So, those wanting to or forced to use IE-only websites might also be forced to upgrade from XP. Welcome to the effects of proprietary lock-in.

Forced to upgrade? IE8 works just fine on XP and will continue to do so. It also doesn't have any of the exploits that IE6 has.

Also, how does it differ between proprietary and open source then? If you're using some 10 years old version of your Linux OS and it doesn't support some feature that the newer OS/kernel versions have, you're not going to be able to install programs that require said feature.

By the time MS discontinues support for IE8, XP will be more than a decade old, and Windows 8 will likely be nearing release. Yes, XP was a significant milestone in computing history, but you're already two major OS releases behind, let it go. I was a longtime XP Pro user, but after having upgraded to Win7, going back makes me cringe.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Blakey Rat]

I'm curious, what would you advise clients about SilverLight???

I really, really want it to catch on, since it's completely superior to Flash in every possible way. (Even ActionScript 3 doesn't hold a candle.) I'd love to be able to develop on it and have my apps work on as many browsers as Flash apps.

But at the moment, adoption is too slow. The sites Microsoft was using to try to drive adoption generally have switched back to Flash, sadly enough.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Rennt]

But the real problem is that there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer.

That is laying it on a bit thick - Back in the day there may have been some quirks, but I haven't used that configuration since the late 90's and I can't even recall ONE public site that did not or does not work.

Corporate environments are different of course, but honestly - if they haven't weaned themselves of IE by now you would be examining the situation closely to determine who should be fired for incompetence.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jonadab]

> there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK
> unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer

Yeah, but 99.9756% of them are ancient crusty pieces of dross that nobody cares about. The other 0.0243% are ancient crusty pieces of dross that some people *do* care about, but their maintainers can't be bothered to keep them up to date anyway because that would be too much like work, or something.

(There are also sites that work fine if you spoof your User Agent string, but they still do the sniffing and give people the error page anyway, probably for reasons to do with internal politics within the organization. See fafsa.ed.gov for an extreme example of this. I don't count these as sites that DO NOT WORK, because frobbing a UA-string box on the toolbar is not exactly brain surgery. Heck, it's easier than turning on Javascript support in IE on some versions of Windows.)

Of course there are web pages out there that still require IE6. Obviously. There are a few that require IE5. There always will be. There are even still web pages out there that use "layers" and don't display properly in anything but Netscape 4. So what? They haven't been updated since Methuselah was born, usually aren't well-indexed by search engines, and in most cases do not contain any information anyone wants to read in the first place. Most of them appear to have been created mainly for the purpose of showing off somebody's cool webmaster skills back in the nineties when knowing HTML would put them a step ahead of other job applicants. Who needs them? The web is inherently redundant. When the information you want is on a site like that, it is generally also on other websites that aren't like that and, in most cases, rank higher in Google search results.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jonadab]

> South Korean bank sites for instance require
> activeX and as such have to be used with IE

Despite the fact that Microsoft has been systematically pushing ActiveX farther and farther into the "theoretically supported for corporate buzzword checkbox reasons but disabled in virtually all real-world situations" bin since around the time Windows XP came out?

Are Koreans mostly all still using Windows 98, or what?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jonadab]

> I know of several dozen websites that [...] require
> downloading active x controls onto the user's machine

Then they don't work with any currently-supported browser.

Security updates for IE6 disabled this catastrophically insane misfeature years ago. Microsoft *had* to disable this feature, because they were getting hammered really hard by the tech press as a result of the exploits that were coming out fifteen times a week. For a while they tried playing whack-a-mole blacklisting specific ActiveX controls, but they soon realized that wasn't a viable approach and, in a moment of sanity, finally turned off the whole "download ActiveX controls whenever a website says so" nonsense. And there was much rejoicing.

This was a long time ago, as web developers measure time. I'm not sure the exact date, but it was definitely before XP SP2 came out. (I think it my have even been before XP SP1, but I can't swear to that.) Firefox hadn't been released yet. I don't thing Gmail existed yet either.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[pheonix7117]

Ubuntu without Flash and mp3 support would be seriously lame.

Was this intentional? :D

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Miseph]

As of a month and a half ago (the last time I tried), FF in Linux wouldn't even let you attempt to log in. It's conceivable that this is a Linux issue, rather than a FF issue... but that is still completely inexplicable.

That said, you glossed over some other items in the list with an ellipsis, and I assure you that whether or not you personally find that to be troublesome, I know people who went back to IE for precisely those reasons... at least one each.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[walshy007]

How does the DRM affect you? It's merely there to enable/ you to play DRM'd files. It doesn't restrict you with anything. But if you have such files, it allows you to play them. How is that worse than Linux where you can't play them at all?

First off, drm is flawed since the content to be displayed has to be shown to the same person you're trying to obfuscate it from somehow

How does this related to linux? for the DRM to be effective you would have to stop people modifying the kernel since then they could just strip things of drm and write the resulting output to disk.. bam, drm removal done.

So either drm is supported in a way that lets you effectively completely remove drm (most people wouldn't mind this) or they try to completely lock you out of tinkering with your own system in the name of protecting the drm. That is what people have issue with.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[badkarmadayaccount]

Hmmm.. Would you mind listing a couple of examples about Apple?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[badkarmadayaccount]

With any descent server mobo supporting serial over Ethernet and ILOM or equivalent technologies, I fail to see the point in these devices. Along with kickstart installer images (RHEL family and Ubuntu) for repurposed boxes, deployment optins have really moved forward, don't you think?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[badkarmadayaccount]

One word: Slipstreaming. Why torture yourself with IE even for a second?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[badkarmadayaccount]

$500 box + $1500 OS X = $2000 machine with OS X
Apple may as well close it's Mac division, there won't be any difference.

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[Mikkeles]

'Along with kickstart installer images (RHEL family and Ubuntu) ...'

So GNU/Linux has finally caught up with the Amiga?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[tepples]

Despite the fact that Microsoft has been systematically pushing ActiveX farther and farther into the "theoretically supported for corporate buzzword checkbox reasons but disabled in virtually all real-world situations" bin since around the time Windows XP came out?

The Flash Player plug-in is installed using ActiveX. How is that "disabled in virtually all real-world situations"?

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[badkarmadayaccount]

http://kickstart-tools.sourceforge.net/howkickstartworks.html
Amiga kickstart is a bootstrap firmware, and not a installer.
<meta type='comment'>*WHOOSH*</meta>

Re:Thats ok , as an XP user

[jonadab]

The Flash Player plug-in may use the ActiveX interface to communicate with IE, and vice versa, but it is not "installed using ActiveX" in the sense of being automatically installed whenever a website points it out and asks for it, like a custom ActiveX control would have been in IE5. That functionality has been disabled in IE for the better part of a decade.

The Flash plugin is installed in much the same way any other software is installed (Firefox, for instance) in Windows: by downloading the installer, saving it to the filesystem, and running it as Administrator. Plugins installed in this fashion are of course still usable with IE. Obviously.

But the other poster was talking about the automatic downloading and installation of custom per-site ActiveX controls whenever a site requests them, which is a relic of the Windows 98 era, when security just wasn't on Microsoft's radar.

Not surprised

[tkinnun0]

XP's graphics handling is really crappy compared to 7 and Vista, so this is no surprise. Flip an LCD to portrait mode in XP, then try to turn on vsync because horizontal tearing just became vertical tearing. Can't be done.

Re:Not surprised

[upuv]

And who exactly flips their monitor more than twice EVER? You buy the monitor you go oh cool it can be viewed in both modes. You try it then you leave it in the mode of choice for basically every after that. Sure some wise A$$ is going to say the opposite. There is such a minority of people that ever move the monitor after plugging it in.

So again how is this on topic?

Re:Not surprised

[Midnight Thunder]

XP's graphics handling is really crappy compared to 7 and Vista, so this is no surprise. Flip an LCD to portrait mode in XP, then try to turn on vsync because horizontal tearing just became vertical tearing. Can't be done.

Whether or not XP can handle it doesn't really matter. Windows 7 is where Microsoft's focus is now and their money is better spent supporting the road forward. One other thing worth looking at is why people are still using XP? Chances are in a couple of years once Windows 7 has proved itself many companies will upgrade to the new OS, invalidating any effort Microsoft put into making IE9 work with the older platform.

Beyond companies, who are probably still using IE6 anyhow (ugh), people who really want to stick to XP and want to have the latest version of IE might end up being gifted by some hacker making it possible.

Re:Not surprised

[sopssa]

You forgot tablets, and XP/Vista/Win7 are used in those too. With those you might actually flip the screen quite often - I do with my mobile phone too.

Re:Not surprised

[tkinnun0]

The topic is XP's antiquated graphics architecture. One example of that is XP's inability to provide hardware-accelerated font-rendering for applications. Another is XP's atrocious graphics in portrait mode. All the goodies borne from the new graphics architecture point to Microsoft's decision to rewrite major parts of XP instead of pushing out more service packs being the right one.

Re:Not surprised

[TheLink]

> One example of that is XP's inability to provide hardware-accelerated font-rendering for applications

In practice it's not such a huge disadvantage, since 2D hardware-acceleration is still rather flaky. Too often I have to turn OFF hardware acceleration because the video card makers make crap drivers (both Nvidia and ATI).

I find that the hardware acceleration stuff often doesn't work so well when you use multiple monitors - e.g. the video doesn't show - all you get is a black box.

As for XP vs Windows 7, I get corrupted graphics on my work laptop with Windows 7 and ATI video (example: sometimes lines of text vanish or are incorrectly displayed when scrolling), and no such problems with XP SP3 + Nvidia + single monitor (I won't be surprised if I find some probs if I add a monitor).

Might be my imagination but seems like 2D hardware acceleration was better in the 1990s e.g. you could get video cards and drivers without such garbage happening - and they actually seemed to be quite fast at drawing 2D stuff, given the slow CPU speeds of those days.

Maybe the video card manufacturers are focusing more on 3D acceleration.

Re:Not surprised

[howardd21]

Windows 7 is where Microsoft's focus is now and their money is better spent supporting the road forward.

Not only is the road forward a Windows 7 road, it is a Microsoft system software road. When a Microsoft looks at its customer base and sees a user that is not upgrading to Windows 7, and instead staying on an OS that is 7-8 years old, they are seeing one on Office 2000 or XP, an old version of Project or Visio, older equipment and printers, etc. Why bother working so hard to keep them happy? They will be happy day in and day out as long as automatic updates keep them semi-secure, and they will moan when some new thing like hardware acceleration is not available to them for their P4, 1.8Ghz with 1 Gb of RAM PC and 17" monitor.

As far as I am concerned, I would not try to support them either, their like dead zombies in a live user community.

Re:Not surprised

[Pentium100]

So, not to be a zombie, you must constantly spend money on upgrades that you don't need?

If someone uses his/her PC at work to create/modify Office documents and browse the internet, odds are that his old PC, OS and Office is enough. Why would someone need a quad core CPU and 4GB RAM to edit 10 page Word document? You can do that on a 486 50MHz 16MB RAM and Win95 with Office 97. Now, browsing the internet is different, but browsers like Firefox and Opera are better than IE and still support XP.

Now, you can say that the employee could just use Linux and I agree, but if (s)he already has the old Windows OS and old Office, the money has been spent already and there is no point in making a problem where wasn't one.

Also, 17" monitor is perfectly OK for, you know, office work.

Re:Not surprised

[Pentium100]

One other thing worth looking at is why people are still using XP?

Because there is no point in upgrading?

If I built my PC today, I probably would install win7 and use it (after a few interface "tweaks"), but my PC is 3 years old and I did not want to use Vista. I could, of course, format the hard drive and install 7, also reinstall all my apps, but I would only do so if there was a huge benefit to it. Win7 might be better than XP, but it is not that much better for me to spend a week reinstalling all of my apps while essentially having a non fully functional PC.

Re:Not surprised

[gbjbaanb]

are you sure that's true? I mean, MS originally claimed they couldn't port WPF to XP and that everyone would have to buy Vista.

When they realised no-one would, they suddenly found a way to get WPF working on XP, hardware-acceleration included. Just because XP doesn't support the WDDM, just means MS hasn't provided the right bits in the other APIs. I mean, Direct3D does hardware-accelerated fonts, and that runs on XP.

No, the problem isn't a technical one, its a cost one. MS has APIs built into Vista/Win7 that aren't available to XP and rather than extend an older API to support all platforms, they're throwing those away in favour of new APIs that support only the new platforms rather than add those features to the old ones. Means you have to buy new MS stuff, you see...

Re:Not surprised

[tepples]

And who exactly flips their monitor more than twice EVER?

People who play classic portrait-mode arcade games in MAME and don't want windowed mode. Or radiologists looking at an X-ray photo. (These A$$es went to college for eight years.)

Re:Not surprised

[Midnight Thunder]

Now, browsing the internet is different, but browsers like Firefox and Opera are better than IE and still support XP.

It may be, but once you are in the "whatever I have is enough" mindset, they will probably be in the same mindset when it comes to their browser. When the general momentum is forward, it is hard to support everyone who is not moving. Heck, from a business point of view why invest in a market which is no longer interested in giving you their money.

Re:Not surprised

[Pentium100]

It may be, but once you are in the "whatever I have is enough" mindset, they will probably be in the same mindset when it comes to their browser.

The browser is a bit different from other apps. While you can still use MS Office 97 and make files compatible with newer versions, it would be difficult to use Firefox 1 or IE5 on today's internet. Newest versions of Opera and FF still work on older OSs (IIRC Opera still works on Win98) and will continue to do so. IE-only sites will work on IE6, 7 or 8.

Re:Not surprised

[shutdown -p now]

So, not to be a zombie, you must constantly spend money on upgrades that you don't need?

At some point, you have to upgrade software to keep the version that you use supported - and this means an eventual hardware upgrade, too. This is true of all software from all manufacturers that I know of (definitely true of OS X and Linux), and support terms for Microsoft software are among the longest in the industry.

Which leads me to the second point. Just because IE9 won't be on XP doesn't mean that IE8 won't be supported. It will, and you will still get security patches. In fact, since it has shipped in Win7, it will be supported with security fixes for as long as Win7 is supported (and IE7 will be supported for as long as Vista is supported).

Re:Not surprised

[Khyber]

"Why would someone need a quad core CPU and 4GB RAM to edit 10 page Word document?"

Because you've got fucking Norton or McAfee taking up 3.5GB and 3 cores.

Re:Not surprised

[upuv]

Ah good point. I retract mine.

Re:Not surprised

[upuv]

A service pack for XP is the wrong thing to do.

