Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

Since the comments on Tim Sneath's original post are broken at best, I'll paste my original reply here:

First, IE9 doesn't fully support mature HTML5 and CSS3 standards. Congrats, the only tests you pass are the ones that your own department submitted to the W3C. Everyone else's show IE9's Release Candidate as having less support than other browsers released 1-2 years ago.

Second, nice job cherry-picking a single paragraph out of one of the few comments in the Hacker News thread supporting your position. You also conveniently omitted the scalding final line of that paragraph: "It's just a shame they're not providing it on XP." This is typical of your response in general: you've responded to absolutely 0 of the actual criticisms of your product, and instead decide to praise the few improvements you happened to make over IE8.

You're only providing your new browser to a small fraction of the OS market, it still doesn't support stable and mature spec features, the ones you do support are still wildly broken (canvas, ahem), and you remain silent through it all.

I had high hopes when you initially announced your plans for IE9 all those months ago. It's a damn shame they turned out to be nothing more than marketing smoke and mirrors.

You're only providing your new browser to a small fraction of the OS market

I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.

The Chrome, Safari, and Firefox teams seem to be able to deliver a very good experience on XP. It's kind of lame that the Microsoft team can't deliver the same thing for an OS that they took part in building. If anyone knows XP inside out it should be the IE team. They even have access to the 'secret' APIs. And if the IE team doesn't know XP inside out they have excellent resources at Microsoft to speak to the people who do know, like Mark Russinovich, or the NT Kernel Team. IE9 not running on XP has everything to do with Microsoft internal politics and nothing to do with technical limitations of a 10 year old OS. The fact that people are still running a 10 year old OS is a testament to what the XP team has built.

I think the limitation has more to do with trying to build a richer feature-set to get users to migrate from XP to 7 (and beyond); but on the other other hand, it's not fair to complain when your ten year old OS isn't getting those newer features -- hell, they should be lucky Microsoft still supports it!

It's a 10 year old OS that still has 42% share of the market. It's still the most popular OS right now. Anyone with half a brain can see that their only reason behind not supporting IE9 on it is to try and force people to spend 100's of dollars upgrading their OS when they already have a perfectly fine and working one.

To claim that people are being _forced_ to upgrade is a tad extreme. IE9 is using newer APIs to enable better performance and functionality in the default OS browser giving users _one more_ reason to upgrade. What is wrong with Microsoft trying to incentivise their users to upgrade to their newest OS?

It's a 10 year old OS with a 42% marketshare because Microsoft has been one of the better, if not the best company out there supporting their old products, much more so than Apple. Microsoft worked very hard to maintain backward compatibility for newer OSes and to avoid newer products breaking on their older OSes. Really.

If Microsoft had stopped supporting their olders OSes, stopped backporting new features and just shipped security updates, the figures would probably have been different.

Ask yourself: What incentive does Microsoft have to support users who paid them $15 for an OEM license a decade ago? I genuinely don't get this entitlement the users of legacy-Windows seem to have here. I've yet to see users of Slackware 8 cause massive uproar because Compiz haven't been backported to their 2001 OS. So what's different about XP?

If the mentality that "people are using the old product so Microsoft should fully support old product and backport and make everything work there" were to rule, basically Microsoft would go bankrupt since nobody would ever need to buy a new product from them. That's not how you become one of the worlds biggest software-companies and that's not how you get your OS supported in the future.

Microsoft may have themselves to blame for the remaining large Windows XP userbase having provided too good support in the past, but that in no way translates into obligations to keep on doing that in the future.

They've continued selling it, that's why they have to support it. It was all very convenient for them to offer it cheap to fend of Linux on netbooks because Vista sucked, so they can honour the implicit bargain they offered.

It's not that they "can't" but they "aren't". It's probably because Microsoft wants XP users to see all the new stuffs Microsoft is making for Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping that those users to change or try the newer OS. After all, IE9 is just an enabler to Microsoft's core businesses (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-we-are-focusin...)

I wonder if it might also be that Microsoft has 1st-party knowledge of its own OS, and this biases them towards depending on specific new features of the OS in their applications, whereas Google et al have a 3rd-party mentality of just looking at the most obvious and stable APIs.

I doubt that's the case. When Microsoft needs something to be done, they would do it. If you discard all the technical mind and just think with a typical business mind, calculating the resources and cost to develop the new IE9 on XP, which is 10 years old, you wouldn't really invest your resource, time, and money to develop IE9 on XP. Plus, if IE9 is supported on XP, it will give "hope" and "hint" that Microsoft still cares about Windows XP.

