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.