I accept the point about the poor architecture I also add the mountains of other issues with XP.

The service pack is called Win7.

Re:Not surprised

[upuv]

The comment makes you a smart A$$ the people that went to University are just smart.

Re:Not surprised

[badkarmadayaccount]

Try running both... on a PII - 366 MHz - 512 MB RAM - XP SP2. Real fun.

So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[wellingtonsteve]

We're gonna have another IE6 on our hands in a few years time - every other browser (and maybe IE9, IE10 and so on) will (hopefully) be implementing HTML5 properly in the future but XP users will be stuck with IE8 so websites will never you be able to make the switch to HTML5 (replacing Flash with etc..) because of having to support IE8

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

I seriously doubt XP will still be used a lot when HTML5 has become mainstream. It's not like you see many Windows 98 or 2000 installations in today's world, so why would XP be any different?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[bheer]

XP users savvy enough to upgrade to IE8 probably also have another browser. Very few corporate intranets have mandated XP/IE8. I foresee many developers having to support mainly IE6/XP and Firefox* in the near future, and maybe a quickie test on IE7 and IE8 if you have resources to do so.

* The idea is that if you wrote a reasonably standards-based site and tested with Firefox, it will work well in Chrome/Safari/Opera. Feel free to test with any other standards-based browser instead.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[portnux]

Does anyone still use IE, with Chrome and Firefox available who needs IE?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

About 62% of the people use IE.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Threni]

There are loads of Windows 2000 installations. Not every organisation upgrades the hardware and software of thousands of PCs just because there happens to be a new version of Windows on the market.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[iamhassi]

Because 98 sucked and 2000 didn't support games and wasn't marketed towards home users, it was the new NT for businesses.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[EngivalX]

Just nit-picking here, but that's a bad assumption. Opera is just a bit more picky than firefox is. For example, recently xkcd.com didn't render in Opera because during an update, they forgot to close their title tag.

Because of how unforgiving Opera is, I tend to test in it first. The end result usually runs in firefox first try.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Danzigism]

yea, and there's still loads of line-of-business applications that require IE in conjunction with the .NET framework. businesses are the only people still relying on IE6. everyone else is just lazy.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[bheer]

Excellent point. Last year I visited a customer with ~200 Windows 2000/IE6 desktops. They don't connect to the Internet and will get updates until July 2010. They'll probably move to Windows 7 in 2011, especially as virtualization can guarantee their old apps will continue to run.

These guys spent next to nothing on software and very little on hardware for the past 10 years. It doesn't work for everyone but they saw it as a good deal.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KiloByte]

Any stats done by a third-party advertiser are utterly worthless. The biggest upside of Firefox is AdBlock, so scum-peddling companies will be blocked, won't see you and thus will overestimate IE's market share.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[westlake]

Very few corporate intranets have mandated XP/IE8.

... and even fewer Firefox.

MS has the centralized deployment and management tools you must have in the corporate work-space.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Carrot007]

I know what you mean but there is not need to express it though lies.

98 was the best of it's line.

And 2000 supported games very well thankyou. Unless you were still playing dos games, in which case you were an idiot.

2000 was great. ME was released because microsaoft marketed 2000 wrong. 2000 was ready for the home user as long as they did not want to play dos games (and dos games died out years earlier (beyond a few games that were dos/windows with 2 clients on the disk)) (and the lack of dos games was just because of no dos mode sound driver, and someone eventually wrote one).

Sorry though, you were probably 5 at the time, or 60 and now can;t remeber it right.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[TheRaven64]

2000 didn't support games

I think you're confusing 2K with NT 4. I replaced a dual-boot NT4 / 98SE install with 2K precisely because 2K did come with proper DirectX support (NT always had OpenGL) and ran all of my games. Before then, I needed to reboot to play games.

For a student, the cost of 2K was the same as the cost of Me (around £45, as I recall). For everyone else, it was a lot more expensive. I don't think it ever got more than about 1% total market share; most big companies didn't upgrade from NT4 before XP was released and most home users didn't both.

If you already had 2K, XP didn't give you anything much of value. The UI became more ugly, the only good feature was Remote Desktop support.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Hurricane78]

Waddaya mean “stuck”. Those who are incompetent use whatever came/comes with their computer (IE on Vista/Win7), and the competent don’t use IE, no matter what the OS is.
Except in Europe, where we have the browser ballot.

Oh, and don’t bet on my sites caring if you got a browser with a buggy implementation of an outdated standard.
IE9 will be the first IE I’m going to support again. But only if they adhere to the standard by the same means as other browsers.
(MS: That does not mean we’re good. Your respect debt will just stop getting bigger. You still have to pay it off AND make some profit, before that happens.)

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

Sure there are a few corporations like that. But they don't represent a significant percentage of the market by any means. I'm sure there are (for example) more Macs in the world than systems with Windows 2000. Hell, there are probably even more PC's with Linux as main desktop operating system than Windows 2000.

There will always be people using old or weird software. But we're talking about mainstream here. Right now, XP is still mainstream, but it's share of users is declining rapidly. I don't see any reason why it would still hold ground in a few years.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

Net Applications is hardly an advertiser. You can't block their statistics by using AdBlock, because that's not how they operate.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[amiga3D]

XP is actually not a bad OS. I don't like MS for political reasons but after all the years of XP development the OS is stable and fast and hardware requirements are low compared to newer MS operating systems. Most importantly, Vista and Win7 just don't offer any real compelling reasons to upgrade for the average web surfer. As long as firefox and opera support XP I can see a lot of people sticking with it until their old computers die.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[eric-x]

hm no some games required xp, some could be fixed by tricking the installer but often you would get a "missing function" error. Besides gaming there are some other problems with 2000, that's why I moved from 2000 to xp. 2000 also doesn't do font subpixel ani-taliasing.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

Exactly the same could be said of Windows 2000, yet you don't see that around on a large scale at all.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[TaoPhoenix]

It's way different.

At the very least, count the years. Win98 (Aka Win95 Version2) Was only out for 2 years. WinMe was that legendary disaster. Win2000 was only out for some 13 months! It lived a few years because it took MS 2 more years to get a grip on XP.

But XP was different. Despite some bumps, it became the gold standard of Windows computing. This was made doubly worse when the Vista fiasco went on. Arguably only in 2010 is it remotely sensibly replaceable with Win7. XP really is "Good Enough" for a ton of stuff.

HTML5 is just a rendering spec. I'm sure there will be browsers supporting it. You wanna see the long tail of XP usage? I'll gander it will be around for TEN MORE years!!

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

I'll gander it will be around for TEN MORE years!!

Oh I'm sure it will be around and used by some. But not by most people. It wont be mainstream, even in two years anymore. Just look at the statistics right now: market share dropped from 80%+ to barely 66% in the last two years and Windows 7 hasn't really even kicked in yet. And now with Microsoft not supporting XP with new products, the decline will only accelerate.

While Vista was obviously a problem, people won't be buying computers with XP pre-installed now that W7 is out, even though it is still an option from some vendors. So given the normal lifespan of a PC of about 3 to 5 years, XP will be completely gone from the scene, which is about the same timespan I reckon it will take for HTML5 to become a mainstream alternative to Flash.

Sure, XP is "good enough" to do most tasks, you're completely right about that. But that's not what it's about.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

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?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

Sorry, that should have read Windows 7 is gaining 5.11% market share each month.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[foniksonik]

Couldn't you just validate first then test? Seems like if you are standards compliant you'll be good in any standards based browser. I then test in ie with the ie7/8.js file conditionally included. Usually works first go as well ( as far as rendering).

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[amiga3D]

XP was actually a big upgrade over 2000. WIN7's improvements are not as obvious to average user.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KiloByte]

Their web bugs are sent to a third-party server, and can be blocked just as any other such request. While they don't waste screen space, they still slow you down and are a privacy intrusion, and thus any block list worth its salt blocks such trackers as well.

The only server which gets reliable data is the one which provides actual content.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[IntlHarvester]

Advertiser or not, it's quite trivial to block analytics scripts using ABP.

(Net Applications appears to run from the hitslink.com domain if someone is interested in actually doing this.)

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

XP users savvy enough to upgrade to IE8

Like those who don't disable automatic updates of their XP system?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[TBoon]

Maybe in the corporate world yes. But for home users, the advantage over Win98 was significant.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[colinrichardday]

Are those figures for just one month (February to March), or is there more of a trend? Linear extrapolation from two points usually isn't very accurate.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Crudely_Indecent]

IE8 forever.... You might as well say IE* forever. We can't even get rid of IE6!

On one of my sites:
IE6 15%
IE7 33%
IE8 51%

MS operating systems:
XP 57%
Vista 30%
Windows 7 10%
Windows 2000 0.76%
Server 2003 0.44%
Windows 98 0.11%

I still have to support IE6 because 15% is a big chunk.
XP still has more share than Vista + Windows 7 combined

It looks to me like MS is just polluting. Seriously, now I have to support 4 different versions of IE.

I'm a Linux user myself, but it bugs me to have to keep extra machines just for testing old browsers. I use VMWare Server and XP to test IE6, IE7 and IE8. The other browsers I test can all co-exist in Linux (even Safari using Crossover)

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[shutdown -p now]

Did you also weep for Win95 users?

Those people aren't "stuck with IE8". Last I checked, Firefox still runs on XP, and so does Chrome. Does this mean that stubborn XP users would have to jump through extra hoops? Sure, but this is no different from what you'd have to do now to surf the Net on a Win98 machine and actually get all the features.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

How about a linear extrapolation from 5 points?

Windows Version      Oct    Nov    Dec    Jan    Feb    Change

Windows XP 32 bit    50.01% 47.97% 45.74% 43.81% 40.33% -3.48%
Windows 7 64 bit      9.54% 13.16% 16.25% 19.04% 22.99% +3.95%
Windows Vista 32 bit 23.24% 20.98% 19.83% 18.39% 16.88% -1.51%
Windows 7 32 bit      4.79%  7.43%  8.57%  9.76% 10.92% +1.16%
Windows Vista 64 bit 10.99%  9.19%  8.40%  7.75%  7.60% -0.15%

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Mad Merlin]

No, we're still going to have IE6 on our hands. Of those XP users still using IE, the vast majority will continue using IE6, not IE8. The only way we'll be rid of IE6 is when XP dies. When XP dies, we'll probably not have another IE6 until Microsoft abandons IE for another decade.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Khyber]

"XP was actually a big upgrade over 2000."

Yea, from a 400MB install to a 1.8GB install, and 2000 supported everything XP supported, minus the added DRM.

BIG Upgrade, pointless waste of time.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

Point being, based on the previous 5 months worth of data points,

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.

This "long time" is estimated to happen in approximately 7 days, at which point, the majority of Windows XP users will have already upgraded to Windows 7 already (This is the point in which there will be more Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit users combined over Windows XP users). Unless he meant just upgraded from Windows XP at all, in which case, that already happened 4 months ago.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[DLG]

Whose numbers are these?
What is the percentage of?
Is it US? International?

This may be data, but is it information given the lack of context?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[ClosedSource]

"XP users savvy enough to upgrade to IE8 probably also have another browser."

How "savvy" do you have to be to follow MS's suggestion to upgrade to IE8 when it appears on your home page (which was never changed from msn.com)?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[ClosedSource]

Actually there's little connection between IE and the .NET framework these days.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[ClosedSource]

I don't know why you assume that most XP users are still using IE6 if they use IE.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[dingen]

XP was actually a big upgrade over 2000. WIN7's improvements are not as obvious to average user.

Are you serious? I think it's rather the other way around. There's virtually no difference at all between 2K and XP. The same thing could be said of W7 and Vista, but upgrading from XP to W7 is quite a step.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

I am either unable or unwilling to discuss the data source, however, it is based on a survey of over 10 million machines worldwide. If you don't think it's an inaccurate representation, present a large unbiased data source of your own and we can dissect that into why that data source may or may not be more or less accurate.

Percentage of the OS's installed. All numbers in theory add up to 100%, however, I did not display those with an insignificant share (2%), or irrelevant to the discussion.

International.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[mister_dave]

According to your numbers, Windows 7 has a 33% market share. That's a little difficult to believe.

W3 Schools, who I'd assume have a mostly geek audience, report Windows 7 having a 13% market share among their users.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[hitmark]

and dosbox worked quite well.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Mad Merlin]

Because that is in fact the case. Many large companies still have at least one system that requires IE6, thus they're relegated to XP and IE6. In that market, people are using about 60% IE6 and 30% IE7. The number of IE8 users may as well be zero.

On the other end of the spectrum, the majority of home users don't use IE anymore, preferring Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

Thus, the majority of IE users are in large companies, and the majority of large companies still mandate usage of IE6. Unless IE8 somehow manages to slime its way into 90%+ marketshare in large corporations and then Microsoft subsequently lets IE languish for another decade, we're extremely unlikely to have IE8 turn into another IE6. Furthermore, by the time IE8 is even a blip on the radar of big companies, XP will be long past its extended support, at which point said big companies will migrate away from XP, as security (or at least security theatre) is fairly important to them.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[amiga3D]

Ah...my mistake. I was thinking of Win ME. ME was kinda like the vista of the day. Everyone who left ME for XP was happy, happy, happy. I don't remember a lot of people that used 2000 on home computers, it seemed mostly business use at the time. We had 2000 PRO at work and it was okay. I was using SUSE at the time as I had finally put my trusty Amiga 3000 away in favor of a Dual PII 450 tower. I remember looking at Win ME and thinking if that was all that had been available to use I'd have kept using the Amiga.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[drsmithy]

XP was actually a big upgrade over 2000. WIN7's improvements are not as obvious to average user.

Uh, what ? XP was basically a few kernel and GUI tweaks over Windows 2000. Windows XP to Vista (and then 7) is probably the single biggest update in the lifetime of Windows NT (with NT 3.51 -> 4.0 and 4.0 -> Windows 2000 following closely behind). 2000 to XP is probably one of the least significant.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[colinrichardday]

The percentage changes you cited only go from February to March. If we go from October to March, we get

Windows XP 32-bit (40.33-50.01)/4 = -9.68/4 = -2.42

Windows 7 64-bit (22.99-9.54)/4 = 13.45/4 = 3.49

Windows Vista 32-bit (16.88-23.24)/4 = -6.36/4 = -1.59

Windows 7 32-bit (10.92-4.79)/4 = 6.13/4 = 1.53

Windows Vista 64-bit (7.60-10.99)/4 = -3.39/4 = -0.85

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[jrumney]

My company is buying two new machines this week, which will be downgraded to XP. Why? The vendors for the software essential to our business (embedded software development) do not support Windows 7 yet, and never will support the bad joke that was Vista.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[ClosedSource]

You didn't produce any real proof that most XP users use IE6 rather than a newer version. Even if "many large companies" do, that doesn't automatically prove that the majority of users do.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[bheer]

IE8 doesn't install automatically in the same way that Chrome updates automatically from 2.x to 3.x or Windows installs security updates. You get a new dialog box prompting you to "upgrade your web experience with a new version of IE", or language to that effect. LOTS of of non-expert users just hit the [X] Close button at that point (for whatever reason -- fear of installing new software, having been taught that installing random new software off the Net is bad, and so on).

