> I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.
Other browsers show that it is technically possible to support XP, without limiting your product on Vista/7. This would be even more true for Microsoft.
So the reason Microsoft does not support IE9 on XP, is apparently to encourage upgrading from XP.
In other words, Microsoft's IE roadmap is determined, in this case, more from Microsoft's overall agenda and interests, rather than what is good for IE and IE's users.
> Other browsers show that it is technically possible to support XP, without limiting your product on Vista/7
I think that other browsers show it is possible to run using only the APIs that were available in Windows XP without using any of the new snazziness that is Vista/7.
It's like the difference between saying, well, I can write my browser to use Carbon on OSX and it works fine even on OS9, but nobody inside of Apple would write a new product not using Cocoa. If I'm getting the metaphors correct -- apologies to Apple folks if I missed it. I'm an old MSFT developer at heart.
In any case, it's exactly the same as asking modern Safari to run on OS9. But OS9 is considered so bad nobody should use it, whereas WinXP is still considered reasonable, relative to the other operating systems currently in use.
Firefox uses plenty of new Vista/7 APIs. If you abstract the implementations out suitably, you can easily support both the old XP APIs and the new Vista/7 ones.
Other browsers show that it is technically possible to support XP, without limiting your product on Vista/7. This would be even more true for Microsoft.
So the reason Microsoft does not support IE9 on XP, is apparently to encourage upgrading from XP.
In other words, Microsoft's IE roadmap is determined, in this case, more from Microsoft's overall agenda and interests, rather than what is good for IE and IE's users.