Chrome, unlike IE, jumped into browser war really late. What this means is that they need to support as many platform as possible to gain every possible percent of the usage metrics. In the end, the percentage number of the usage metrics is the key indicator of success.

It's not an enabler, it's a threat to their core business. That's why they don't produce a modern browser, just like they "can" do spell-checking in the browser, but aren't because the web threatens their Office monopoly.

Why would you expect a modern browser from a company that is frightened of the web?

Tell that to the DoD.

I don't know, I kind of think of XP as the AK-47 of Windows operating systems. As a non gun owner I guess I could only compare Vista to a Howitzer.

I have a huge number of clients that are still actively using XP. The fact is, XP, for many people, is good enough. The only reason they're upgrading at all is purely due to attrition -- their old computer dies and they replace it with something running W7.

And this is ignoring my corporate clients, who are using software that is integral to their business, that hasn't been updated in years and does not run correctly on Windows 7.

The "always be upgrading" mentality in the computer industry is a serious problem for end-users.

Unlike Chrome that is automatically "always upgrading" itself. End users here seem to love that :p

But unlike the Windows upgrade cycle, this costs nothing.

Even though there are usually feature updates mixed in with the bug fixes and security issues, many people (especially non-techie people) lump the Chrome updates in with OS updates as a necessary part of maintenance like changing the oil in a car.

Upgrading Windows beyond XP currently adds very little of significance to most people though, particularly corporates with many many desktops to upgrade (and people to support when they do) and home users with limited cash.

From a designers point of view the "just upgrade already" argument can't wash. We can't force our users to upgrade there OS (we can only just get away with cajoling them into upgrading their browser or occasionally (but increasingly) choosing an alternative (though this is less of an option for corporates for the usual reasons).

The accusation is that MS is trying to make IE9 one of the reasons to upgrade (and therefore pay for that upgrade). This is the same accusation levelled at them with DX10 and later, and it is equally correct (and equally understandable from their commercial PoV). In the case of the browser though this is seen as more onerous because your internet access method is more ingrained in your life and much more potentially damaging when there are security issues.

A large client of hours (a major bank) is rolling out IE8 to their users (who are currently stuck on IE6) in a few months time. If IE9 had promised XP support they might have planned to roll that out instead, though a little delayed as they would need to wait for at least the RCs to start their main roll-out testing - so IE9 not being available on XP is definitely going to have an effect on the number of people still using the irritations that are IE6/7/8 in corporate environments.

We have end users who were not so happy when Chrome updated itself and broke the rendering of a web page that they have to use every day.

And this is ignoring my corporate clients, who are using software that is integral to their business, that hasn't been updated in years and does not run correctly on Windows 7.

Not refuting the rest of your point, but Windows 7 comes with "XP mode". It's literally a virtual machine running Windows XP.

Saying something which works in Windows XP "doesn't work" in Windows 7 is obviously misguided or wrong.

If you use XP Mode, it still works only on XP.

That is not a native solution, it's just a workaround.

XP mode is only included with Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate.

> I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.

Other browsers show that it is technically possible to support XP, without limiting your product on Vista/7. This would be even more true for Microsoft.

So the reason Microsoft does not support IE9 on XP, is apparently to encourage upgrading from XP.

In other words, Microsoft's IE roadmap is determined, in this case, more from Microsoft's overall agenda and interests, rather than what is good for IE and IE's users.

> Other browsers show that it is technically possible to support XP, without limiting your product on Vista/7

I think that other browsers show it is possible to run using only the APIs that were available in Windows XP without using any of the new snazziness that is Vista/7.

It's like the difference between saying, well, I can write my browser to use Carbon on OSX and it works fine even on OS9, but nobody inside of Apple would write a new product not using Cocoa. If I'm getting the metaphors correct -- apologies to Apple folks if I missed it. I'm an old MSFT developer at heart.

In any case, it's exactly the same as asking modern Safari to run on OS9. But OS9 is considered so bad nobody should use it, whereas WinXP is still considered reasonable, relative to the other operating systems currently in use.

Firefox uses plenty of new Vista/7 APIs. If you abstract the implementations out suitably, you can easily support both the old XP APIs and the new Vista/7 ones.

> I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.

Trying telling that to our corporate clients.

Or a home user on a limited budget, who doesn't want to switch to Linux because their games won't run and doesn't want to switch browser because they think they'll have to relearn stuff.

The first replacement, Vista, is only 4 years old, that's what matters.

First paragraph can be read as response to "not providing on XP". Microsoft tends to invent new (and ostensibly better, really just more unusable) API for 2D graphics acceleration with each version of Windows since 3.1. And IE9 seems to be their flagship application for current iteration of this 2D graphics API madness.

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