Browser upgrades ought to be invisible. But because of Microsoft's awkward IE 6 to 7 to 8 transitions, it isn't. And it keeps a lot of people from upgrading as quickly as they should.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

Then again, my numbers aren't limited to people who visit w3schools, and has a much larger sampling. I would say the vast majority of w3schools.com visitors are developers, with a bias towards open source developers. Assuming my numbers are more accurate of a true market share, then we can safely say that open source geeks are less likely to have upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows XP than the average consumer.

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[mister_dave]

Windows 7 was released in July 2009. Do you really think that it is likely to have a 33% market share in March 2010?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[KingMotley]

My numbers come from a survey of over 26 million PC's. With an estimated total number of PC's in use in the world estimated to be approximately 900 million, my survey covers 2.8% of all PC's. I consider that fairly accurate. How accurate is your guess by sitting in front of your PC?

Re:So XP users will be stuck with IE8 forever..

[Khyber]

A Win2K system absolutely hauls ass for DX9 gaming. So much less cruft. Win2K Professional still sits on one server just for that. Most anything that will work in XP will work in 2K, given the appropriate service pack (2K is up to 5? 6?)

I can!

[daoshi]

1. Switch on my laptop
2. Boot into XP.
3. Install VirtualBox
4. Install Vista in VirtualBox
5. Install IE9 in Vista
6. ????
7. Profit!
8. Got infested with virus because of 0day IE9 holes.
9. Reboot into Ubuntu and start up Firefox
10. World peace.

Re:I can!

[selven]

10. World peace.

I'm pretty sure you need a proprietary driver for that. No wonder no one's found it yet.

Re:I can!

[Mystra_x64]

I thought something like that when I wanted to test IE9 preview. Aside from the fact that I boot my Debian instead.

I've downloaded Vista image from MS site but had no luck. It does not have any SP at all. And SP1 (downloaded by hand) was unable to install itself. Nice...

Re:I can!

[Anpheus]

Where'd you download it from?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/default.aspx

Try getting the Windows 7 trial there.

Re:I can!

[Mystra_x64]

I used http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

I'll see thank you.

Re:I can!

[Anpheus]

Ah, yeah that's purely for what it says it is: testing the browsers and OSes listed in that document. If you're really interested in testing Microsoft stuff for business reasons, testing or just keeping on top of things, they do have a subscription service that, for $250 a year you can get access to literally every Windows version, every Office version, every SQL Server version, etc. Comes with keys and everything.

It's called a Technet Subscription I believe, and if you have a lot of computers in your house it allows you to license any computer you own. The only caveat is that it's licensed "not for business use."

Re:I can!

[Mystra_x64]

Well, I only do care about browser testing. It's just they down have an image for IE9 for obvious reasons.

Good.

[upuv]

Yes XP just worked. It still works better than win 7 in my regard.

However XP + ie is basically an invitation to be hacked / malwared / infected / ripped off.

ie6 is still around basically because xp is. Any one who does any sort of web stuff hates ie6. ie6 is point blank holding back the web. Of course ie 7-8 also have a truck load of issues. But it's the combination of ie + xp that is the real killer.

Lets hope win7 takes hold with ie9 and relegates the other lesser M$ combinations to the bit bucket.

( Of course I say all this and I personally only use FF and Linux )

Re:Good.

[blahbooboo]

Yes XP just worked. It still works better than win 7 in my regard.

Don't agree. XP was great in its day 10 years ago (or 5), but people need to let it go. Fact is XP wasn't ever that great, Windows 2000 was far better than XP. Second, "Xp just worked" is hilarious. My goodness, the amount of crap I deal with in XP far exceeds how it is with Windows 7. When I am forced to use XP now that I am used to Windows 7 I can't understand why anyone would voluntarily keep using XP unless Vista were the only option (hehe). Windows 7 has restored my faith that MS can do something right.

XP is ANCIENT software and does things soooo much worse than 7. I haven't had a single problem with hardware or software in 7, in XP it's download and driver install hell.

Re:Good.

[stewbacca]

Amen. I've been an MS basher since XP day 1. Starting with the after-thought Fisher Price graphics, down to the years of poorly design interface that never got fixed, all in the name of maintaining backwards compatibility and not scaring old timers away from learning something new.

Good for MS now. I bought a Win7 box and like it better than my OSX computers, which, for anyone who knows me, is an amazing statement.

Re:Good.

[Bigjeff5]

Windows 2000 was far better than XP

You do realize that XP was just a prettied up consumerized version of Win2k right? They used the same kernel, and most of the same code base. XP saw a number of improvements with SP1, SP2, and SP3 that Win2k never got.

I find it extremely difficult to say Win2k is better than XP without completely ignoring Win2k first. You have to imagine something that never existed in the first place to make that statement, because if you took pre-sp1 XP and turned off the eye-candy you essentially had Win2k. XP-SP3 is vastly improved over the original XP, they are almost different OS's.

That said, I agree that Win7 is significantly better than XP; I use XP, Vista, and Win7 and Win7 is the best hands down. I'm actually thinking of paying for a copy of 7 to upgrade my Vista laptop - the first time I will have bought a retail copy of an OS since Win98 (that's over a decade ago, for those who suck at counting).

Re:Good.

[blahbooboo]

Yes I do realize that XP was a crapped up Win2k. Win 2k was faster and more stable than XP from day 1. XP just added better USB support and a couple other bloatware things which could have been patched into Win2k. BTW, perhaps you forgot, but pre-XP Sp1 was an absolute NIGHTMARE. Unstable, FAR slower than Win 2k, universally hated (almost to level of Vista lol)

Win 3.1

[michaelmalak]

A software layer emulating hardware acceleration can't be that hard, especially given the existence of good documentation of the software and hardware interfaces. Must be much easier than developing MAME, for example. Somebody will do it.

It reminds me of Windows 3.1 -- how one had to purchase Trumpet to connect to the Internet.

Except the difference now is XP satisifies many user's needs, while Windows 95 provided compelling reasons for users to upgrade from Windows 3.1.

Re:Win 3.1

[tepples]

A software layer emulating hardware acceleration can't be that hard

Yes it can. Even though software can emulate hardware, it can't necessarily do so at the same speed. Tests like Acid3 require completion in a specific amount of time.

Must be much easier than developing MAME, for example.

How fast does MAME run newer arcade games using PS2- or Xbox-derived system boards on a netbook? Not at full speed, even though the CPU in a netbook is faster than that in a PS2 or Xbox.

Re:Win 3.1

[nschubach]

What I find disturbing/entertaining is the use of "impossible" in regards to software when a solution is presented right after it.

Re:Dichotomy

[dsavi]

In my opinion they could at least ship a version of IE9 without the hardware acceleration, at least it would improve standards compliance.

People need to stop bitching

[Sycraft-fu]

It is unreasonable to expect a vendor to continue to support their old products forever. MS has quite a long support cycle, and it is a pretty predictable one too. XP has now entered what one might call "sunset" support. They still patch it, their answer to security issues isn't "Just upgrade to a new one," but they are done adding features. It is the final version, feature wise. That ended at the end of 2009, when general support for XP was terminated. We are now under extended support, the "sunset support", until 2014.

Windows 7 is of course being upgraded and supported as it is new. General support is scheduled to end for it in 2015, and extended support in 2020, though they've been known to extend the support dates before.

That is not bad at all. XP was released in 2001. It got nearly a decade of mainstream support, and it going to have 13 years in total support. Compare that to Ubutnu LTS or OS-X and you find it is extremely long. Solaris is one of the few OSes that has support cycles of that length.

So people need to STFU. No, XP is NOT going to get anymore new features. Deal with it. If you wish to continue using XP, then you can do so without those features. If not, upgrade to a newer OS.

This isn't the first new feature XP hasn't gotten either. DirectX 10 and up are Vista and 7 only, the DWM is Vista and 7 only and so on. XP is an old OS. It's a good one, but it is an old one. They are not going to offer new stuff for it indefinitely.

For that matter Windows 2000 won't get IE9, and didn't get IE8, though it's extended support doesn't end until mid this year.

I could see people being mad if Vista weren't getting IE9 or something, or if XP wasn't getting security patched. If MS had a policy of "As soon as a new Windows comes out we completely drop the old one," that would be reason to complain. As it stands, they support their OSes for a long, long time. You get at least a decade of total support, which is quite a lot.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[Ant P.]

Compare that to Ubutnu LTS or OS-X and you find it is extremely long.

Comparing XP's worthless out-of-box installation to any other OS which comes with (and MAINTAINS) hundreds of third-party apps is an extremely invalid comparison.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[TyFoN]

I think the main reason people are bitching about it is because while you need to upgrade the others more often, they are free to upgrade (except for OS X, but the mac users are already used to shovel money in apple's direction).

Re:People need to stop bitching

[jhol13]

I bought a brand new computer two weeks ago. Want bet what the OS in it was?

Re:People need to stop bitching

[samkass]

IS isn't a "feature" of the OS, it's an application that runs on the OS. Considering XPs market share, it's obviously more of a business decision than a technical one to drop support. Every other browser has found a way to work with XP and if IE was a separately responsible business area of Microsoft this problem would get solved.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[bheer]

While I agree with everything you say, I'll point out the following (and I usually support MS on many issues):

• Windows Live Messenger 14.x (labelled '9 series' or something) has lots of snazzy Windows 7-style visual effects and was backported to Windows XP (I am aware this is less elaborate than what IE9 is planning).
• Opera supports 2D acceleration under XP
• The technical arguments against backporting to XP are hogwash. Chrome has superior sandboxing on Vista/7, but gracefully downgrades on XP
• Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot by effectively ceding the modern XP browser market to Chrome, Firefox and Opera. XP will still be around 'til 2014-2015. That's 4-5 years. If they think they can afford that, well, more power to them.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[Gadget_Guy]

Vista was a mess as we all know and most business users have skipped it entirely.

Except Vista isn't a mess. I didn't see it when it was first released (because I believed the naysayers here and avoided it), but post SP1 Vista works fine. Mind you, I was used to running as a non-Administrator user. As for business skipping it, why wouldn't they? Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade, why spend the money? At my work, we are only just upgrading most of our workstations from Windows 2000!

Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out. That's when I'll start installing it for business users.

What is wrong with Windows 7 now? What are the deal-breaker bugs that you need to get fixed? I have been using it since the beta and it has been remarkably solid. I think you are just parrotting the old line about not using SP0 products without even checking that it is true this time.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[Sycraft-fu]

The fact that you say XP is their only stable operating system shows the fact that you are just an anti-MS zealot, or very not up to date on their OSes. Windows 7 is exceedingly stable, as is Vista. So long as you are running on stable hardware that has tested drivers, you aren't going to find any stability problems. Certainly not more than XP and probably even less.

If your metric for a stable OS really is number of service packs, then you are a fool who's got no business doing computer support. I rather suspect that's not the case, and you simply don't like MS.

Also this all misses the point that in no way is MS getting rid of XP. They are simply not bringing their latest browser, as of yet unreleased, to it. If that really is something you find to be a big deal, you've got extremely strange priorities, or a case of anti-MS zealotry.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[gaspyy]

Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out. That's when I'll start installing it for business users.

You're so full of it. 7 is rock-solid out of the box. I've been testing it since beta and we were ready to upgrade as soon as it hit the stores.
Windows 7 without any SP is faster and more secure than XP-SP3. But not even SP1 is good enough for you, you need SP2; why not SP4?

Tell me, make a list of issues that prevent your company from upgrading. I'll wait.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[ronobot]

When Ars Technica posted this news several days ago, the comments were mostly along the same lines as this one. The thread then became an "XP vs Vista/7" pissing match.

I think everyone is missing the issue. It's not about XP, it's about Internet Explorer.

The ~170,000 visitors a month web site that I work for has an XP userbase of 53%. I doubt that number will dip below 50% by the time IE 9 is coming out. Another commenter on the Ars thread found numbers for XP that were around 65%.

So for me, the real question is: in the midst of intense competition from Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, why would the IE team choose to create a browser that no more than 50% of users can install?

Re:People need to stop bitching

[jafiwam]

There's nothing wrong with Win7.

It's faster than Vista on the _same_ hardware and has some very nice usability features in it.

Most of the IT department (who is allowed to make these sorts of decisions for themselves) where I work have started using Win7 as the primary on their workstations and they love it.

It runs everything they have needed it to run (except a shitty off brand printer that's about to get dumped).

Win7 is a win for Microsoft. They really got it right for once.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[linebackn]

It is unreasonable to expect a vendor to continue to support their old products forever.

Programmers must draw a line somewhere, how much of an OS do they want to re-implement in their application? Sometimes such re-implement has to be done, but other times it is just too much work and maintenance. It is all about balance.

On a related note Mozilla just released their final update to SeaMonkey 1.1 (1.1.19). Here is a screen shot of it running on NT 3.51! Very impressive work keeping it running on a 15-year old OS for this long.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[allcaps]

Kirby has been supporting their old vacuums for quite some time.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[Sycraft-fu]

There's also the question of what "maintains" is. Having apps in a repository doesn't equal "maintaining." If all they are doing is getting the apps automatically form the authors' sites and/or having them submitted and then packing them up for install, that doesn't mean shit. That's just making things available in a convenient location. That's wonderful, but that really doesn't qualify as maintenance and support. If they are regression testing the apps making sure that they don't break anything, function with all new apps, etc, etc then sure, ok. Perhaps even if they themselves are patching apps that aren't being supported by devs anymore.

However I've never seen that.

All they do is get whatever happens to be out there. That's fine, but it isn't worth much. You can't say "Oh look at the maintenance they do on all these apps!" No, it is bundling is what they are doing. They pack them up so you can get at them easily.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[nvrrobx]

And if Microsoft were bundling lots of applications (third party or otherwise), people would be bitching that Microsoft doing so limits choice.

There is no winning for Microsoft here, clearly.

XP is almost 10 years old - they have to move on at some point.

