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Comment by omh | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised there isn't more criticism of Microsoft in this article.

There's one big reason why IE9 isn't available on XP, and it's commercial rather than technical. Microsoft know that businesses don't have many reasons to upgrade from XP (at least not before 2014), and they're trying to force them. I manage a few standardised XP desktops and it's going to take some work before we can upgrade them to Windows 7. If IE9/IE10 was available for XP then I'd have upgraded already.

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Given that IE 9 builds on top of a lot of new things that have been introduced with Windows 7, most notably rendering-wise (DirectWrite, Direct2D), I guess it certainly is a technical reason. Replicating that on XP would either need backporting those APIs which is not going to happen because XP is out of mainstream support, or developing abstractions or fallbacks within IE which would need more resources within the IE team.

Sure, you could use suitable abstractions from the start, but why bother for an OS that's not supported anymore? Other browsers went that way, because they often run on multiple OSes, but you probably wouldn't expect a Linux version of IE anytime soon either.

I don't see why DirectWrite or Direct2D could not be ported to XP - why would it be any more difficult than a gamer updating DirectX?

It is not. There are all over internet tutorials on how to install DX 10 and beyond on XP.

That is not the MS native implementation which requires the new driver model. MS ditched the old DirectX redists after 9.0c in 2004 and since then only updated D3DX. Sure there is the Platform Update for Vista, but that is only possible because Vista already have the new driver model and it uses a completely different installer.

That's interesting. I was aware of some of the security APIs used in IE9, but in those cases I always thought that it was still essentially a business decision not to provide an XP-compatible version. IE9 is supported on Vista as well as 7 though, and it seems that they had to backport some APIs to allow this (see KB2117917). I don't know enough about the underlying code to know how hard it would have been to do that for XP, but I can definitely see that it could be a significant effort.

Sorry, that's crazy talk. If IE9 were available for XP, these business wouldn't use it for the same reason they aren't upgrading to Google Chrome (even though its free and available).

Perhaps you missed the latter part of my comment. I am a sysadmin at one of those businesses. I can't upgrade Windows but I would look at an upgrade to IE9 tomorrow if it were possible. (In our case we have Chrome and Firefox installed alongside, but the reasoning for IE is the same).

The really upgrade-averse businesses are still on IE6/IE7, but that's not really what the article is discussing.

I appreciate the info. But I still can't seem to fathom why you can / would want to upgrade to IE9 if it were available. Or how MS is trying to spur OS sales by restricting a still terrible browser when 2 superior ones exist and are available for free.

Am I missing something fundamental here?

I'm not so sure that this is to their commercial advantage, in fact I think it could be quite the opposite. Where there is the motivation (i.e . by those managing the desktop environments), the IE8 dependency is an easy one to solve via alternate browsers. This, of course, takes people further away from the MS stack.

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