As a side-note, it is not just IE that is affected, any browser which relies on the bundled OS encryption libraries has the same problem. It has been a while s

As a side-note, it is not just IE that is affected, any browser which relies on the bundled OS encryption libraries has the same problem. It has been a while since I checked (I did a fair bit of SNI-related research for the HTTPS support in https://pagekite.net/ https://pagekite.net/), but at the time Chrome and Firefox on XP also lacked SNI support on WinXP for [edit: what I assumed was] this reason. I think Chrome has since bundled their own crypto code so recent versions of Chrome on XP do work, but I am not sure about Firefox. I didn't test Opera. This was also an issue on Linux desktops relatively recently, for alternative browsers like wget and KDE's Konqueror.