I have a 2008 Nissan, but the 2010 has a better navigation system. Should I be insisting that Nissan upgrade my navigation software to match that of the newer model of my car? After all, it is software.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[Gnavpot]

XP was released in 2001. It got nearly a decade of mainstream support, and it going to have 13 years in total support.

I see this a lot, and I think it is the wrong way to count support length.

Support length of Software version X should be calculated from the release date of Software version X+1, or from the date where sale of version X stopped.

If a company releases a new version every 10 years and pulls support after 10 years + 1 day, I will consider the support rather shitty.

(In the discussion of XP it can even be argued that support length should be calculated from the release date of version X+2, since a large part of the user base discarded version X+1 and some of them even went as far as removing it from new computers.)

Re:People need to stop bitching

[tepples]

Comparing XP's worthless out-of-box installation to any other OS which comes with (and MAINTAINS) hundreds of third-party apps is an extremely invalid comparison.

Unlike Canonical and Red Hat, Microsoft has market power in operating systems for commodity desktop and laptop PCs. If Microsoft included basic versions of Office, Visual Studio, and the like with Windows, it might get in trouble with competition regulators, just as it did with Internet Explorer in the EU.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[jack2000]

DirectX 10 WORKS on XP, I'm using it on XP64 even! That bit about XP not supporting the DX10 because of new os architecture was a huge load of bullshit!

Re:People need to stop bitching

[kgwilliam]

The OP was talking about support lifecycles and how XP has a pretty good support lifecycle compared to a lot of Linux distributions. Can you explain what that has to do with your argument about hundreds of apps coming with a Linux distro?

Re:People need to stop bitching

[westlake]

All they do is get whatever happens to be out there. That's fine, but it isn't worth much

When Microsoft bundles an app with Windows, the geek will fret and cry "Monopoly!"

But the 15,000 free apps in his Linux distro's repository leaves the masses unmoved - and he can't quite figure out why.

     

Re:People need to stop bitching

[kupekhaize]

While I can certainly understand the need to deprecate older software and hardware, there are lots of times MS has been famous for claiming the need to do such things, when the sole purpose is to force people to give them more money.

Case in point: one you already mentioned; DX10. Microsoft claimed there was no way to get DX10 working on XP, and everyone *had* to upgrade to Vista to get it. Several games came out (Microsoft Flight Simulator X was a good example....) that required DX10 for advanced graphics and features, and Microsoft claimed there was no way to get them available in Windows XP.

However, it wasn't long before people bypassed the installer's OS checks, and got DX10 running on Windows XP. The end result? Flight Simulator had all of the extra graphics options that were "impossible" on Windows XP. First hit on Google ATM for "DX10 on Windows XP" gave me this page which does a good job of summing it up and giving graphic examples.

There's a reason we all stopped taking what Microsoft says at face value a long time ago.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[ClosedSource]

Around here I don't hear a lot of comments about what the users want, but what web developers want. Do you really think that users will be better off if MS switched IE's core to WebKit? Sounds like a real bugfest to me.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[ClosedSource]

"IE needs newer OS support in order to support HTML5? I call bullshit on this."

You're right. It's bullshit to talk about supporting HTML5 until it's a real standard.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[petermgreen]

Support length of Software version X should be calculated from the release date of Software the X+1, or from the date where sale of version X stopped.
Indeed and MS are one of the few companies who does this.

IIRC according to thier lifecycle policy mainstream support will last 5 years after release of the product and at least two years after the release of the successor while extended support will last at least 5 years after the end of mainstream support and at least 2 years after the release of the second successor.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[rsborg]

Talk to me when Windows 7 Service Pack 2 comes out

Since you feel you need an SP2 for business use...

Windows 7 IS Vista SP2.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[DaVince21]

Windows 7, I'd hope, or else you've been majorly ripped off.

Re:People need to stop bitching

[upuv]

Windows 7 is not stable. Well not where I am. Windows 7 is however better than Vista but my dog could have barfed up something better than Vista.

So far I find I have to reboot 7 more often than an XP machine. I'm also one of those that have put 7 on a laptop that formally had XP and the battery lasts roughly half as long. And what is with 7 and the missing drivers? The worst is when it says it can't find the NIC driver.

XP from a user perspective very stable. From a guy who has to build web sites that support ie on XP Nightmare.

At the moment the it just works OS that I use, has to be Ubuntu. Never fails to get all the drivers working these days. And I gotta say I never thought I'd see that happen.

( An aside. I kept on trying Vista. x32 x64 laptops desktops etc. Every single time something didn't work. )

( Another Aside. What is with the 7 interface. It feels completely half done. )

Re:Breaking News!

[dingen]

Well, it kinda is news, because all of the other upcoming new web browsers do support the 8-year-old operating system.

Microsoft

[TyFoN]

It's funny that Microsoft are the only ones that are not able to make XP compatible software (DX10 and IE9)

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

Of course they are able. They just don't want to, because not supporting XP drives Vista and W7 sales.

Re:Microsoft

[Thantik]

This. Exactly. They are looking for every excuse they can to NOT put things on windows XP. What will happen though is that they will claim 'new features'...and 2 months down the line some hacker somewhere is going to find out that it's just a string or something somewhere that has to be changed in a DLL and Microsoft will be caught.

They do this shit for their server software, why not a web browser?

Re:Microsoft

[fyrewulff]

This. Exactly. They are looking for every excuse they can to NOT put things on windows XP. What will happen though is that they will claim 'new features'...and 2 months down the line some hacker somewhere is going to find out that it's just a string or something somewhere that has to be changed in a DLL and Microsoft will be caught.

No. What part of "XP does not support hardware acceleration on it's desktop" do people not understand?

XP is an ancient OS. It cannot support new technology because it just simply cannot, to put it in layman's terms. The only way to make it support newer and newer stuff is if it was engineered in a way that any component can be removed and replaced (it wasn't) or do a complete rewrite.

Now if you're going to spend time on a rewrite, you might as well make a new OS because a complete re-write is a ton of work that will need to be compensated with money.

The fact that nobody has managed to somehow find any of these secret strings in a DLL in the 3 or so years that DirectX10 has been available would prove this. Yes, they may make some moves to entice people to upgrade - but there are seriously things that cannot be backported to XP, not even by Microsoft. The damn OS came out in 2001. Nobody would be running a Linux from that time on their desktop and nobody would be running a MacOS version from that year, either.

Re:Microsoft

[johnlcallaway]

With all their advances, I guess they haven't discovered either of the 'if ... then' or 'switch ... case' programming logic....

Re:Microsoft

[TheRaven64]

What part of "XP does not support hardware acceleration on it's desktop" do people not understand

All of it, given that we've run DirectX and OpenGL apps in XP in the past. XP doesn't support compositing windows, but it does support providing a 3D rendering context (OpenGL or Direct3D) to a window and compositing within that. The only things that don't work on XP are geometry shaders, and a web browser does not need these.

The paper from MS Research showing how to accelerate text rendering on the GPU by turning the bezier curves into triangles and then performing the fixup in pixel shaders came with example code that ran on XP (back in 2004). Even WebGL does not require anything that the XP driver model does not support.

The damn OS came out in 2001. Nobody would be running a Linux from that time on their desktop and nobody would be running a MacOS version from that year, either

Microsoft is still shipping XP. You can buy a new machine with XP from Dell and others, today. If Apple still shipped machines with OS X 10.0 and simultaneously released software that required 10.6 or later, do you think people would not complain?

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

No. What part of "XP does not support hardware acceleration on it's desktop" do people not understand?

So you don't offer hardware acceleration on XP. Or you implement your hardware acceleration differently. Everybody is still releasing brand new software for XP, with hardware acceleration and everything, so why can't Microsoft?

It's especially weird since Microsoft designed both XP and IE9, so surely they could have figured out a way to make them compatible. But they didn't. Not because they aren't able to, but because they don't want to. It's as simple as that.

Now they hide behind an excuse that IE9 isn't compatible with something in XP, but that's only true because they made it that way themselves.

Re:Microsoft

[Rockoon]

What is hardware accelerated in Vista and 7 but not in XP? Why that none other than the GDI+ API.

While XP had a fine hardware accelerated GDI interface (provided by video card drivers), hardware acceleration was never implemented for GDI+.

Basically on XP, GDI+ is sort of a hack on top of GDI. While on 7 and Vista, both GDI and GDI+ runs on top of the new accelerated compositing system. To implement accelerated GDI+ for XP, it is essentially a crap load of work either porting over the compositing system, or implementing both GDI and GDI+ directly on top of DirectX. All this, and not all of the GDI+ features can be accelerated with older video hardware (pixel shader 1.0? no vertex shaders? voodoo? yeah right)
IE9 obviously uses GDI+ extensively, and so do many newer .NET applications. You will note how crappily some of them run on XP precisely because GDI+ isnt accelerated.

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

Thanks for your insightful post :) I don't know a lot about the internals of developing for Windows and I always enjoy learning a bit more about it.

So could it be then that IE9 is a .NET application? Wouldn't that be (one of) the first "flagship" products Microsoft ship in this form?

I always wondered why Microsoft's own software isn't powered by .NET. Things like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook but also the stuff that comes with Windows itself, like Paint, Windows Media Player, Calculator, Wordpad and of course, Internet Explorer.

Re:Microsoft

[Rockoon]

Nah, IE9 is probably not .NET.

GDI+ is independent of .NET, essentially an API targeted at C++ developers (GDI+ is based on classes compatible with VC++ classes)

Its just that .NET uses it extensively for its own stock graphics classes, which is why many graphically intensive .NET applications that use the stock classes dont run well on XP (especially obvious with any sort of intensive alpha blending.)

The .NET libraries could be redesigned to use DirectX, XNA, or OpenGL or whatever.. but that wont help the C++ developers using GDI+

Re:Microsoft

[TheThiefMaster]

The only things that don't work on XP are geometry shaders, and a web browser does not need these.

And interprocess sharing of a graphics surface. And the entire hardware accelerated text subsytem for direct-x (which also happens to support cleartype).
Given that Internet Explorer uses multiple processes, the former is probably quite important. Being a web-browser, the latter would be immensely helpful.

Re:Microsoft

[KingMotley]

Microsoft is not shipping XP. They have no released a windows XP retail box in the channel in years. They have not sold any XP licenses for a long time. They ALLOW for owners with a valid vista license to use XP, and dell (and others) downgraded the OS to XP for their clients on a number of machines.

Re:Microsoft

[KingMotley]

If Microsoft wanted to extract more money from people in an easy way, they could release an XP SP 4, paid version, which upgrades some parts of XP to be more like vista, while trimming the fat.

They did, it costs $99 but they called it Windows 7.

Re:Microsoft

[nedlohs]

You don't want to implement your hardware acceleration differently, that's the whole point - the windows XP version would require more development effort and the benefits don't outweigh the costs.

Sure they could implement IE9 using only things available on XP, but clearly they want to use the new stuff.

Should they make IE 9 work on Windows 3.1 too? MS DOS 4.0?

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

No, I don't even think they should support IE9 on XP. I just wished they would be honest about the reasons, instead of hiding behind the excuse that it's not possible to run IE9 on XP. It would be possible if they wanted to. But they don't want to make IE9 for XP, so that's what they should say.

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

Nah, IE9 is probably not .NET.

So there are still no major applications shipped by Microsoft that use their own .NET framework? Isn't that awfully strange?

Re:Microsoft

[theurge14]

"The damn OS came out in 2001. Nobody would be running a Linux from that time on their desktop and nobody would be running a MacOS version from that year, either."

But yet masses of Windows users are still running it.

Re:Microsoft

[bar-agent]

So there are still no major applications shipped by Microsoft that use their own .NET framework? Isn't that awfully strange?

Not really. Microsoft doesn't have new applications. They just release new versions of old applications. If they were to do a new desktop application from the ground up, they'd use .NET.

Re:Microsoft

[Rockoon]

You could ask the same thing about VBA, yet VBA is unquestionably the most popular development platform ever.

It does look like Windows Media Center is built on .NET, but meh.. its unimportant. Development platforms are tools. Plenty of .NET applications, including games, are out there.

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

its unimportant. Development platforms are tools

It might not be important technically, but PR-wise I think it's strange they don't use their own tools in the products they ship.

Re:Microsoft

[fyrewulff]

I think you confused "games that can use hardware acceleration" and "the actual OS shell/desktop can be graphics accelerated from the ground up".

XP handles your desktop compositing entirely in the CPU. Win 7 can handle it entirely in your GPU, leaving the CPU to do better things.

Re:Microsoft

[Rockoon]

Which part of their development chain do you suspect as not being one of their tools?

I suspect that 100% of it is.

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

Heh, that's true. But you must admit it's kind of akward they're promoting .NET as the #1 framework, but don't use it themselves in their most eye-catching products. At first I thought it was simply because .NET was too new, but it has been 8 years now and there's still not a lot rolling out of Redmond that depends on .NET. Maybe you're right and it's completely irrelevant, but I always thought it was a little strange.

Re:Microsoft

[badkarmadayaccount]

And they should port their apps because?

Re:Microsoft

[nedlohs]

Except everyone understands that when they say "impossible" they mean "without rewriting the whole thing". Especially since straight after saying impossible they have some examples of how it could be done to show that it wasn't a simple "so compile it for XP" job.

But I agree it's silly to use the word "impossible" when you don't actually mean "impossible" - you just mean "too expensive to be feasible". Just like I shouldn't say it's "impossible for me to perform brain surgery" when really "it's too expensive and time consuming for me to drop everything and do 12 years of medical school in order to perform that brain surgery you want".

Re:Microsoft

[dingen]

You are right when you say that now, after IE9 has been designed and partly developed, it is "impossible" to make it compatible with XP.

The thing is however, that Microsoft designed it on purpose like this. When they created the design for IE9, they knew it would not run on XP. That's when they decided that this was acceptable. At that point in time (when no line of code for IE9 was written), is was still completely feasable and not impossible at all to change the design so that XP would have been supported. But they didn't do this. They created the "impossible" situation on purpose. That's why I think they should come clear and just state they don't want to support XP, instead of weaseling that it can't be done.

Re:Microsoft

[nedlohs]

Unless IE9 is supposed to be IE using the new features in windows. In which case it wasn't a "screw XP" choice, it was a "lets see what we can do with the new toys" choice.

And "using the new features" is itself "impossible" to do on windows XP, and hence they aren't hiding anything.

Not a problem

[gweihir]

I use Opera and Firefox as backup for those very few pages not standard conform enough to work with Opera. I have not had a page that does not work with either but works with IE in ages.

