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Internet Explorer 9 Will Not Support Windows XP
MojoKid writes "As it turns out, news this week is that the same features that made IE9's hardware-acceleration possible probably aren't compatible with Windows XP. Microsoft initially dodged giving a straight answer to the question of XP support but has since admitted that the new browser won't be XP-compatible when it launches. This has created a small tempest of protest from those users still using XP, but this is less of an arbitrary decision than some appear to think. It's literally impossible to port Windows Vista/Win 7-style hardware acceleration backwards to XP. Microsoft would have to either develop a workaround from scratch or create a CPU-driven 'software mode.'"
I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Firefox
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.
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
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
IE is simply the best firefox downloader around.
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
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...
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!)
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
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.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...