I have a huge number of clients that are still actively using XP. The fact is, XP, for many people, is good enough. The only reason they're upgrading at all is purely due to attrition -- their old computer dies and they replace it with something running W7.
And this is ignoring my corporate clients, who are using software that is integral to their business, that hasn't been updated in years and does not run correctly on Windows 7.
The "always be upgrading" mentality in the computer industry is a serious problem for end-users.
But unlike the Windows upgrade cycle, this costs nothing.
Even though there are usually feature updates mixed in with the bug fixes and security issues, many people (especially non-techie people) lump the Chrome updates in with OS updates as a necessary part of maintenance like changing the oil in a car.
Upgrading Windows beyond XP currently adds very little of significance to most people though, particularly corporates with many many desktops to upgrade (and people to support when they do) and home users with limited cash.
From a designers point of view the "just upgrade already" argument can't wash. We can't force our users to upgrade there OS (we can only just get away with cajoling them into upgrading their browser or occasionally (but increasingly) choosing an alternative (though this is less of an option for corporates for the usual reasons).
The accusation is that MS is trying to make IE9 one of the reasons to upgrade (and therefore pay for that upgrade). This is the same accusation levelled at them with DX10 and later, and it is equally correct (and equally understandable from their commercial PoV). In the case of the browser though this is seen as more onerous because your internet access method is more ingrained in your life and much more potentially damaging when there are security issues.
A large client of hours (a major bank) is rolling out IE8 to their users (who are currently stuck on IE6) in a few months time. If IE9 had promised XP support they might have planned to roll that out instead, though a little delayed as they would need to wait for at least the RCs to start their main roll-out testing - so IE9 not being available on XP is definitely going to have an effect on the number of people still using the irritations that are IE6/7/8 in corporate environments.
And this is ignoring my corporate clients, who are using software that is integral to their business, that hasn't been updated in years and does not run correctly on Windows 7.
Not refuting the rest of your point, but Windows 7 comes with "XP mode". It's literally a virtual machine running Windows XP.
Saying something which works in Windows XP "doesn't work" in Windows 7 is obviously misguided or wrong.
> 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.
The Chrome, Safari, and Firefox teams seem to be able to deliver a very good experience on XP. It's kind of lame that the Microsoft team can't deliver the same thing for an OS that they took part in building. If anyone knows XP inside out it should be the IE team. They even have access to the 'secret' APIs. And if the IE team doesn't know XP inside out they have excellent resources at Microsoft to speak to the people who do know, like Mark Russinovich, or the NT Kernel Team. IE9 not running on XP has everything to do with Microsoft internal politics and nothing to do with technical limitations of a 10 year old OS. The fact that people are still running a 10 year old OS is a testament to what the XP team has built.
It's not that they "can't" but they "aren't". It's probably because Microsoft wants XP users to see all the new stuffs Microsoft is making for Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping that those users to change or try the newer OS. After all, IE9 is just an enabler to Microsoft's core businesses (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-we-are-focusin...)
I wonder if it might also be that Microsoft has 1st-party knowledge of its own OS, and this biases them towards depending on specific new features of the OS in their applications, whereas Google et al have a 3rd-party mentality of just looking at the most obvious and stable APIs.
I doubt that's the case. When Microsoft needs something to be done, they would do it. If you discard all the technical mind and just think with a typical business mind, calculating the resources and cost to develop the new IE9 on XP, which is 10 years old, you wouldn't really invest your resource, time, and money to develop IE9 on XP. Plus, if IE9 is supported on XP, it will give "hope" and "hint" that Microsoft still cares about Windows XP.
Chrome, unlike IE, jumped into browser war really late. What this means is that they need to support as many platform as possible to gain every possible percent of the usage metrics. In the end, the percentage number of the usage metrics is the key indicator of success.
It's not an enabler, it's a threat to their core business. That's why they don't produce a modern browser, just like they "can" do spell-checking in the browser, but aren't because the web threatens their Office monopoly.
Why would you expect a modern browser from a company that is frightened of the web?
I think the limitation has more to do with trying to build a richer feature-set to get users to migrate from XP to 7 (and beyond); but on the other other hand, it's not fair to complain when your ten year old OS isn't getting those newer features -- hell, they should be lucky Microsoft still supports it!
It's a 10 year old OS that still has 42% share of the market. It's still the most popular OS right now. Anyone with half a brain can see that their only reason behind not supporting IE9 on it is to try and force people to spend 100's of dollars upgrading their OS when they already have a perfectly fine and working one.
To claim that people are being _forced_ to upgrade is a tad extreme. IE9 is using newer APIs to enable better performance and functionality in the default OS browser giving users _one more_ reason to upgrade. What is wrong with Microsoft trying to incentivise their users to upgrade to their newest OS?
Microsoft's position seems to be to make their newest OS run the web best. Nothing wrong with that; and they've ensured a vibrant application ecosystem for XP that has led to many browser vendors supporting that OS well. XP users aren't exactly left high and dry.
Also, it's naive to think that everyone else's interests are merely to make a better browser: Google does it to get people spending more time on the internet under the assumption that they'll use Google to search and click on their ads.
Business arguments aside, I really wish they would support IE9 on XP. If indeed IE9 has better web standards support than its predecessors, I, as a web developer, want IE users to switch.
It's hard enough to convince users to upgrade their browser. If you ALSO have to convince them to upgrade their OS, there's basically 0 chance of that happening.
I'm not saying MS is or isn't making the right decision for their business. I'm just saying that IE9 is a lot less exciting for web developers if it's got this big roadblock to adoption.
