Thursday, March 18, 2010

Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft's ploy to get users on to Windows 7

Okay everyone gets it that Windows XP can't be supported forever, that it is already 8.5 years old and that developing a new product for it induces support costs but considering it's sheer market share and nothing else, Internet Explorer 9 should have been supported on it. It would be better for the web. Surely the lack of hardware acceleration won't make developers as mad as an older IE version with deficient standards support. This is evil Microsoft at its best. Next to follow will be .NET Framework vNext (post 4.0) and probably Windows Live Wave 4. I hope sincerely that users and web developers force Microsoft to rethink their decision.

Edit: It's now obvious from the leaked Wave 4 installer that the next version of Windows Live also drops Windows XP support. How annoying! Microsoft is now so so desperate to get users off XP. In the past I remember, several versions of MSN Messenger continued to run on Windows 2000 and Windows 9x. It was when MSN Messenger became Windows Live Messenger than it began to require Windows XP.

IE9 is a perfect example of abuse of monopoly to leverage the latest Windows release sales. Firefox 4 continues to support the platform-neutral open web. It takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite on Windows 7 but gets it that it can't cut off support for a majority of the people still on Windows XP.

The latest casualty is Windows Phone Developer Tools which won't support XP either. Apple and Google must be happy that Microsoft is sabotaging its own phone platform development.

Disclaimer: All mentions of "evil" on this blog are tongue-in-cheek as in http://thesource.ofallevil.com. I don't think Microsoft is an evil corporation.