No Internet Explorer Version 9 for XP

[Americano]

Microsoft has announced its best selling Internet browser will not support Microsoft's XP operating system in the upcoming Internet Explorer Version 9.

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/internet-explor.php

And, naturally, IE9 will require more hardware support to function at its best.

Chrome and Firefox have to be wearing big smiles with this news as there's still a huge base of XP users out there.

[Michael]

Microsoft has announced its best selling Internet browser will not support Microsoft's XP operating system in the upcoming Internet Explorer Version 9.
This is priceless. Has Microsoft lost their minds? Are they that desperate to flog their new OS?

I use XP at home and will likely continue to do so for another half-dozen years or more. If Microsoft wants to prevent me from using their newest browser, that's their loss, not mine. Besides, I, like most intelligent net surfers switched to Firefox years ago over IE security issues anyway.

Btw, calling IE a "best selling internet browser" is PR bullshit since it is given away for free. :lol:

[Americano]

Doesn't make much sense to me. Will MS put a warning label on their V9 upgrades of do not use with our other operating systems?

[Michael]

Reminds me that the latest versions of MS Office are not backwards compatible either.

That's what got me to abandon MS Office.

Besides, I keep 90% of my old files in simple ASCII txt format for exactly this reason. Formatting and fonts just multiply the file size by several orders of magnitude and pose a long-term ultility penalty. Much better to just avoid the bells and whistles with pure ASCII text documents.

[Americano]

Reminds me that the latest versions of MS Office are not backwards compatible either.

That's what got me to abandon MS Office.

Besides, I keep 90% of my old files in simple ASCII txt format for exactly this reason. Formatting and fonts just multiply the file size by several orders of magnitude and pose a long-term ultility penalty. Much better to just avoid the bells and whistles with pure ASCII text documents.

I'm still using Office 2000. Other than images I don't use PCs for information storage. I still prefer hard copies of any important text. An admittedly paranoid state of mind in the age of information.

[Greendruid]

I'm with you on the hard copy issue Americano. Anything that I've deemed as a valuable skill, usually pertaining to stuff on the farm/rural property management front, I try to get in book form or print out and file. Besides, this place is well known to lose power at least three times over the winter, just when you might need to know something about survival skills.

Getting back to the OP though, this is pure Microsoft ingenuity here. They have the majority of computer owners ham-strung into accepting whatever the major retailers are selling in terms of OS and the crap that comes along with it. This must be their revenue base - it's obviously not folks like us. I'm wondering if forum browsers have an inverse relationship to use/purchase of Microsoft products.

[Lily]

My new hospital group has built its entire home-based employee system (payroll, education, benefits) on IE6. Are you kidding? You can't even download that version from Microsoft anymore. Luckily, I have that browser on a partitioned drive from an earlier upgrade to my new(er) desktop. Those employees who don't have IE6 cannot access anything from home. The system does not support Firefox or any other net browsers.

I'm with you guys on the paper trail. I write fiction. Everything is on paper, just in case. I don't trust Word or MS Office. Heck, I have stuff from when I used WordPerfect.

[Michael]

I'm wondering if forum browsers have an inverse relationship to use/purchase of Microsoft products.
No.

According to the internet server report for this forum, some 90% of all users/visitors to this forum are using a MS-based OS.

On the browser side, you are correct though. IE looks like it has about 25% of the market at best. Firefox totally rules that category.

[Michael]

My new hospital group has built its entire home-based employee system (payroll, education, benefits) on IE6. Are you kidding? You can't even download that version from Microsoft anymore. Luckily, I have that browser on a partitioned drive from an earlier upgrade to my new(er) desktop. Those employees who don't have IE6 cannot access anything from home. The system does not support Firefox or any other net browsers.
That's fucking hilarious!

Gotta wonder what brilliant techie built that dead-end monster! :lol:

I'm with you guys on the paper trail. I write fiction. Everything is on paper, just in case. I don't trust Word or MS Office. Heck, I have stuff from when I used WordPerfect.
Paper trail? Are you guys kidding?

Like, do you have a room dedicated to storing this stuff? I count my saved/stored files by the thousands. Printing all that stuff out and storing it would be insane.

I keep everything in ASCII text files and I have CD's burned with copies of them, so nothing is ever lost.

[drgoodtrips]

My new hospital group has built its entire home-based employee system (payroll, education, benefits) on IE6. Are you kidding? You can't even download that version from Microsoft anymore. Luckily, I have that browser on a partitioned drive from an earlier upgrade to my new(er) desktop. Those employees who don't have IE6 cannot access anything from home. The system does not support Firefox or any other net browsers.

I'm with you guys on the paper trail. I write fiction. Everything is on paper, just in case. I don't trust Word or MS Office. Heck, I have stuff from when I used WordPerfect.

Building something for Internet Explorer 6 exclusively was pretty common for a long time and wasn't really a stupid decision. IE6 came out with XP and basically obliterated all other browsers. Unless you were running Mac or Nix, there was nothing out there but IE6. Because of this Microsoft just started making up 'standards' as it perceived would integrate the browser with the rest of the OS (this was the early basis of why "Internet Explorer" and "File Explorer" are really the same thing). They threw security to the winds and introduced the convenience of letting people write web pages in which they would embed fully executable programs, which is a security nightmare.

On the plus side, this is what created today's modern browser as we know it - really just an insecure mashup of programs executing in the same window (one shows you web pages, one runs scripts, one plays movies, and so on and so forth). Of course, on the minus side is that exact same thing. Modern web browsers except Chrome/Chromium are horribly and inherently insecure.

