11 ms·

The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8

63 points by troyhunt 14y ago

chris_wot 14y ago
So use Firefox then. You don't have to run IE on Windows XP.
- bdfh42 14y ago
  One of the points of the post was that switching from IE to FireFox is not a straightforward option. There is a lot of code running that depends upon features, functionality (and perhaps the idiosyncrasies) of IE.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    I'm really not sure you can have this both ways. Either you use a modern, up to date browser and code to standards (and thus reduce your coding workload and maintenance), or you can code to an old, out of date browser. The fact is, the main reason that he wants people to upgrade to IE10 is to reduce the support and maintenance burdens of supporting old browsers with weird javascript and rendering bugs. The heading is, after all "Old technology is wasting everyone’s time and money". The solution I put to everyone is to stop supporting IE8 and install Firefox. You can even deploy it via Active Directory and update it via Group Policy, AFAIK. So the simple solution is to switch to something like Firefox. Or you could continue to support IE8. It's really not ideal to do both, which you'll need to do if you have Windows 7 or above given you will almost certainly have IE9 or above on these installs.
    - gnaffle 14y ago
      The main problem is all the internal webapps that were written to support IE6, still works with IE8, and are very costly to rewrite, upgrade or replace. So in many cases they have to _add_ Firefox, they can't simply replace IE. That means even more user training (what, they've installed a second internet with a fox on it? Which should I use??), so the more tempting option is to just sit it out and wait, because they know that they will have to upgrade to Win7 or Win8 next year anyway if they still want security fixes.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    First, you don't need to switch. Installing Firefox does not make removing IE from the machine mandatory Second, installing FF or Chrome is not viable only if you're an IT drone or similar. (blah blah corporate policy blah blah) But of course FF is to blame as well when they came with that upgrade plan of theirs (of several frequent versions)
    - codeulike 14y ago
      Firefox now do 'Extended Support Releases' for controlled environments where the admins dont want constant updates http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
- troyhunt 14y ago
  In most managed corporate environments, you do have to run IE. The freedom of installing your own software at will doesn't exist.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    I understand, but it seems to me that if corporations change their standard to something like Chrome or Firefox, then they will have less maintenance costs in the long run. I think it's easier and more cost effective to deploy the latest version of Firefox than it is to: a. purchase new hardware for the latest OS from Microsoft, b. Get all the OS images ready to deploy, c. Train staff to use all the new applications that have changed UIs due to older versions of the software not working well on the new OS. Not only this, but as I've said ad nauseum, development costs should reduce when you use something that is updated as often to the latest standard as Chrome and Firefox.
    - tallanvor 14y ago
      Many companies use custom applications that simply don't work in other browsers. A browser like Chrome or Firefox is not appealing to companies who don't want to have to worry about a new version coming out every couple of months and having to constantly test their application to make sure it still works.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        This argument is flawed. There are really only two types of custom apps that you are referring to: apps that rely on ActiveX controls, and apps that use nonstandard eventing and DOM APIs, as well as bugs built into Internet Explorer. In each case you have a problem: those who use ActiveX will eventually find a total lack of support and updates for these apps, and those apps that rely on non-standard behaviour risk getting broken in even minor updates. Not to mention there will come a time when Microsoft will completely stop supporting the browser version the app is relying on, even for security updates. As has been pointed out by someone else, Firefox has special long term updates for corporations in restricted environments, so it's not a huge concern in terms of lots of updates being applied every few months.
- nirvdrum 14y ago
  So now we have minimum system requirements for Web pages? How is this any better or simpler than desktop apps? Moreover, what's the point of having an open spec if I need to update my browser every 6 weeks to run the latest version of site X? And what consumer is actually asking for this?
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    As a rule, you don't. However, Firefox is overall more feature complete, standards compliant and willing to correct bugs in an open fashion than Microsoft is with Internet Explorer. The ROI isn't really on the end user, it's on those who develop apps and must maintain them. Incidentally, for many web apps there are indeed minimal system requirements: must do CSS correctly, must follow DOM event model correctly, must render pages in a standards compliant manner, etc.
    - nirvdrum 14y ago