Re:Long live...

[dingen]

I'd prefer to stick with IE6

Yeah, who needs transparent PNG's anyway, right?

Re:Bye Bye XP

[hedwards]

You do realize that Win XP's coffin has more nails than a typical big box hardware store, right? I'm a little curious how this particular nail is going to be the one that finally smites the beast.

XP + ie = unsafe?

[Alwin Henseler]

However XP + ie is basically an invitation to be hacked / malwared / infected / ripped off.

Although I'm inclined to agree with you, you're making an overly broad statement here.

XP != XP SP1 != XP SP2 != XP SP3.
2 year old, never updated install != fresh + patched install.
IE6 != IE7 != IE8.
Browsing random pornsites != browsing a small set of trusted sites != using apps on corporate intranet.

So with "XP + ie = unsafe" you're lumping things together that in reality are many, vastly different things, and how (un)safe their use is depends on many factors.

Re:XP + ie = unsafe?

[upuv]

" So with "XP + ie = unsafe" you're lumping things together that in reality are many, vastly different things, and how (un)safe their use is depends on many factors. "

Ok I'll say it more plainly XP(SPX) + ieX == unsafe. Or in another way. XP-SP3 + ie8 == unsafe.

I simply look at two factors.
1. What are the most hacked OS browser combinations.
2. What OS browser platform requires more time and dollars to support by almost every web shop in existance.

Ask those questions results in XP and IE popping to the top.

It's time for XP to fade away.

Thank you, Microsoft

[blind biker]

Back in the days when the 'net was a IE-only turf, things were rather ugly, and somewhat hopeless. Then came Mozilla, and slowly things started to change. But really slowly, with some minor accelerations here and there: Chrome kicked up some dust when it appeared, so did the EU's mandate to have multiple browser options in Win7, but the biggest acceleration in removing IE's dominance will come, apparently, from Microsoft itself: the large majority of people still use XP, and there is no sign they're giving up on their trusty OS just yet. Forcing them to upgrade ("If you want IE9, you must get Win7") is a double-edged sword (but then, what isn't?) will certainly force some users to drop IE and get Firefox, Opera or Chrome.

Re:Thank you, Microsoft

[cpghost]

Back in the days when the 'net was a IE-only turf, things were rather ugly, and somewhat hopeless. Then came Mozilla, and slowly things started to change.

I remember using NCSA-Mosaic on SunOS, a couple of years before IE even existed.

Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[RAMMS EIN]

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. That's all very well, but that doesn't mean customers shouldn't complain. Were I a customer of Microsoft's, I would be less interested in excuses and technical explanations and more interested in what was actually being delivered and what I could do with it.

Besides, it can't be that Microsoft figured this out just now. They deliberately took the decisions to make use of features that they of all people should have known weren't available in Windows XP. In other words, they chose not to support Windows XP. I can very well understand that users of Windows XP would not be happy with that.

The good news is, of course, that nobody actually needs MSIE 9. This leaves Microsoft free to make whatever decision they see fit when implementing it. People who want a modern browser on Windows XP can use any of the several alternatives which are available now: Opera, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Chrome are all modern browsers available for Windows XP. And for applications that depend on MSIE-specific features, you can use an earlier version of Windows XP.

Long story short: Microsoft did decide not to support Windows XP. I can see why users of Windows XP would be unhappy about that. But it's not a big problem.

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[howardd21]

Yes. That's all very well, but that doesn't mean customers shouldn't complain. Were I a customer of Microsoft's, I would be less interested in excuses and technical explanations and more interested in what was actually being delivered and what I could do with it.

And what's being delivered is Windows 7, DX10, and IE9. That big new Corvette Engine does not fit in 8 year old Chevy Cavalier, is that GM's fault?

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[dingen]

That big new Corvette Engine does not fit in 8 year old Chevy Cavalier, is that GM's fault?

Yes, of course it is. They designed the old car, the new car and both of the engines. Who's fault would it be else?

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[bheer]

> That big new Corvette Engine does not fit in 8 year old Chevy Cavalier, is that GM's fault?

Car analogies for software are imperfect. You can't fit a bigger engine retroactively into a Chevy Cavalier, but you can backport new software to older OSes. Microsoft even does it for their Windows Live software (Live Messenger has some very snazzy Windows 7-style graphics).

The real reason for not supporting IE9 on XP is that they don't want to. Imho this is stupid given the number of XP users out there (and XP is here to stay 'til 2014), but if they don't care about marketshare ... *shrug*.

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[RAMMS EIN]

And what's being delivered is Windows 7, DX10, and IE9. That big new Corvette Engine does not fit in 8 year old Chevy Cavalier, is that GM's fault?

As far as I am concerned, it isn't really a question of fault. Please do not take my earlier post as an attempt to assign blame. It was not intended that way.

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[howardd21]

Yikes! You actually think GM had any intent to make sure all future engines with different applications should fit in an older car with a different application? Are you serious?

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[howardd21]

Cool = and I won't take that it that way. I was wondering about our intent, so thanks for clarifying. The fact is that it is not likely for technical and economic reasons for companies to continue to support older platforms after a point.

Re:Microsoft Did Abandon Windows XP

[dingen]

I'm not saying they should do that or that it even would be a good idea. Nor am I saying it is such a bad move of Microsoft to drop support of IE9. But it is their decision, you can't blame anyone else.

Microsoft decided to drop support of XP for IE9 out of their own choice to do so, not because it's not possible te create an IE9 that will run on XP. I have no problem with that, but I do think it would be nice if Microsoft was honest about this. It would be a good thing if they simply said "screw the old stuff, we're moving on and so should you", instead of hiding behind technicalities which they invented themselves.

what a riot

[phrostie]

not sure what is more funny, Vista/Win 7-style hardware acceleration, or that everyone else will continuing to support XP

Re:Breaking News!

[Macthorpe]

Well, then they aren't new enough :P

Is this an incompatible carrot?

[erroneus]

Okay, so far, MSIE9 is technically an improvement, but not close enough to its competitors to be taken seriously.

Is this how Microsoft wants to persuade people to buy new computers and stop using WindowsXP?

Re:Is this an incompatible carrot?

[Gadget_Guy]

Okay, so far, MSIE9 is technically an improvement, but not close enough to its competitors to be taken seriously.

It is a year away from being released, and not even in alpha yet. The only thing we have seen so far is a tech demo of the trident engine that didn't even have a full browser user interface. How can you be making any sort of judgement call about it is already?

Re:Is this an incompatible carrot?

[cbhacking]

And at that, it's actually already got some very impressive capabilities. In particular, and relevant to the discussion at hand (hardware-accelerated 3D) try this page in you favorite browser(s): http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html .

The IE9 preview, early though it is, blows Firefox et. al completely out of the water. Try running the number of images up to the max (256), zooming in, and holding the Shift key while moving your mouse. On my machine, IE9 preview will still get 28 FPS. Opera 10.5 will come next closest, at about 9.5 but with terrible background flicker. Firefox 3.6 gets about 5.5 FPS, not smooth at all.

Re:Is this an incompatible carrot?

[Gadget_Guy]

Probably a biased judgment

There is no "probably" about it.

It can only have been based on experience with IE8, IE7, IE6, IE5, IE4, IE3, IE2, and IE1, with a large helping of extra Microsoft.

If you are going that far back, then you are including the time they attained parity with their main rival (Netscape Navigator) with IE3 and also where they exceeded the opposition in terms of stability, standards compliance and general user interface features in IE4 & IE5.

Unfortunately they rested on their laurels with IE6 during the time Netscape got reimplemented, so that when Mozilla Suite was released they were behind the eight ball (although it wasn't until the release of Firefox that IE got its real competition).

Still, you can't just say that IE9 will be bad because IE has always been the inferior product, because it is simply not true. They arrogantly allowed themselves to become the inferior product in just the same way that Netscape did back in the 90s.

So what?

[XMode]

I honestly cant see a problem with this. XP is now a 9 year old operating system that has been superseded but 2! newer versions and has entered extended support. I wouldn't expect apple to release the new version of safari on OS 9, I wouldn't expect Debian sarge to have the latest version of firefox back ported, why is IE9 any different?

Because Netbooks are STILL being sold with XP

[voss]

Netbook users obviously dont give a rats ass about hardware acceleration, they just want their websites they shop and bank
and watch little youtube videos to work. They are not asking for 720p performance, just want their web to work.

Re:Because Netbooks are STILL being sold with XP

[Bigjeff5]

I don't know if you know this, but Netbooks are coming out with Windows 7 on them now because it runs smoother than both XP and Vista.

So they can get their web to work AND 720p performance. :)

What acceleration does XP not support?

[MobyDisk]

This article is confusing - I apologize that I don't know much about IE9, so maybe these questions sound lame.

What features of IE9 will be hardware acceleration? Why is that acceleration required, not just a benefit? What APIs are they using that XP does not support? The only thing I can think of is that they are using DX10. I'm impressed that IE9 would really have any use for that, but I supposed they wouldn't code against DX9 just for backward compatibility.

Re:What acceleration does XP not support?

[magamiako1]

MobyDisk:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd370990(VS.85).aspx

Re:What acceleration does XP not support?

[Eskarel]

It's HTML5 basically. HTML5 brings a whole bunch of things which were once the domain of things like plugins and external code into the base specification. This means the web browser needs to be more powerful than it needs to be today(and most browsers are already insufficiently powerful for the next generation of RIAs which will be coming in the next few years.

As for why it's not optional, that's pretty simple really. Making it optional would be more work and result in more bugs and complexity than not making it optional and since the latest Microsoft OS that doesn't have the capability is XP which is 10 years old and which Microsoft is done developing for they have no real motivation to take on that extra cost and complexity.

XP is on the way out. It'll be gone within the next couple of years, and there's a simple reason for this. Aside from all the rather nifty features which Vista and 7 have which personally I'd say provide compelling reasons to upgrade, Vista and 7 have one killer feature which XP does not have and will never have, a 64 bit version that doesn't blow.

Re:What acceleration does XP not support?

[BitZtream]

Browsers taking advantage of 3d acceleration is something that should have been done a long time ago. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Images are just textures that can be thrown anywhere on the screen, multiple times, FAST in all sorts of weird and contorted ways, including shaders.

Firefox is well on its way to accomplishing this via the Cairo rendering back end which has hardware acceleration on some platforms.

Resizing the page, scrolling, zooming all sorts of things can be made incredibly fast. Scrolling for instance, render the whole (static portions) of the page to a texture (or multiple to keep them pixel for pixel accurate on larger screens) and then just move the viewport around on a rectangle textured with those textures.

Windows kind of does this on its own already but in XP that backing store isn't accelerated in the same way as Vista/Win7. I.E. The acceleration in XP is based on the cards 2d acceleration traits, which while at one time was fast as hell relatively, however gaming pushed the 3d side harder faster and 2d has been neglected for anything other than video playback for years. Thats where Vista and Win7 change things.

Instead of using the old driver model, the model was updated which required manufactures to facilitate new acceleration methods, the end result is basically that Vista and Win7 render using the 3d acceleration, shaders and all the other neat things that are now available on most graphics cards. Vista/Win7 makes them more of a requirement.

Now ... being that some hardware acceleration features are now required by the driver model, IE developers can basically just write to directx (Or more likely WPF) which will throw everything at the card in ways that can be accelerated.

Basically, the reason they 'cant' do it on XP isn't a technical one, its a practical one. They pretty much know Vista/Win7 are going to have a certain level of hardware acceleration, taking the need for them to render it on the CPU and sending the render to the card, they send the drawing commands to the card and let it draw it for them. They just can't reliably expect that to be there in XP.

Re:Bye Bye XP

[Hadlock]

Hell, FreeDos is still an active project. XP is infinitely more useful and flexible in comparison. "Sunset" support until 2014? They'll probably extend that "another six months" every 6 months until 2016 or so. I can't imagine XP fading into "win98" obscurity until 2020. Many of the computers at my office run win2k, possibly due to the happy coincidence that win2k and XP share essentially the same codebase.
 
I'd hope by 2012 people still running XP will have migrated to some webkit or mozilla based browser by then, though.

Firefox on Mac OS 10.3

[klubar]

Firefox has a similar problem. The new versions are not support on fairly recent versions of the Mac OS. Windows XP is getting really old--how long does MS need to maintain compatibity? (It's not like they don't want customers to upgrade).

When Apple drops support for not very old versions of the OS or hardwar, it's called brilliant marketing strategy. When MS does it, it's called abandoning compatibility

Re:Firefox on Mac OS 10.3

[jo_ham]

Who says that? Apple even *possibly* dropping support (ie, not even officially doing so, with security updates to 10.4 in September 09, but otherwise no news about whether it is supported any more) is routinely criticised on slashdot when things like this come up.

If you're specifically talking about the PPC>Intel switch, or the OS9 to OS X switch, it was a necessary move for them in both cases. For dropping PPC - IBM just couldn't deliver on PPC performance or price, so Apple moved architecture (and kept up with universal binaries for some time). In the case of OS 9 to OS X, they kept Classic around for donkey's years - I think mainly to support Quark Xpress, among other things, who were dragging their feet (and shot themselves in the foot when Adobe mopped up some quick and easy InDesign marketshare).

I think any platform that you have standardised on will eventually become obsolete and require upgrades. If you rely on Apple or MS to provide that platform, you are at their whim in terms of just when those dates will be. Both Apple and MS have maintained backward compatibility where possible and have provided things to assist in the move to the new software/hardware.

Even in the OSS world, there are going to be points where your favourite kernel version of choice just has to be put out to pasture because time moves on.

Re:Firefox on Mac OS 10.3

[Bigjeff5]

Try running some OSX 10.0 software on your OSX 10.6 OS and you'll find a shitload of stuff that does not work.

Apple routinely breaks backwards compatibility, and they do it on purpose. It's a big FU to Mac software developers so that Apple can maintain complete control over their environment.

Microsoft, with the exception of Vista, bends over backwards to ensure compatibility from release to release. There is even some old Win98 software that still works just fine in Windows 7, that's friggin 12 years old! Stuff does eventually lose compatibility, but that is mostly because a change broke a vendor's code and the vendor didn't request a workaround from MS for the new OS. If they don't know about it they can't fix it. Apple, on the other hand, tells the vendors to buzz off, that it's their problem not Apple's - even though it is Apple's change that is breaking the functionality.

That said, you're right that eventually there must be progress, and since XP is now two versions old and in end-of-life support you can't expect new software to work out of the box. It's going to be a crapshoot, just like it is for Win2000 and Win98. Microsoft just tends to not be so cruel about it as Apple. Linux is generally the nicest about it, but eventually things must break.

