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Comment by mcastner | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a political attack ad. So many half-truths in here.

Just an example: they claim that Chrome "dropped support on Windows XP for functionality that [IE Team] think is fundamental to performance." Linking to this blog post: http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/02/dev-channel...

The reality is that Chrome disabled it temporarily on the dev channel due to crashing, and in fact brought it back for v11: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=72975

Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge the fact that they don't even have a version of IE10, or even 9, for Windows XP!

Is this really what the browser wars are going to come to? Lies and marketing? I thought we were over that.

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They actually came out and said "building a new browser for the ten-year old version of Windows that came with IE6 didn’t make sense to us because of the limitations of its graphics and security architectures." Considering IE 9 dropped support for XP, I don't think they consider it "news" that IE 10 won't support XP.

>Microsoft doesn't even acknowledge the fact that they don't even have a version of IE10, or even 9, for Windows XP!

Whaa?? I'd cut them slack on not supporting XP.

You're missing the point; they are attacking Google for "disabling" features for XP while they dont support XP at all (with their latest browsers).

Why? Everyone else is supporting XP with no major problems. Meanwhile, MS has the source code for XP, and for some reason can't replicate that success?

It's over 10 year old operating system already. Software has its shelf life. I can't blame them for wanting to not spread their support matrix too wide.

I don't blame them for trying to kill it off. Truly. It's been long enough, especially now that 7 is actually a solid upgrade for nearly every use.

But I do blame them for all the under-handed, customer-spiteful tactics they've used. DirectX 10 on Vista only, though it's almost 100% compatible with DX9 (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run). IE9+ on Vista/7 only. It's complete bullshit, through and through, and I see no reason to defend their methods.

> (having 9 report version 10 allows many DX10 games to run

The only games with which this will work is games that support DX9 explicitly and, for some reason, disable it. The D3D9 and 10 APIs are completely different. Having worked on an implementation of DX10 for XP, I can say for sure that this is 100% incorrect.

/me hunts around

Aaah, I see where I got that from. Early speculation on Crysis. Apologies!

Know how well the Alky project managed to get DX10 on XP working? I just found it now.

That was my project, and not very well haha. It worked, if you consider a lack of shaders, lighting (IIRC), and other critical things to be "working". Shaders were a PITA for a few reasons, not the least of which being that the D3D10 shader bytecode was completely undocumented. Spent a couple months doing nothing but reversing the bytecode format, and things sort of fell apart after that. All the code's out there, though, as is the complete story of the project and the company around it: http://daeken.com/alky-postmortem

Hah, what a find :D I'll be happy to read it.

I'm not entirely convinced mimicking anything Microsoft puts out is a good idea, even under the best circumstances. I've lately been getting pretty far into .NET, and the more I see, the more it terrifies me.

I'm on the fence with them supporting XP. One comparison to take into account is Safari's releases have dropped support for an older OS, much less than 10 years, they did change processor architecture though and have less business users to support. Also Microsoft offer free support.

I don't think you understand. MS is criticizing Chrome for temporarily dropping support for XP (re-introduced in v11). IE9+ doesn't support XP at all.

That's what you call doublespeak.

I don't think they are criticising, I think they are making the point that they aren't the only ones who think you can't do hardware acceleration in XP. Whether that statement is true or not is irrelevant.

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