5 ms·

It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built f

by beej71 16y ago

It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built for a modern browser? And XP has 60% of the market! It has been a good... forever since MS has been a proper team player when it came to working well with websites that run on all other browsers with minimal modification. This is closer than we've ever ever been in the past to having a remotely sane reality. So pretty please, with sugar on top, fix the fucking browser.

Silhouette 16y ago
> It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. I understand the sentiment, but I don't think that kind of hyperbole advances the debate in any useful way. Obviously Microsoft are under no legal obligation to support an operating system first released many years ago and when two successors have been out for a while now. It may be commercially sensible for them to do so, but that depends on many other factors beyond the preferences of the web development community. > Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built for a modern browser? Yes, I do that for a living, on multiple projects, and so far I have encountered no serious difficulties in doing so. What problem(s) have you found with running "a web app that was built for a modern browser" on IE8? > It has been a good... forever since MS has been a proper team player when it came to working well with websites that run on all other browsers with minimal modification. So people often seem to say, yet I find very few portability/compatibility issues with running my web apps on any recent browser. I was surprised to find that in the last problem that did arise, it was actually IE that was compliant and Chrome and Firefox that were implementing non-standard behaviour. And as I noted before, IE is one of the only major browsers that hasn't been playing silly political games with blocking useful video-related technologies lately. > This is closer than we've ever ever been in the past to having a remotely sane reality. I guess we just have very different points of view, perhaps born of different real world experiences. In my world in 2011, we are closer than we have been for many years to the hell of IE vs. Netscape, everything working differently in every browser, and having no stable target for development. As I see it, the blame for this lies almost entirely with Mozilla, Google, and to some extent the standards bodies, not with IE.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >So people often seem to say, yet I find very few portability/compatibility issues with running my web apps on any recent browser. I was surprised to find that in the last problem that did arise, it was actually IE that was compliant and Chrome and Firefox that were implementing non-standard behaviour. Go on ... I've come across this once before several years ago but would be interested to know the details of this?
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    That particular case related to escaping characters that can be significant in HTML (quotes, ampersands, etc.). It turned out that IE honoured the named entities for exactly those characters specified in the HTML4 documentation when rendering an HTML4 document, while Firefox and Chrome also translated some additional named entities that were required by XHTML but not in HTML4. When it came to filling in form content from a database via AJAX, this led to a portability problem where you had to decide what to escape and what to put in verbatim.
    - danieldon 16y ago
      First of all, it's not "some additional named entities that were required by XHTML" since there is only one: '. Secondly, the fact that IE doesn't even support XHTML is a better explanation for it not supporting '. Third, can you not use decimal and hex entities in IE?
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >also translated some additional named entities that were required by XHTML but not in HTML4 Sounds like you were passing non-allowed entities into a doc interpreted as XML but as MSIE wouldn't do that it skipped over any issues by pretending it was HTML4? That wouldn't be a standards compliance failure for FF/Chrome though. MSIE has often coped better with (forgive me) sloppy code, however.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
Isofarro 16y ago
I'm bemused by this: "It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built for a modern browser? And XP has 60% of the market!" Considering that, within the UK, IE7.0 is the most popular choice of browser out of the IE range, followed by IE6.0. So supporting IE8 needs a small fraction of the time needed to support IE7 and IE6. Fixing IE8.0 isn't going to significantly reduce support time and cost. (Juxtaposing that with the XP market share figure of 60%...). Thank goodness for progressive enhancement.
kenjackson 16y ago
XP needs to die. It's a walking security trap. MS ending support for XP is just as important as them ending support for IE6. Frankly I wish Chrome and Mozilla would also stop support on XP.
- mauriciob 16y ago
  Ending support is only going to make it worse. Google and Mozilla are committed to security. Microsoft is too, and that is why they postponed the ending of support. It will be a chaotic world if Microsoft stops releasing security fixes to XP when it still has a big market share and allows malwares, botnets, etc. to be installed and propagated easily.
josephcooney 16y ago
IE9 uses a new hardware-accelerated 2D drawing API called Direct2D (kind of a replacement for DirectDraw) and a new text API called DirectWrite. Neither of these is available on Windows XP, precluding IE from being easily back-ported. So pretty please, with sugar on top, stop making flippant demands for multi-billion-dollar companies to do things you don't fully understand the implications of.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  It is the place of consumers and web developers to make any demands they please of any multi-billion-dollar company they like, regardless of their understanding of the issues. It is the place of the multi-billion-dollar companies to decide whether to honor those demands. Also, it's not terribly difficult to support more than one drawing API as long as you abstract the drawing code, as is most likely done for Direct2D in Firefox 4.
- beej71 16y ago
  I was actually referring to the original article, namely IE9 on Vista+, with my flippant comment. But now that you mention it, I guess we'll just leave it up to the Other Browsers to put accelerated 2D on XP. They're open source if MS wants to see how they did it.
est 16y ago
> It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. That means you have to backport DirectX 11 to XP so IE9 could use Direct2D and DirectWrite
- Andrewski 16y ago
  Hasn't this already been done by several different hackers? I am quite sure it has been.