Re:Firefox on Mac OS 10.3

[stewbacca]

I've been an OSX user since day 1 and just last month bought a Win7 box after years of XP sp 2. I hear Vista was garbage, but so far I've had as much success with old versions of software on my Windows box as my always reliable OSX boxes have been over the years. I also have to throw in an added level of complexity for the Win7 box, since it's 64-bit.

Re:Firefox on Mac OS 10.3

[jo_ham]

So we have two potential situations:

Apple updates to a new version of OS X, provides a developer release for testing etc, and a third party app breaks due to changes in code.

MS releases new OS, including beta phase, and a third party app breaks.

You're saying that requesting a workaround from either company and MS providing one (citation needed?!) and Apple not doing so (citation needed?!) is the only difference?

The reason that the development builds of new OSes exist is for exactly this reason.

Apple (and MS) have both done a great deal to work towards backwards compatibility - in Apple's case they kept around a copy of OS 9 as the Classic environment for a long time, and moved to a fat binary app model during the architecture change. Their dev tools feature the ability to target specific older OS versions during build, so you can maintain a working app in the older OS if you find you need to change code in the newer version (usually through APIs being changed or removed).

Apple is under no obligation to ensure third party apps work across platforms - they offer tools and documentation to assist, but the dev builds are there for that reason. I would argue that MS is in exactly the same position. If something breaks, it's not MS's responsibility to tailor their OS to prevent it - if they just keep everything from the old OS and pile new stuff on top you end up with a huge mess.

I Just now upgraded to Firefox 3.58

[night_flyer]

from 1.5 so I don't think this really concerns me...

Literally impossible?

[wiredlogic]

Wasn't DirectX supposed to save us from the walled fortress of NT's Win32 API? I don't see how any hardware acceleration features couldn't be implemented on XP and if the API gets in the way just bypass it. If root kits can Pwn XP there's no reason why MS can't do the same.

Re:Literally impossible?

[KingMotley]

Could, would, and should while being very similiar are not the same.

In the same vein, neither are can and will.

Re:Literally impossible?

[Bigjeff5]

DirectX support for the XP desktop is an add-on feature, not an integral feature. In other words, the XP desktop is not itself capable of acceleration via DirectX, but it provides the proper interface to run apps that ARE written to take advantage of DirectX.

The Windows Vista and 7 desktops, being very post-DirectX, ARE able to be accelerated. Because of this, IE9 can take advantage of the desktop acceleration instead of having to write a whole new layer for the acceleration. Note that this is the exact same reason the flashy desktop effects in Vista and Win7 aren't available for XP. It's not because they hate XP, it's because computers have changed since XP was designed and there is now a fundamental flaw in XP for this sort of thing.

This limitation of XP apparently also means that multi-process applications - i.e. all major web browsers - are unable to share graphics information among processes, which means you either have a massive amount of overhead as your acceleration engine (which you had to write because there is no desktop acceleration) has to be loaded for each tab in the browser, or you just nix acceleration altogether.

We're getting to the point where they would have to develop a completely separate version of IE9 to support XP. If the point is to avoid having to write new code for the new operating systems, why the fuck would they write an entirely different version for the OS they have stopped supporting?

Comparing XP and ubuntu support is flawed

[voss]

Upgrading Ubuntu is like installing a service pack. It costs nothing and all you usually have to do is run the upgrade and restart.

You dont have to pay anything to upgrade from a three year old version of Ubuntu to the current version,
you just have to run the upgrade a couple times. Since new versions of ubuntu are free most users will upgrade reasonably
quickly(in one version counter tool 80% of the users were using 9.10 )

Re:Comparing XP and ubuntu support is flawed

[ClosedSource]

Ubuntu's upgrade approach is terrible. If your version is older than 6 months you have to do a double-upgrade. For every 6 months between your version and the current version you have to do an upgrade (if the intervening releases are still available).

In general, you might be better off just saving your data, wipe your Ubuntu release and just start over with the latest version.

Re:Comparing XP and ubuntu support is flawed

[mikechant]

Ubuntu's upgrade approach is terrible. If your version is older than 6 months you have to do a double-upgrade. For every 6 months between your version and the current version you have to do an upgrade (if the intervening releases are still available).

Or, of course, you can stick to the Long Term Support versions and do one upgrade roughly every two years (the LTS version is supported for 3 years for the desktop version but the new LTS versions come out every two years, so you should upgrade when your current LTS version is between 2 and 3 years old). This is probably about on the level of the larger Windows Sevice Pack upgrades.

I wonder if Microsoft offered an XP--2 edition

[voss]

For say $20 or so that offered XP users DX 10 and IE 9 would XP users be willing to pay for it???

Re:I wonder if Microsoft offered an XP--2 edition

[Bigjeff5]

They already did this - there are actually two different products available. The price is a little steeper than $20 though.

One is called Windows Vista and ranges from $70-$300, and the other is called Windows 7 and ranges from $100-$350.

Seriously, if they have to re-write the fucking desktop to make it work correctly for a product that is in end-of-life support, they aren't going to do it. Good night, the OS is almost 10 years old now, it's tired, upgrade if you want the cool new features. That's what makes it an upgrade.

Re:I wonder if Microsoft offered an XP--2 edition

[badkarmadayaccount]

IE9 depends on DX10. Which runs on XP, Google is your friend. If I were MS, I'd release DX11 for $150 for XP.

They already did that with directx 10

[voss]

They have a modified directX 10 file out there that will run on xp. The reason why they dont want directX 10 for XP is that XP will run directX 10 faster than vista or windows 7

Why still use XP?

[moniker127]

I don't understand why people who would care about what browser they use would still be using XP. XP was released almost 9 years ago for god's sake. You cant expect everyone to cater to your outdated operating system! XP is so old it is in danger of becoming retro. If you disagree, rollerblade on over here and disco me to death.

"hardware acceleration"?

[Orgasmatron]

Hardware acceleration in a browser? What am I missing?

Re:"hardware acceleration"?

[ashridah]

Hardware accelerated SVG, Video rendering, font smoothing, etc.

Why should your cpu do all the work when any modern system with a 5 or so year old video card can render it faster, with less power used, and better quality?

Some of IE's demos at mix showed them rendering an architectural drawing (where even the letters on the page for room numbers) are drawn using paths, paths can be hardware accelerated very easily, and then scaled to your resolution/zoom by dedicated hardware.

the html5 canvas crowd are also going nuts over the possibilities (games written without flash? yes please!)

Re:"hardware acceleration"?

[game kid]

One Windows 7 feature/API/interface/whatever Microsoft has been pushing these days is Direct2D and DirectWrite. (That's two, I know; just play along.) Basically a way to draw vector shapes and smooth text and shit with a DirectX-based COM interface. The text is a bit different from the usual ClearType, because it smooths vertically as well as horizontally.

Microsoft has said they'll use the "Direct"s in IE9* and that they've joined the SVG working group, and have already done vector stuff with VML, so it's clear they want to use the Directs to implement (some subset of) SVG. They got Acid2 working in IE8, so they may as well punch in the SVG stuff used in Acid3; and if they can make a nice, fast GPU-land engine that renders the hypertext and the shapes, IE9 could actually be nice. IE8 can still be slow with pages, such as Wikipedia's often-long list of featured article candidates (though I've tried it now and it doesn't seem as horrible as I remember...hmm), so the GPU stuff may help.

*One of the comments there reads, "instead of focusing on things like: Direct2D and DirectWrite, please focus on better STANDARDS SUPPORT!" I think, and hope, that bort is missing the point.

Artical FUD

[edxwelch]

Has anyone actually RTFA?
It's quite funny, because they are saying that the reason IE9 can't be released on XP is becuase of hardware acceleration - meaning it's using the GPU for rendering - and hence is much faster, and then they show a pretty bargraph showing how much faster it is than ie8 at *javascript* benchmarks. Do they really think the javascript code is being run on the GPU? Of coarse not, it's faster because it's been re-written - the old ie8 javascript engine was basically a pile of poo.

Re:Artical FUD

[ashridah]

the javascript bit benefits from multi-core support, not gpu.

The GPU acceleration kicks in when you go near font smoothing, SVG support, video rendering, etc. No point letting the cpu do that when the gpu is so much better at it, and has been for years.

Re:Artical FUD

[edxwelch]

> The GPU acceleration kicks in when you go near font smoothing, SVG support, video rendering, etc.
Well really, I imagine all rendering is done by the GPU, not just parts of it.

Re:Artical FUD

[Anpheus]

Modifying the DOM rapidly incurs a lot of redraws and reflow. Accelerating this with the GPU will make web applications faster and probably give some Javascript tests a boost.

That said, they do have a new Javascript engine in IE9 that is completely unrelated to the hardware acceleration feature. I don't think that's the problem with porting to XP though.

Re:Breaking News!

[TheRaven64]

How do you judge the age of the OS? From when it was first released, or from when they stopped selling it? I just checked on the Dell site, and they're still shipping machines with Windows XP.

This announcement isn't really surprising. The new rendering code in IE9 uses DirectX 10, which hasn't been back-ported to XP. The official reason, of course, is that it's impossible. For some reason, this hasn't stopped GPU manufacturers exposing all of the DX10 functionality via OpenGL extensions on XP. Maybe Microsoft should use OpenGL, rather than DirectX, and then they could run their apps on XP...

Little known background story

[Anonymous Coward]

You are probably wondering how this could happen:

Microsoft manager: Our evil level has dropped to 9,386,556,335,456,844!! What will we do?

Microsoft drones: Make a new browser with proprietary features!!! Extend! Extinguish! Egregious! Execrable! Excrement! Enough?

Microsoft manager: X%$#X#!!!

Drones: Be slow in supporting IE8!!!

Microsoft manager: Excellent!

Drones: Eventually stop supporting IE8!!!

Microsoft manager: Evil!

Drones: Give evasive reasons!

Microsoft manager: Evil! Evil!

Okay, some of this may be fiction, but I am not sure what part.

Re:XP sucks

[heffrey]

Flamebait now appears to mean 'holds an opinion that differs from mine'!

munitions

[tepples]

Unless something has changed recently, all South Korean bank sites for instance require activeX and as such have to be used with IE.

ActiveX banking applets in the Republic of Korea came into being because the United States once classified SSL browsers with more than 40-bit encryption as munitions and banned their export outside the United States and Canada. (This policy ended sometime in the late 1990s.) So Korean banks used homemade crypto applets as an alternative to SSL. I'm sure at least some banks have switched to SSL by now.

Re:munitions

[BZ]

Actually, Korea ended up using their own crypto standards because their deployment of strong crypto predated the finalization of the 128-bit SSL standards.

And switching to SSL is apparently hard because government regulations for financial institutions in Korea require the use of the current setup.

its not all about direct2d

[buddyglass]

The IE9 benchmarks also show it having faster JS performance. The JS engine could be backported to IE8 if they really wanted.

I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[tkjtkj]

but this takes the cake! I refer to: " 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." I mean, to say a thing is "impossible" and then, in the same breath, reveal not one but TWO methods of doing the thing is as funny as it is absurd.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[allcaps]

Dude, I don't think you read the article. They said it's impossible. Literally impossible. Go read again. They seem to know what they're talking about.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[symbolset]

Repeat after me: "Anything one program can do, another program can do."

Before you go investing your faith in some web article about what's possible, try to get read up on the classics like Alan Turing's amazing body of work. Especially if you're going to go to a site like Slashdot and air out your ingnorance in front of the world.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[Anpheus]

The major rewrite of XP's code that would be necessary to port all of the featured added in Vista and Windows 7 would make it an unsupportable mess. They'd have to extend the support lifecycle again because now they have to patch those features on a third OS and they'd be lambasted for it if there were ever any issues with duct-taping Windows Vista and Windows 7 kernel code into the Windows XP kernel.

Think about it this way, let's say you're a Red Hat customer and you standardized on Red Hat 7 using the 2.4 kernel. But there's some new whiz bang feature you have to have in the 2.6 kernel! Shucks! You emailed the author and asked them if that feature would ever work in 2.4 and they gave you a list of major kernel components that have changed. So then you call Red Hat and ask them, "Hey, we really really like Red Hat 7 and the 2.4 kernel we standardized on. We realize we probably should have stayed up to date, because we basically locked ourselves in, but we were wondering if you'd support our install if we hacked in bits from 2.6 to use this new feature."

Their answer would be "Are you serious? No. No we're not going to support or help you hack in major changes from the newer kernel into your old one and then support you."

Why would they? Even though you're a paying customer, they are never going to see a return on investment for hacking that in for you and supporting you with patches.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[mr_da3m0n]

Repeat after me: "Anything one program can do, another program can do."

Before you go investing your faith in some web article about what's possible, try to get read up on the classics like Alan Turing's amazing body of work. Especially if you're going to go to a site like Slashdot and air out your ingnorance in front of the world.

Your point is valid, even if made in a really condescending way.

However, I think what they mean is that it would be unpractical to the point of not being a viable venture, which is certainly true. They cannot practically change fundamental inner-workings of Windows XP and dedicating man hours to such a project would be ridiculous, which is the point everyone have been making, that you seem to be missing.

Because one can do something doesn't mean it's a practical, valid idea that is worth pursuing.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[Tromad]

Impossible as in "no one will ever put the time and money into this so it might as well not even exist". Not technically impossible but feasibly impossible.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[cbhacking]

This is true, but also irrelevant. We're talking about the possibility of a specific performance optimization here. Obviously, software rendering *can* do 3D - this has been known for decades, and is what other browsers use if you go to a 3D website like http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html . The fact that it's possible to do the same thing does not mean that it's possible to do it with the same performance though, which is the crux of the matter. WDDM drivers provide a lot of capabilities that non-WDDM drivers lack. WDDM drivers require kernel driver interfaces that XP lacks (if you added support for them to XP, it wouldn't really be XP anymore; this is a non-trivial modification of an old and long-stable portion of the kernel). The way IE9 gets the performance it does on 3D relies upon these capabilities. No Vista/Win7 = No WDDM = No support for those features = No IE9 hardware accelerated performance. There might be another way to get equivalent performance, but neither MS nor anybody else has demonstrated it yet.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[xtracto]

Around 1996/97 I downloaded a free program (kind of homebrew/non commercial "scene" stuff) that allowed you to configure in a *very* detailed manner OpenGL and Direct3D settings of *any* game.

The idea was that you run this program and then loaded an EXE with it. After that, a screen containing a bunch of settings related to Direct3D or OpenGL configuration was shown. After you selected settings correctly for your computer, you ran the program and in some way, this little software intercepted GL or DX calls.