Another unfortunate side effect of IE6 was all the really, really bad code written for IE6. Since, for years, it had no competition, Microsoft just declared browser innovation to be over, took its 99.9% marketshare, and called it a day with no further innovation to be offered. So, for 5 years, the only web design done was done for a non-compliant and insecure browser. To make matters worse, lazy web designers came to depend on this lack of security as programmers will. The easily designed sites that had a wonderful level of interaction but a horrible level of security. And this is why so many corporate environments mandate IE6. They're faced with a choice. They can either allow their users to upgrade browsers and shell out tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars to rewrite all of the quirky little intranet apps that still work... or they can not do that.

Internet Explorer has gotten much, much better with each subsequent release. It is now comparably lean and standard compliant (arguably newer iterations are better than Firefox in some important ways) and because of this, it breaks users that need the enormous, shitty code base of IE6. The newer versions are simply too well designed to offer reverse compatibility with such an inferior product. The same actually holds true for a lot of Microsoft products these days. Windows 7 is a much better design than anything before it, but Microsoft simply cannot offer good design and backward compatibility at the same time. Previous Microsoft products simply cannot function adequately in a well designed environment. (As a quick example, Vista/Win 7 UAC is actually a good design - it's the shitty Microsoft paradigm of the registry and all programs requiring administrative access that makes these features annoying. Linux/Mac/Unix all have this exact thing and their user bases do not complain).

[drgoodtrips]

Microsoft has announced its best selling Internet browser will not support Microsoft's XP operating system in the upcoming Internet Explorer Version 9.

http://dvice.com/archives/2010/03/internet-explor.php

And, naturally, IE9 will require more hardware support to function at its best.

Chrome and Firefox have to be wearing big smiles with this news as there's still a huge base of XP users out there.

I don't know that it makes much of a difference for Chrome, though Firefox might capture this market to some degree.

I suspect that the heart of this issue is not that IE9 needs better hardware to run, but that IE9 is designed to run on better hardware. If you go out and get a reasonably priced computer, it will have hardware that XP simply cannot make full use of. More than 4 gig of memory, or more than a couple of cores, and unpatched XP simply won't get the job done.

So, why make new software to run on old hardware? Who is your user base for this? I'm typing this on a computer that's 8 years old and runs XP Pro. I upgraded memory recently and now it's running with a gig of memory. I don't want Firefox on here because of its memory hogging tendencies, to say nothing of whatever Microsoft might put out that takes advantage of technologies that facilitate increased hardware usage.

I see this announcement as being akin to Honda saying it doesn't plan to retro-fit 93 Civics and Accords with console computers that play MP3's and track gas mileage from the (nonexistent) ODB2 computer. If people like their 93 Civics/Accords because of reliability, they're probably not the type of car user that wants all of the newfangled gadgets - the auto equivalent of the computer world "early adopter".

[Americano]

Building something for Internet Explorer 6 exclusively was pretty common for a long time and wasn't really a stupid decision. IE6 came out with XP and basically obliterated all other browsers. Unless you were running Mac or Nix, there was nothing out there but IE6. Because of this Microsoft just started making up 'standards' as it perceived would integrate the browser with the rest of the OS (this was the early basis of why "Internet Explorer" and "File Explorer" are really the same thing). They threw security to the winds and introduced the convenience of letting people write web pages in which they would embed fully executable programs, which is a security nightmare.

On the plus side, this is what created today's modern browser as we know it - really just an insecure mashup of programs executing in the same window (one shows you web pages, one runs scripts, one plays movies, and so on and so forth). Of course, on the minus side is that exact same thing. Modern web browsers except Chrome/Chromium are horribly and inherently insecure.

Another unfortunate side effect of IE6 was all the really, really bad code written for IE6. Since, for years, it had no competition, Microsoft just declared browser innovation to be over, took its 99.9% marketshare, and called it a day with no further innovation to be offered. So, for 5 years, the only web design done was done for a non-compliant and insecure browser. To make matters worse, lazy web designers came to depend on this lack of security as programmers will. The easily designed sites that had a wonderful level of interaction but a horrible level of security. And this is why so many corporate environments mandate IE6. They're faced with a choice. They can either allow their users to upgrade browsers and shell out tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars to rewrite all of the quirky little intranet apps that still work... or they can not do that.

Internet Explorer has gotten much, much better with each subsequent release. It is now comparably lean and standard compliant (arguably newer iterations are better than Firefox in some important ways) and because of this, it breaks users that need the enormous, shitty code base of IE6. The newer versions are simply too well designed to offer reverse compatibility with such an inferior product. The same actually holds true for a lot of Microsoft products these days. Windows 7 is a much better design than anything before it, but Microsoft simply cannot offer good design and backward compatibility at the same time. Previous Microsoft products simply cannot function adequately in a well designed environment. (As a quick example, Vista/Win 7 UAC is actually a good design - it's the shitty Microsoft paradigm of the registry and all programs requiring administrative access that makes these features annoying. Linux/Mac/Unix all have this exact thing and their user bases do not complain).

Well planned obsolescence. Backward compatibility greatly expands development cost, discourages upgrading and consequently limits potential market share. Microsoft's success can't be denied.

[Michael]

Microsoft's success can't be denied.
True. This strategy has been enormously profitable in the past.

But it is games like this that ensure that Microsoft's future can't be assumed.

[Americano]

True. This strategy has been enormously profitable in the past.

But it is games like this that ensure that Microsoft's future can't be assumed.

Europeans now have their choice of a dozen or so browsers when purchasing Microsoft's operating system. It took them years of litigation to break MS's browser monopoly. As a consumer, try and get anything but IE with your new MS operating system in the US.

[willssmith]

XP home use and probably another half dozen years or more to continue to do so. Microsoft wants to prevent their loss to me, this is the new browsers, not mine. The most intelligent net surfers, as well as I, like many years ago on the IE security issues in Firefox is already open.