by beej71 16y ago

Silhouette 16y ago

> It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. I understand the sentiment, but I don't think that kind of hyperbole advances the debate in any useful way. Obviously Microsoft are under no legal obligation to support an operating system first released many years ago and when two successors have been out for a while now. It may be commercially sensible for them to do so, but that depends on many other factors beyond the preferences of the web development community. > Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built for a modern browser? Yes, I do that for a living, on multiple projects, and so far I have encountered no serious difficulties in doing so. What problem(s) have you found with running "a web app that was built for a modern browser" on IE8? > It has been a good... forever since MS has been a proper team player when it came to working well with websites that run on all other browsers with minimal modification. So people often seem to say, yet I find very few portability/compatibility issues with running my web apps on any recent browser. I was surprised to find that in the last problem that did arise, it was actually IE that was compliant and Chrome and Firefox that were implementing non-standard behaviour. And as I noted before, IE is one of the only major browsers that hasn't been playing silly political games with blocking useful video-related technologies lately. > This is closer than we've ever ever been in the past to having a remotely sane reality. I guess we just have very different points of view, perhaps born of different real world experiences. In my world in 2011, we are closer than we have been for many years to the hell of IE vs. Netscape, everything working differently in every browser, and having no stable target for development. As I see it, the blame for this lies almost entirely with Mozilla, Google, and to some extent the standards bodies, not with IE.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>So people often seem to say, yet I find very few portability/compatibility issues with running my web apps on any recent browser. I was surprised to find that in the last problem that did arise, it was actually IE that was compliant and Chrome and Firefox that were implementing non-standard behaviour. Go on ... I've come across this once before several years ago but would be interested to know the details of this?
- Silhouette 16y ago
  That particular case related to escaping characters that can be significant in HTML (quotes, ampersands, etc.). It turned out that IE honoured the named entities for exactly those characters specified in the HTML4 documentation when rendering an HTML4 document, while Firefox and Chrome also translated some additional named entities that were required by XHTML but not in HTML4. When it came to filling in form content from a database via AJAX, this led to a portability problem where you had to decide what to escape and what to put in verbatim.
  - danieldon 16y ago
    First of all, it's not "some additional named entities that were required by XHTML" since there is only one: '. Secondly, the fact that IE doesn't even support XHTML is a better explanation for it not supporting '. Third, can you not use decimal and hex entities in IE?
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >also translated some additional named entities that were required by XHTML but not in HTML4 Sounds like you were passing non-allowed entities into a doc interpreted as XML but as MSIE wouldn't do that it skipped over any issues by pretending it was HTML4? That wouldn't be a standards compliance failure for FF/Chrome though. MSIE has often coped better with (forgive me) sloppy code, however.
    - Silhouette 16y ago

Isofarro 16y ago

I'm bemused by this: "It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. It's positively criminal. Do you know what it's like to target IE8 with a web app that was built for a modern browser? And XP has 60% of the market!" Considering that, within the UK, IE7.0 is the most popular choice of browser out of the IE range, followed by IE6.0. So supporting IE8 needs a small fraction of the time needed to support IE7 and IE6. Fixing IE8.0 isn't going to significantly reduce support time and cost. (Juxtaposing that with the XP market share figure of 60%...). Thank goodness for progressive enhancement.

kenjackson 16y ago

XP needs to die. It's a walking security trap. MS ending support for XP is just as important as them ending support for IE6. Frankly I wish Chrome and Mozilla would also stop support on XP.

mauriciob 16y ago
Ending support is only going to make it worse. Google and Mozilla are committed to security. Microsoft is too, and that is why they postponed the ending of support. It will be a chaotic world if Microsoft stops releasing security fixes to XP when it still has a big market share and allows malwares, botnets, etc. to be installed and propagated easily.

josephcooney 16y ago

IE9 uses a new hardware-accelerated 2D drawing API called Direct2D (kind of a replacement for DirectDraw) and a new text API called DirectWrite. Neither of these is available on Windows XP, precluding IE from being easily back-ported. So pretty please, with sugar on top, stop making flippant demands for multi-billion-dollar companies to do things you don't fully understand the implications of.

nitrogen 16y ago
It is the place of consumers and web developers to make any demands they please of any multi-billion-dollar company they like, regardless of their understanding of the issues. It is the place of the multi-billion-dollar companies to decide whether to honor those demands. Also, it's not terribly difficult to support more than one drawing API as long as you abstract the drawing code, as is most likely done for Direct2D in Firefox 4.
beej71 16y ago
I was actually referring to the original article, namely IE9 on Vista+, with my flippant comment. But now that you mention it, I guess we'll just leave it up to the Other Browsers to put accelerated 2D on XP. They're open source if MS wants to see how they did it.

est 16y ago

> It's more than a shame Microsoft's not providing IE9 on XP. That means you have to backport DirectX 11 to XP so IE9 could use Direct2D and DirectWrite

Andrewski 16y ago
Hasn't this already been done by several different hackers? I am quite sure it has been.