This allowed you to lower the graphics quality and even render in wire frame mode. The most important feature (and the reason I downloaded it) was that it allowed to force the use of DirectX HEL (hardware emulation layer) when you didn't have a 3D graphics accelerator.

Unfortunately I do not remember what program was that and where did I got it (if someone knows, I would like to get the program again). But I have seen that it *is* possible to do all sort of amazing tweaks. For that reason, I do not think that using IE9 in Win XP will be impossible.

Re:I've seen many stupid things in my life but...

[BZ]

Turing's work focuses on feasibility of computation, not on the time needed for the computation. In particular, given Turing-complete languages A and B it's quite possible for an algorithm to be implementable in A in a way that takes O(N) time and impossible to implement in B in faster than O(N^2) time. And that doesn't even start in on the constant factors.

Since the thing being discussed here is not a change in functionality but a performance optimization, Turing's work doesn't tell us much about its feasibility in the different environments under discussion.

Thats really annoying

[fartrader]

IE is simply the best firefox downloader around.

let XP go.

[dAzED1]

I know what you're gonna say...there was nothing usable until Windows 7, that's why you're using an operating system that was released nearly 10 years ago.

Bullshit. There was Linux, OSX, and others. You've had plenty of options. Hanging on to that ancient crap, and expecting the vendor to still support it, is silly.

(just upset that he STILL can't use SNI because of idiotic XP users)

patching apps that aren't being supported

[tepples]

Perhaps even if they themselves are patching apps that aren't being supported by devs anymore.

It turns out that Ubuntu package maintainers do just that: backport security fixes from newer versions of software to the older versions included in the distribution releases.

Yeah, Citi Bank

[stonewolf]

Of course in their case it just that they are too stupid to breath.

Their site works fine with Linux and Firefox, but they deliberately refuse to work with anything but Windows and Mac. Spoofing the user agent string lets the site work perfectly with any OS and pretty much any browser. They tell me they do this for "security" but it doesn't actually work that way.

Yeah, a bit off topic. But, I posted this as an example of the hold MS has on the *minds* of their customers. I've gotten fairly high up into Citi banks IT folks by being polite and telling their customer service people that what they just told me doesn't make any sense. That it goes against the very mathematical basis of computer science that governs the way networks and computers work. And then demanding a valid explanation. You have say things like, "Yes, I understand that that is what you were told, and I know you are not lying to me. But, you have been lied to, and you don't have the technical training you would need to know that. Please put me through to someone who can answer my question or cancel my account." That works, especially if you are willing to try to explain what is really going on. So, after many hours I finally get to a guy who is so locked into the idea the MS is Lord and Linux is the Devil that even though he is very technical he can not think reasonably about my question.

I've had several similar experience in my life. Trying to explain to a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim that not believing in his God does not make you an Atheist is a lot like trying to explain to that guy why Linux is not evil.

Belief is not subject to rational discussion.

Stonewolf

Re:Yeah, Citi Bank

[BrokenHalo]

That's a bit scary. I haven't come across an IE-only bank since 2000, when my sister came over from the UK and had to deal with one of the banks here in Australia (which has, I am told, subsequently cleaned up its act). It infuriated me then, but there is even less excuse now. But at least nobody expects us to use Netscape 4 any more...

Re:Yeah, Citi Bank

[countertrolling]

Belief is not subject to rational discussion.

Yes, we know :-) Try talking to a fundamentalist republican or democrat.

Re:Yeah, Citi Bank

[stonewolf]

If you are ever able to progress past your current level of reasoning you will remember that post and be very very glad that you posted anonymously. I strongly recommend that until you understand how inane your response was that you not ever post using your real name.

Stonewolf

Re:Yeah, Citi Bank

[stonewolf]

LOL! Good example. OTOH, we now seem to have a good theory, based on lots of data, evolutionary psychology, and game theory, to understand the differences between those two groups.

My experience it that Republicans refuse to even look at the theory and simply assume the data is rigged while Democrats do examine the theory, and then express a desire to help the poor Republicans.

Stonewolf

Re:Yeah, Citi Bank

[stonewolf]

Ah yes, the old typo attack.

If you have no other way of attacking the information you are presented with you attack the typos and spelling errors. This kind of attack was outlawed by netiquette before I got my first email address back in '81.

For your information I am a published author and well respected public speaker. Over the last 30 years I have been paid for every single item I have submitted for publication. And, that is a bunch. Not to mention that even though I am a software developer I have been given the task to teaching basic writing skills to people I work with, and in a few cases, for.

Your problem is that sometime in your life someone gave you the fallacious ideas that 1) the grammar rules your learned in school actually have a connection with reality, and 2) good spelling is a sign of intelligence.

They don't and it isn't.

Stonewolf

And re-buy your hardware

[tepples]

So long as you are running on stable hardware that has tested drivers

A lot of people are not. Sure, anything in a standard device class is "stable hardware that has tested drivers". But numerous makers of peripherals like printers and scanners have not updated the drivers for discontinued hardware to be compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7, allegedly as a way to get customers to replace working, paid-for hardware with new hardware.

It's not impossible

[Auckerman]

To say it's "impossible" is being dishonest. All display rendering in OS X is done by tasks that were offset by the graphics card. It's a native OS X feature that speeds up all applications. Firefox runs just fine on OS X and XP.

Microsoft either doesn't know to or is unwilling to write direct X in a way that creates minimum work for developers to use.

Re:It's not impossible

[jack2000]

They are unwilling, DX10 will run on XP. In fact I have it installed right now, Microsoft would rather pretend it didn't!

Re:It's not impossible

[Anpheus]

http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/graphics/article.php/c16139

Mind running or compiling this demo and letting me know how it runs? I'm genuinely interested.

Re:XP sucks

[Auckerman]

Some people see no need to pay more money to buy the most recent OS.

Bogon overload

[stonewolf]

It is literally impossible... in the same sentence where they list two ways to do it.

My bogosity meter just blew up.

What they are saying is that they can't do it without spending more money on it than they want to. More accurately they are saying that they want to get people to move from XP to 7. They do not make a dime pushing out a patch for XP. In fact, doing that costs them money. OTOH, if they refuse to provide features on XP such as DIrectX 10 and 11, and now IE 9 a bunch of people run out and buy Windows 7 either in a box or in a new computer and that mean income for MS.

Do you remember when it was "impossible" to release DirectX 10 for XP? It was impossible for MS to do it, a bunch of "amateurs" did it almost no time at all. That is, by the time I had heard the news one of my students had already installed DirectX on XP and was running the demos that came with it.

Have you looked at a list of the games that only support DirectX 10 and/or 11 that will not run on any version of DirectX 9? The list is very short. Shorter than this post... So, what is really happening is that MS was abandoning its real customer base, the 72% of windows users who use Windows XP. They don't make money off of them so they have no interest in spending money on them. You know why their are so few DirectX 10 and 11 games? Because 72% of Windows user are running XP. The game companies have to write code for machines their customers have. In fact, a lot of smaller companies are moving to OpenGL because they can get all the new 3D features of DIrectX 10 and 11 on XP. sheesh...

It is unbelievable what a company is so certain of retaining its customers that it can abandon them and mistreat them and still assume they will be customers in the future. But, they can because they own the *minds* of their customers.

Well... I notice I'm starting to rant... so...

Stonewolf

OK, just one last rant... I've had to explain to a students that memorizing the DIrectX API would not help him write games for his favorite game box, the PS 3. He called me a liar. His world view did not include a computer that ran an OS other than Windows or a game that was written using any thing but DirectX. It is so sad...

Re:Bogon overload

[stonewolf]

Good question.

My understanding of the term "customer base" is that it refers to everyone who has purchased your products in the past. If you don't see it that way, then what I said will not make much sense.

Stonewolf

Re:Bogon overload

[stonewolf]

So you're saying software products need to back port all the features from new versions to older versions for free for you otherwise they are greedy capitalists?

No, not at all. I'm a greedy Capitalist and I would go broke if I did what you suggest.

Reading the two replies to my original posting I realize that I did not state one of my assumptions. A browser is not a feature of the operating system. Neither is a graphics library. They are add on packages that can be modified, expanded, and rewritten as many times as you like without having to add any new features to the OS.

Consider the differences between Netscape 1.1 from the middle '90s and Firefox 3.6. Hugely different applications. Did anyone have to add any new features to Windows to support those browsers? Nope. Sure, they used new features when they came along. But I'm not aware of any changes made to the OS to support those browsers.

Now, MS comes along in 2010 and says they can not provide IE 10 for XP. How can I accept a statement like that as anything but a bald faced lie?

Another example would be OpenGL versus DirectX3d. You do need certain things in an OS to implement a high performance graphics library. You must have loadable device drivers.

Once you have those you can implement any number of different graphics libraries that are completely independent of the OS. For most of the last 20 or so years OpenGL has run on Windows without the need of any special features being added to the OS. And, yet MS claims that DirectX3d is part of the OS.

If you look at the history of MS and antitrust prosecutions you will find that the courts seem to be quite consistent on refusing to accept the idea that a browser is part of the OS. So, I am not alone in this view.

The capitalist in me wants a level playing field in which I can compete on the merits of my product. I do not want to be faced with artificial barriers. The level playing field is so important to capitalism that most countries have laws that try to prevent artificial monopolies. Using monopoly power to force people to buy a product is completely against the basic concepts on which American Capitalism is based. It is also illegal.

When MS claims that something is part of the OS, when it clearly is not. And, they then use the lack of that feature as a means to force people to buy a new product. They are not being capitalists. they are being thieves. They are, in my view, subverting and denigrating capitalism. In my view MS is the Goldman-Sachs of the software world. Neither organization has a close relationship with capitalism.

What makes this all even more absurd is that 7 is selling extremely well and, IMHO, would sell very well without MS trying to coerce their customers into buy it. Why is it selling so well? Because it is a damn nice OS. I plan on buying a copy after SP1 ships. You might notice that I am not what you would call an MS fan. But, I use MS Office because it is an exceptional product. Even though I run Linux on 5 out of my 6 PCs I do have one running XP just so I can run MS Office.

Oh, one last thing. MS does not make any money off of EI because they give it away. Other than as means of coercing customers they have no profit motive for *not* providing EI 10 on XP. I do not believe their is actually any cost to them for providing IE 10 on XP because there is no technical reason for there to be a cost. It there really is a cost involved it is due to either incompetence or due to MS's attempts at circumventing antitrust laws.

To make it even more ridiculous, their policy on which versions of DirectX are available on different versions of Windows has forced the game industry DirectX 10 and 11. Until the percentage of customers running XP drops significantly (last numbers I found show that 70+% of Windows users still use XP) only games aimed at the small group of hardcore gamers will even pretend to use anything but DirectX 9. The reality is that a number of games that need DirectX 10 and 11 feature

LOVE it

[jav1231]

First IE9 taps your GPU to up it's speed. That negates the need to be lean and mean and continues the long-standing tradition at Microsoft of let the browser get fatter, we'll just use more resources. Now it's not going to support it's own OS that has the most market share. Frankly, the more stupid the ideas from Microsoft the more likely people will abandon the crack dealer.

Re:XP sucks

[heffrey]

I got an XP -> 7 upgrade for GBP65 which I think is excellent value for money.

Bullshit

[abulafia]

MSFT continually attempts to promote vendor lock-in. That they've moved from attempting to disrupt standards via software development to attempting to disrupt standards via legal wrangling is not a positive development.

They still attempt to trot out the argument that Linux is infringing a pile of patents, but the fact that they never quite mention which, specifically, they are referring to makes even credulous typists in the IT industry press think that it is bullshit.

If you would like to argue in the alternative, please explain how fucking with the attempts at standardizing a file format for government use via building in a standards exception for their own software bug, waving patent claims all the time, and attempting to subvert government decsion-making processes in order to sell a few more copys of Word are a "weak attempt".

MSFT is a corporate structure who is incompatible with current use patterns in software, which is death in this industry, true. That doesn't make them the cute old man on the corner, yelling at clouds, to be politely tolerated. I think they're still more dangerous that Apple, although I think it is reasonable to disagree with me on that one.

The model of proprietary OS is basically done. Apple gets away with it because they consistently make a kick-ass system and use the hardware/software split as a distinguishing upsell, but it is BSD underneath the lickable chrome. Google is now threatening this model, and Apple is responding the same way Microsoft has been doing for years: obstruction, patent attacks, etc. One difference is that Apple actually makes products people want, which might lead to this taking longer to sort out, but I don't think it ends and differently.

And full disclosure, I'm typing this on a MBP, and have an iPhone, although the latter will go away with the contract, now that Android is viable. Buying the best products even when you dislike the company's tactics might make RMS dislike me, but I have to type on this thing all day for a living, and prefer to type on a system designed for actual use - lickable on the outside, my favorite Unix underneath. I don't think this disqualifies me from critiquing the behavior of the folks who sell it.

Re:Bullshit

[Vancorps]

I'll disagree that Apple consistently makes a kick-ass product given how much iTunes sucks ass. Beyond that I think you underestimate the demand for Windows which is still far and wide the most purchased OS on the planet. Apple gets away with it only because their marketshare is low and because their is competition.

All those claims you've made about MSFT are indeed weak as none of them were successful and I might add that Microsoft has not filed any patents claims obstructing Linux. When they file a lawsuit I'll consider your point valid there.

Also, what legal wrangling are you referring to? I know they tried to get their standards into OOXML and of course they failed so again it was a weak attempt for obvious reasons. Again, no lawsuits came of this.

Otherwise you're describing what every commerical software developer does. This is why MXF became a standard in the video editing industry pushed almost entirely by Avid. I'm sorry, but MXF is far worse a file standard and makes MSFT look nice for the standards they were proposing.

MSFT lacks the power to create standards these days so I think you give them too much modern credit and diminish the accomplishments of their competition such as Mozilla for the browser, OpenOffice, the gazillion media players. Microsoft no longer has a monopoly on anything they do. I'd say they have competition which means they will lose ground but of course the market is also expanding so they will lose is slowly as their competitors become successful.

You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.

As a side note, I love my Android phone, in the past week two of my friends have ditched their iPhones for various issues. The funniest part is that one is totally non-tech and the ATT store tried to tell him he was on T-Mobile despite the fact that he wasn't. It could get any reception so it was always trying to connect to other networks. This was the reason he was bringing the phone in. Another friend called Apple support and they tried to tell him his phone belonged to someone else despite the fact that he purchased it from an ATT store. Then there's my boss who has had to replace his iPhone three times for bad batteries. I wouldn't call that particularly kick-ass. Of course I have an obvious bias against Apple as I have always seen their approach as evil starting with the days of Appletalk. When MS became evil I learned Linux. Now I support all three, weeeee!!!

