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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

IE9 not supporting XP at least had some sort of justification, regardless of whether it was a good decision. Vista was a large platform upgrade/rewrite, and they mentioned particular features IE9 was using that they didn't want to bother re-implementing for XP (graphics stack, security). But Win7 is not such a drastic upgrade over Vista (architecturally, anyways). So what's the explanation for this?

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What's the justification for Safari 5 not supporting Tiger?

Safari 5 came out 62 months after Tiger.

If we assume that IE10 comes out in 12 months from today then IE10 will come out 65 months after Vista.

Hmm that's two different browsers, two different operating systems and two different vendors - what's your point?

If you can't see my point, honestly I don't think I could explain it to you. Imagine I just said, "nothing to see here, move along". Don't spend too much time on it.

Hacker News is the port of call for the more skilled members of the Apple Fan Club. I find it quite amusing since one of the most impressive kinect "hacks" ever was pulled off @ MIX but this is the most upvoted MS article in the last 2 days.

Apologies, I think my brain took a holiday yesterday.

Two vendors, browsers, and operating systems competing in the same space. Expecting one of those competitors to support its browser past a certain number of OS releases without expecting the other to is a double standard.

Thank you for the straightforward answer - I think I was having a slow day yesterday!

While I hate to admit it, this point does have merit if it's true.

Apple does have one advantage: the vast majority of OSX users upgrade. While tons of people (most, even) are still using XP and Vista over 7.

The explanation is probably, "We want to sell licenses for the latest version of Windows".

Microsoft played the lock-in game too well and they can't even get their customers to upgrade to new versions of the same software. Since Windows is a one-time purchase, if no one is buying the new versions of Windows, Microsoft is making much money off of these new versions.

I've been using Windows and Linux side-by-side for different things since 1996. Some things have just been more trouble to set up in Linux than I wanted to bother with, with Windows available and easy to use. But Vista annoyed me enough that I am gradually switching more of my work to Linux, hopefully by the time this Vista box dies, I will just switch everything over to Linux.

Is it just me, or can nobody else see this working in practice?

Upgrading to Windows 7 to get IE 10 seems like a classic "You're doing it wrong"!

By itself, yes. But if there are 5 other MS products where the latest version is not supported on Vista, they start to add up.

It could be 3 successive IE releases, for example...

Maybe because the Mainstream Support End Date for Vista is 4/10/2012

Probably ARM support thats coming with newer code out of Microsoft. May have been too costly and had too many breaking changes to get it on Vista. Just a guess.

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