It's a 10 year old OS with a 42% marketshare because Microsoft has been one of the better, if not the best company out there supporting their old products, much more so than Apple. Microsoft worked very hard to maintain backward compatibility for newer OSes and to avoid newer products breaking on their older OSes. Really.
If Microsoft had stopped supporting their olders OSes, stopped backporting new features and just shipped security updates, the figures would probably have been different.
Ask yourself: What incentive does Microsoft have to support users who paid them $15 for an OEM license a decade ago? I genuinely don't get this entitlement the users of legacy-Windows seem to have here. I've yet to see users of Slackware 8 cause massive uproar because Compiz haven't been backported to their 2001 OS. So what's different about XP?
If the mentality that "people are using the old product so Microsoft should fully support old product and backport and make everything work there" were to rule, basically Microsoft would go bankrupt since nobody would ever need to buy a new product from them. That's not how you become one of the worlds biggest software-companies and that's not how you get your OS supported in the future.
Microsoft may have themselves to blame for the remaining large Windows XP userbase having provided too good support in the past, but that in no way translates into obligations to keep on doing that in the future.
They've continued selling it, that's why they have to support it. It was all very convenient for them to offer it cheap to fend of Linux on netbooks because Vista sucked, so they can honour the implicit bargain they offered.
> I still fail to grasp the argument of IE9 not being released for XP. I mean, the OS is ten years old, upgrade already.
Trying telling that to our corporate clients.
Or a home user on a limited budget, who doesn't want to switch to Linux because their games won't run and doesn't want to switch browser because they think they'll have to relearn stuff.
Good enough for what? Good enough to be exploited by a script kiddie in 10 seconds? Mozilla and Google are doing no one any favors by support XP.
It's like adding sweetener to poison. You may think you're doing good by making the poison taste good. But rather you should be encouraging people not to eat poison.
XP is ten years old. I don't know anyone on any other platform, including my friends using Linux, who is still using a 10 year old build of the product.
I think that says more about what the Linux and OS X teams were able to achieve 10 years ago than it does anything about XP.
Yes, if the primary objective of your OS is to avoid exploits by script kiddies than you should probably choose something like OpenBSD, or Linux SE with a very hardened profile. XP probably isn't a good choice of OS if your primary objective is protection from script kiddies. As long as you aren't pissing people off on 4chan, or dealing in sensitive data you should be fine with XP.
However, if your needs include surfing the web, email, using an Office productivity suite, and playing a triple A game title, and are willing to install something like Microsoft Security Essentials then you'll be reasonably protected from viruses, and have the ability to complete your day-to-day tasks and goof off at the end of the day.
Personally, I find that Win7 + VMWare + Ubuntu 10 suite my needs best unless I'm doing iOS development in which case I use OS X + VMWare + Win7 + Ubuntu. I've had issues running OS X inside VMWare so I just use another machine for iOS dev.
Could I do the same thing I use Win 7 for with XP? Definitely, I suspect it may be tight on RAM as I don't think VMWare supports PAE, but other than the 32-bit memory limitation it would work perfectly fine. I bet I could meet all my needs with XP 64-bit edition.
Mozilla, Google and Apple are actually doing about 42% of computer users a favor by support the OS they have chosen to run. It's not up to you to dictate what people should prioritize in their choice of computer software and hardware. They could be more secure upgrading to Win 7 or Linux but I bet they feel it's not worth the trade off.
or dealing in sensitive data you should be fine with XP.
That's a pretty broad statement. Most people using a computer are dealing with data that is sensitive to them.
In any case though if you're doing dev work it does matter less. Although there are some things I like a lot more post-XP:
1) Video driver in user mode. Nothing beats watching your video driver die, you get a two second pause, and then its back. In XP you were down for the count.
2) Reliability monitor.
3) Much improved RDP support. Including WPF support and streaming video/audio. This allows me to work anywhere against my main dev box and it feels almost exactly like I'm on the actual machine.
4) Libraries allow me to have a different logical view than the physical structure of files.
This just a subset of the types of things that when I go back to an XP machine I realize I miss.
It's about attack surface. Microsoft can't go on supporting security updates and patches for all its operating systems forever. People need to move on so a modern platform can be provided with a minimized attack surface that the security team can concentrate on. If I were tasked with maintaining patches for XP SP4.9 2017 I would probably just shoot myself.
Well, Google should do nothing less than encourage people to use those spammy methods either stop the practice all together or force Microsoft to lessen the weight is uses for that particular signal.
Short version is: they used to, and got busted for, serving answers to the spiders and ads and pitches to the surfers. So now they show the answer at the bottom of a pile of ads and pitches.
But they still suck. Horribly. And are the number one example I hear when people say "I wish Google would let me blacklist domains".
That used to be the case, but the complete page as it appears in Firefox to me now: http://i.imgur.com/Lw0Mh.png.
The indexed content is blurred out and there's a big ad overlaying it, with no close button or other method to display the content, other than the Google cache link.
So, here's the difference that I found. If you're coming from Google SERPs (the referrer is Google) the answer is shown near the bottom. If you copy and paste the link into a browser (empty referrer) I get the results you show in your screenshot.
That screenshot was most definitely taken with Google as the HTTP referer. (I'm too lazy to cut-and-paste the URL from the search page into the browser, I just clicked the link.)
Clicking the link again shows the additional content at the bottom of the page as you described. So there's some other algorithm at play.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm not quite sure I follow how they "almost" got it. Perhaps if they were negotiating numbers and figures and it just fell through -- I could see that; but just because the initial meetings didn't go so well or were hung up on NDAs? I don't get it.
System requirements:
- Supported Operating Systems are Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP2+, Windows Server 2003 SP1+, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2.
Click: http://www.stockyoyo.com