Re:Bullshit

[abulafia]

The funny thing about your post is that you claim the market keeps Windows alive (which, you might note, I do not dispute), and also claim that Apple boxes somehow don't.

Here's the thing: Apple in increasing market share at the moment.

I sort of agree with you in one way - Windows describes a baseline. Being better than a crappy Walmart box means you can charge for it.

I also agree that Apple behaves poorly. I said this up-front. What you, or anyone else, have failed to describe is how Microsoft is improving the landscape. Google gives to open source. Apple gives to open source. MSFT? I can think of one situation, mandated by a legal decision that forced them.

Please educate me: how many other times has Microsoft done so? Willingly? Providing examples is good, here.

I'm not claiming that open source is the only way to make the world beter. I am claiming that MSFT has consistently, for a long time, worked to make themselves richer by way of attempting to stop other people from making the world better., and I have noted examples. I have no idea what your friend's mishap with his phone should tell me about Microsoft, and I have my own annoyance with ATT, and I intend to get an Android phone when my contract is up, partially because I want to write software for it. But other than that, you make perfect sense.

I don't have many problems.

[MikeFM]

Really? I don't often use IE for anything besides testing against and I rarely find a site that doesn't work because of my browser. Occasionally you'll see a weird glitch but that is about it. Usually the only sites that give a problem are crap sites I wouldn't go to anyway. Little Bobby next doors personal blog about Star Trek and bondage at zero g.

To point a finger though I've recently had annoying problems in individual web-based developer tools for Amazon that would not work with Safari or Firefox. I was shocked that Amazon would be so badly programmed but I've noticed that a lot of their developer and business tools are really clumsy and buggy. MTurk is cool but it feels beta - real beta not like Google beta.

I think Microsoft is full of shit though. IMPOSSIBLE to port to XP? Give me a break. They mean they might have to backport a subsystem to make it possible and they don't want to? I hope they choke on IE9. I'm sick of supporting their broken crappy browsers.

[citation needed]

[abulafia]

So, support your theory. Give examples of MSFT supporting standards, doing more than the legally required baseline of removing barriers to competition, or in some other way doing anything other than attempting to make MSFT a requirement for using a computer.

Saying, "that's what companies do" is true, but not sufficient. Some companies are engaged in pernicious efforts. Whatever else you can say about Google, they are promoting open source, which is a categorical net benefit to humanity. (To argue otherwise, please demonstrate how removing open source would make people's lives better.)

I'm not asserting that GOOG gets a free ride, but comparing a quid pro quo Google gets in return for funding an open source browser to Microsoft's long and consistent legal attack on open source is simply laughable.

Calling me a grumpy old man is not data. Put up, already.

Re:Dichotomy

[Khyber]

"Programmers wince today when told to build for Windows XP."

Only the ignorant bastards that rely upon high-level everything. I can program for Windows 98 or DOS without flinching, because I've got the low-level knowledge.

Most programmers today don't have that, and thus they are total pussies when told to code for anything EXCEPT the latest OS.

Technical reasons?

[Elektroschock]

As there are no technical reasons to keep IE9 away from XP we will soon get the message that IE9 is now also kindly offered for XP users.

That is Public Relations.

Re:Technical reasons?

[jisatsusha]

No DirectWrite on XP, that's a technical reason.

Re:Dichotomy

[ClosedSource]

"I can program for Windows 98 or DOS without flinching, because I've got the low-level knowledge."

I can develop for the Atari 2600 without flinching, but like Windows 98, there's not much of a market for that skill.

You mean twice a day?

[ClosedSource]

Programming in Landscape, Porn pictures in Portrait.

I don't have a problem with "not worthwhile".

[symbolset]

Really, I don't. Or "difficult". Or "not in Microsoft's best interest", or "it's contrary to Microsoft's long term stragetgy". That's credible.

But impossible? No. Not for a minute would I believe that.

Re:I don't have a problem with "not worthwhile".

[Anpheus]

First, impossible can mean a lot of things. Impossible could mean that it would hurt their bottom line so severely to divert resources to an XP rewrite that it would hurt existing products and anger shareholders. That's impossible. Having a public option in the health care bill is impossible because of the political reality in the situation. Impossible is typically used as hyperbole to express that which would be a Pyrrhic victory. For the IE9 team, asking the Windows team to rewrite major pieces of XP is probably impossible.

Second, it's Joel Hruska of hothardware.com that's saying this is impossible, nowhere does he quote Microsoft. I think Microsoft will more readily admit that IE9 will not be ported to Windows XP because:

* Windows XP is no longer in mainstream support and only security related patches will be provided from now on. This lifecycle was known to businesses investing in XP ten years ago.
* It may not be possible to port Vista and Windows 7 features to XP without potentially breaking compatibility, which would go against their support lifecycle, anger business customers and other things. There are certain things that Windows does for compatibility that are far-reaching, and lifting Windows XP up to Windows 7's functional level in some areas may cause compatibility issues, mismatches.
* IE9 should not be further bloated by targeting an OS that the Windows team will not even support.

Re:I don't have a problem with "not worthwhile".

[symbolset]

A lot of the strong dislike about Microsoft products comes from these strategic decisions to lock in users, move them along to the next product, and prevent uptake of competing technologies. There's a lot here on /. about the persistent security issues that Windows suffers as Microsoft persists in choosing features and ease of use over security.

This whole issue persists and is so hot precisely because knowledgable people in the industry know that achieving compatibility and higher security is absolutely possible because it's done by other platforms like Open Office and BSD. It would never occur to me to claim that Office can't be made compatible, that Windows can't approach Unix in levels of security. Obviously that is possible because anything one program can do, another program can do. But then we read the Comes documents and the Halloween documents and see that these things are not only seen as "not worthwhile," but anathema to the Microsoft monopoly. They are deliberately avoided as a matter of policy - and that's what fuels the frustration - that Microsoft deliberately denies us this great boon because they see it as not in their best interest to do so, and then they field proxies who claim the things themselves are not even possible. That's rubbish.

Now in TFA it appears that some PFY on the Explorer team stumbled across w3.org and they're investigating what parts of this "web standards" nonsense might be worth embracing and extending. That's cool in a way, but most of us just assume that Microsoft will only keep the Explorer team alive (again!) long enough to reverse their market share losses and retain "ownership" of the web in the minds of common users. It's assumed that as soon as they've rebuilt their share they'll extend the standards in non-compliant ways to prevent compatibility by other browers - perhaps defending that turf with patents and patent licensing. This is what that whole HTML5 H264 vs Ogg Theora thing is about. Then once they've got their share built up again and the threat is extinguished, off to the slag heap once more with the Explorer team until their monopoly is threatened by innovation again, as their users languish in an abyss of incompatibilities and insecurities (again!). This is the song that never ends.

To come out in front of God and Everybody and say that compatibility and security are not possible is an outright lie, and I'm going to call out that lie ever time I see it. Maybe I could be nicer about it, but we've seen this nonsense for so long now that somebody who would claim to know something worth sharing should be mindful of it.

Re:I don't have a problem with "not worthwhile".

[Anpheus]

You bring up a lot of salient points about the issue with lock-in and questionable business practices. There are certainly a lot of ways that Microsoft and, of course, most businesses could improve and even benefit from better interoperability.

That said, they aren't saying compatibility and security are not possible, "they", as in Microsoft, are merely saying they will not port IE9 to XP. IE9, so far, has no greater security improvements over IE8. In fact, one of the selling points of IE7 and IE8 on Vista and Windows 7 were that improvements in the security model allows process integrity levels as well as the typical ACLs. This security feature, like many others added in Vista and 7 are not present in XP because XP did not have those features and it would be more than just a bolt-on piece of code to handle it.

I think it's also very contradictory for you to begrudge Microsoft for trying to get people off XP and into better, more secure platforms. Like I said before, you do bring up many good points, and I am personally not an IE user (used to use Opera, then when the ad bar came out I switched to Firefox, then Chrome when it came out) though it is my sincere hope that you are wrong about the motivations of the IE team.

And again, stop suggesting Microsoft is saying it is wholly impossible. The fact is, back-porting substantial amounts of Vista and 7 code is likely to introduce far more problems, more security issues and will cause them far more pain down the road if it ever backfires than simply drawing a line in the sand and saying "Look, you knew we were going to stop supporting XP eventually and we told you ten years ago." Should I get pissed off at Microsoft for not backporting all of Windows Vista because XP doesn't support all the new security features?

Re:Shills need to stop sucking MS dick

[ClosedSource]

Sure, if IT had stuck to VAXs we wouldn't have all those pesky unsophisticated users to make the Internet a marketplace and a popular communications medium. We wouldn't have spam, or malware because there wouldn't be enough people on the Internet to buy things or to steal credit cards from.

Re:Bye Bye XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. XP's coffin has tons of nails in it. Unfortunately, XP isn't *in* the coffin. It's sitting on the lid saying, "Hey guys. You want to put more nails inside this box again? Sure. Let me hop off so you can open the lid."

Re:Bye Bye XP

[countertrolling]

Here -- he says he's not dead!

The other way around

[chenjeru]

Shouldn't it be said the XP won't support IE9? Or that IE9 is not supported on XP? An app doesn't support an OS.

And the reason is ...

[AftanGustur]

"Microsoft Palladium" never actually left the building.

This is surprising why?

[Endo13]

Their new browser won't support (what probably will be, by the time IE9 comes out) a 10-year-old operating system. Somehow, I'm not all that shocked. IE6 didn't support Win3.1 either. This is the same deal.

XP is the past. It's time to move on.

2K also ...

[antdude]

... didn't get IE7, latest QuickTime versions, many other softwares, recent/newest hardwares, etc. Lots of stuff.

Hardware accel is pretty sweet

[cbhacking]

I'm not sure what you think is "funny" about that, but maybe you just have an odd sense of humor. Actually, I suppose if you were the sort to bash anything that MS does which looks like a mistake, without any idea of what was involved, yeah it might be funny.

Go visit this page, in whatever browser(s) you please: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/01FlyingImages/Default.html

• IE8: The default 36 images get nominally 4 FPS, but it doesn't even finish drawing the old frame before starting the new one so it tears abominably. At 4 images it gets about 30 PFS, smoothly. The follow-the-mouse function doesn't work.
• Chrome 4.1: At 36 images, only 2 FPS, though no tearing. At 4 images, 30 FPS. Animation is still smooth, but framerate drops terribly if you zoom in oh hold the Shift key for faster rotation.
• Firefox 3.6: 20 FPS at 36 images, and very clearly not smooth if you hold the shift key (fast spinning). 60 FPS and smooth at 16 images, though it drops to 12 FPS if you zoom in.
• Opera 10.5: At 36 images, 25 FPS and smooth. Faster rotation is fine, but zooming in gives a flickering background and only 20 FPS. It'll do 100 images (at 12 FPS) but the background flickers fit to give you a seizure.
• IE9 preview: At 36 images, 60 FPS and smooth, even zoomed in or with Shift. No change at 64 images. 100 images causes a drop to 57 FPS. I can go up to 256 images before the framerate drops to 30, and it's still smooth even with zoom and Shift.

I don't have Safari or Konqueror installed here, but I think you get the idea. IE8 can't even execute the page's code right. Chrome crawls at the 3D effect. Firefox is OK at wide angle and crawls when zoomed. Opera is the fastest of the released browsers, but has horrible flicker when images pass the edge of the screen. None of these browsers use hardware accelerated drawing.

The very, very early preview of IE9, which does use hardware acceleration, blows them all away. No performance degradation until it reaches the point where most other browsers drop to the single digits. No trouble with zooming or fast motion. No flicker or tearing. If you'd told me I was watching a demo of a 3D engine written in C++, I'd have believed you (not been terribly impressed, but believed you). For something using pure JavaScript I'm amazed.

My system has a mid-range GPU (GeForce 9600M) but pretty good CPU (Core 2 Duo T9600, 2.8GHz), running Win7 x64. I'm guessing IE9 uses vertical sync, since it maxes at my refresh rate (60 Hz). Clearly, simply compiling the JS to native binary isn't enough to get the really impressive performance, since the other browsers do that. Since Vista/Win7 use 3D to render the desktop anyhow, I can certainly believe it's easier to incorporate this kind of functionality into those operating systems. It may be possible with XP, but so far there's no indication that you can get comparable performance - none of the browsers that will run on XP can, at least.

This is funny

[abulafia]

You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.

That is a direct response to a legally mandated finding that MFST was a monopoly. You want to claim this as some sort of proo that they promote an open marketplace? You're funny. Not convincing, and actually, not that funny.

Please, discuss how MSFT was shanked, and wossent reeally a monopoly, or that monomopoies are good. It isn't like we've not had that discussion before.

Re:This is funny

[Vancorps]

I'm curious what post you were reading before I made no claim that Microsoft was helping the community at large or that they were working to create an open marketplace. That completely came from you totally misinterpreting what I wrote.

I actually said that MSFT lacks the ability to control standards these days due to much increased competition. I personally think this is a good thing as it has resulted in better products for all of us. Windows 7 is a lot better than Windows 98/ME/2000 which was the height of monopoly days for MS.

This is why I run Ubuntu as my desktop OS and have a VM with Windows 7 for all that lovely Windows only BS that server management apps like XenCenter seem to want to require.

So in summary, I don't know what you were reading but it clearly wasn't my post as your tone and questions don't relate to anything I said.

No It's Not

[rdnetto]

apt-get is better :)

Re:recompile

[DaVince21]

Besides your "point", they would have done that themselves if they could, while the article quite clearly explains they can't. Not without a whole lot of extra (wasted) effort, anyway.

Follow the (lack of) money

[hicksw]

I have a household with a half dozen desktop/servers and a half dozen laptops. Eight run XP and the other four still run Win2K. They do what I want and need. The hardware is not dying. You seem to think it would be a good idea for me to blow $2K on MS Win7 licenses to get graphics features that my hardware does not support and that I do not require.

I reckon I have four years to move to FOSS or wait for another business refresh to dump some Win7 boxes on the used market for cheap.

Now, get off my lawn.
--
If it's good, they'll stop making it.

Shit...

[Puppet Master]

Does this mean I have to go back to IE6??

Re:Dichotomy

[Khyber]

Tell that to all the COBOL programmers ;) Or those that still support IBM System/32.