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Comment by zaatar | Hacker News Reader

Actually, no. The good reason that IE9 does not run on Windows XP has been publicly stated for at least an year, if not actually longer. The FAQ on ietestdrive.com [1] answers this question. The short answer is that the Graphics stack that IE9 uses is not available on Windows XP.

[1] http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/info/FrequentlyAskedQuesti...

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It's a bogus technical reason. Chrome and Firefox show that GPU acceleration can work on XP:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-acceleration...

If Microsoft wanted to support GPU acceleration through an alternate rendering path like two other browsers are doing on XP, they would have done so.

I find it more likely to conclude that they just didn't want to support XP and developed a browser GPU acceleration engine that wouldn't support it as a result of this high-level decision.

That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but having looked at the code myself, I'd have to say someone must be nuts to have gone to extra efforts to create a new engine that specifically won't run on XP.

Huh? I never said they wrote the graphics stack not to support XP. I said that there's no technical reason why you can't have a fallback rendering path to work on XP. Chrome and Firefox show that this is possible.

You can point at the FAQ all day, but you can't deny that there is a way to do GPU acceleration of web content on XP.

Actually, chrome and firefox demonstrate that there is a technical reason, since they both only implement accelerated compositing on XP, not accelerated content layout.

I suspect that it is two reasons they don't have IE9 on XP:

1) They don't want people using XP. If other browser vendors want to take it on, I think MS has decided that they're fine with that. But they don't want to enable XP anymore.

2) The test matrix is a huge test cost. Doing XP means cutting something else. I think they decided that the cost of supporting XP wasn't worth it when they looked at how it effected their roadmap.

I personally wish for a crippled version of IE9 that doesn't use GPU acceleration but reliably backports to XP. But I can also see how that could be a nightmare to develop and maintain.

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