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Comment by felixrieseberg | Hacker News Reader

As a microsoft employee: Windows 7? Windows Server 2008? INTERNET EXPLORER _9_?

What is this? A virtual desktop service for time travellers?

Come on, you know better than this. Microsoft has given everyone good reason to be skeptical of every other Windows version. XP? Solid. Vista? Nope. 7? Solid. 8? Off to a rocky start...

He's referring to the out-of-date and inferior version of Internet Explorer (hence his use of caps).

They could have installed IE10 or IE11 -- which are good. I can't think of a good reason for installing IE9, though maybe someone will come up with one...

Some of our internal corporate apps require IE9 as IE10 presents compatibility issues. I'm not at all surprised that it IE9 is part of the baseline.

I'm genuinely curious how this app that works with IE9 can't work in IE10. From my experience, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making IE backwards compatible. You might have to force IE into a specific mode, but I can't imagine an app for IE9 not working at all in IE10.

We've been in the tough situation where some business/banking websites only worked in IE9 while others that we were having trouble with only started working properly in IE10. Ultimately we rolled back to IE9 because the former out numbered the latter and because IE9 is still the standard version of our corporate image.

IE10 snuck onto a few servers and unrestricted desktops because it was installed silently through Windows Update along with the normal patches. That did give us the unexpected opportunity to test it out with real users.

Ah, thanks for the correction. I'd hoped we had finally got beyond "only works in IEx".

Presumably it's upgradeable...

Welcome to the real world, where most enterprises routinely lag MS's release schedule.

Many corporations lag the bleeding edge significantly. It really hurts when CUSTOM_SOFTWARE_X doesn't work on the newest and greatest.

Then, after that happens, they have to retrain everyone on the changes.

You'll be surprised, but most of enterprises use XP and Windows 7. They don't use Windows 8.x for variety of reasons: cost of education, existing OS is good enough, their intranet web sites designed against IE8/9.

Why would anyone willingly use Windows 8?

There is sooooooo much XP still running in most large organizations it is very very frightening.

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