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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

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RyanMcGreal

Good news, but XP users still won't be able to upgrade past IE8.

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Yes they can: Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari ...

Neat, how do those handle legacy activex sites.

They come with a convenient "minimize" button that the user can click to reveal the IE icon on their desktop.

Maybe Microsoft could enable an auto update to XP to a limited Win 7 OS :)

I honestly can't see the reasoning behind this.

They want people to buy a newer version of Windows.

And more subtly, the "support windows, support office" mentality that forces each team to link arm-in-arm with other team. Everyone slow is sped up, everyone fast is slowed down.

Btw, running that forward, everyone fast learns to slow down, and the slow ones aren't pulled ahead as much.

Or more accurately, it's not financially viable for a company to support a 10 year old OS.

And yet Firefox and Chrome have no problem releasing modern browsers that work on XP.

IE9 implements too much of its modern HTML5 and security features using Windows 7. DirectX 10, which it uses for hardware accelerated graphics, text and video does not run on XP. XP is eons behind the times in security features. It's not just a marketing decision, at some point if they wanted to do these things they had to say "this version of IE will not run on our 10 year old OS."

Hmmmm.... I wonder how other browser vendors are able to pull it off then?

This answer doesn't seem to carry much weight if Firefox and Chrome can do these things and still remain secure.

They use OpenGL instead of DirectX for hardware acceleration. Microsoft's obviously not going to do that; using DX plays to their strengths in every possible way, from what their developers and toolchain is already optimized for, to what's already rendering the entire desktop in WinVista/Win7... so it could even mean IE10 on Win8 tablets will be better on battery life than FF/Chrome. I'm not an expert on this, but DX is likely the objectively better choice for hardware acceleration on Windows -- the reason FF/Chrome use OpenGL is because they have to support other platforms IE doesn't, and doing everything twice in OpenGL/DirectX to get the best result on Windows while still supporting Mac/Linux has obvious downsides.

The latest version of Firefox does not run on PowerPC (my parents are both still on PowerPC Macs). Mozilla has no financial interest in people buying new Macs.

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