      Assuming consumers lead to your revenue, you should be serving them, not telling them they're not supported. But I realize that's an unpopular opinion here. The whole "standards compliant" is now just something Web devs tell each other. Browser vendor prefix usage is at an all-time high. Devs are routinely targeting features added by browsers from draft specifications (because that never turns out to be bad). And "standards compliant" seems to always mean the latest standard, which naturally precludes any device that predates that portion of the standard. CSS 1, 2, and 2.1 are all standards too. Oh, and my question about the consumer is given the choice between having no access at all or geolocation and drop shadows, I'm guessing almost all would rather just be able to access the site. I can't see much coming out of all this browser innovation that normal people care about or would ever ask for.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        Actually, it's usually the case that the customer is forced into using an ancient and unsupported environment which is forced on them, by the custom application. That's why organisations stay with old browsers, not the other way around.
- wglb 14y ago
  Not quite. There are many corporate environments that fully control their desktop and don't allow chrome or IE. There are some major applications that work only in IE.
meaty 14y ago
I hardly think this is a crisis. Support it or piss off your userbase. That's your call. In our case, becaues we're a corporate provider, 65% of our userbase is on IE8 still and will be for the forseeable future. Do we have a problem? No. Why? Because we're not fickle when it comes to technology. We're not obsessed with the latest thing. We're not going to throw this policy away and it's not a crisis. Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad.
- rurounijones 14y ago
  Depends on your market. As you have rightly pointed out in your case supporting IE8 is very very important. For others, not important. The fact that your last few lines seem to, in your opinion from what I can tell, place you in the "right" regarding this issue seems a bit hypocritical given your first two lines. To each their own, the market (and an XP EOL next year) should eventually kill off IE8.
  - meaty 14y ago
    I'm stating the truth that you can do what you like, but I don't think that is necessarily right. We still have a lot of corporate users on windows XP with no sign of them upgrading any time soon. Why? They don't need to - they're not on the public internet and everything they already do still works. There is little value in them changing. Their windows 7 upgrade is scheduled as an incremental step around 2015 but only on hardware failures.
    - Wintamute 14y ago
      Imagine you're a representative of an advanced space faring civilisation and have been given the task of safe-guarding a small stone-age settlement of promising humanoids. Their planet is rich in precious ores but the galaxy is at war and their position is precarious. Do you teach them the secrets of metal work or let them grub around in the mud for another few thousand years?
      - 14y ago
bdfh42 14y ago
Good write-up of a lot of key issues facing corporates and thus by implication all ISVs. Minor quibble - the Compaq iPaq had supplanted the Palm offerings as the "cutting edge" with colour, great sound quality and a lot of (admittedly battery emptying) performance. I was writing code for both platforms in that year.
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
I was hoping for some discussion of how viable Chrome Frame was as a solution in corporate environments. My current feeling is that it's not worth the bother and you'd be better installing full Chrome and hiding IE unless you also need the compatibility for internal apps.
- lloeki 14y ago
  Chrome Frame is viable and a solution we push for. The reason is that our product is sold to a variety of customers, some wanting "cutting edge" and keen on automatic upgrades, while others are more reluctant and want a more static panorama (control issues, or 'special' demographics that would be lost on a browser switch), yet both want convenience features like file attachments via drag and drop. We have limited resources, therefore we stay focused on our area of expertise and stick to standards (zero flash/java/silverlight to minimise support area and odds of yet another thing possibly going wrong), develop edge (HTML5, CSS3, responsive...) first, and have fallbacks for less compliant browsers (e.g IE9), and possibly block access to part or entirety of our products to old browsers, while clearly informing the user as to why he should live with it or get on board, and that he can use Chrome Frame to not change anything to his habits but raise the "features" bar (most of the resistance comes from ivory tower project managers and BOFH sysadmins, while users mostly don't care or agree). This is, for us, the only viable solution in the long term.
- Joeri 14y ago
  I've observed several attempts at pushing chrome frame to large multinationals with IE6 and IE7. Couldn't get traction. It's too much of an unknown, and in one case they were using a custom browser around IE's browser control and chrome frame wouldn't have worked.
- taylodl 14y ago
  I work for a Fortune 200 company and I just recently led the effort for them to adopt Chrome Frame. We were using a charting package that we could either render in Flash or SVG and because of our BYOD strategy we chose SVG but the performance in IE8 was abysmal. Chrome Frame fit the bill nicely. You include a tag in your HTTP header to request Chrome Frame. If it hasn't been installed then IE8 renders the page. The nice thing is the site self-selects that it wants Chrome Frame so your legacy sites continue to get IE8. Even better, your users are still launching IE so you don't have the support hassle of this site requires this browser while this other site requires this other browser. Meanwhile this gives us an opportunity to modernize our legacy web applications. Chrome Frame has been a great solution for us.
jpswade 14y ago
With "Google Chrome Frame" this is hardly a problem any more.
- Yaggo 14y ago
  Google Chrome Frame needs to be installed, often not possible for the end-user. Besides, who wants to _install_ something to view a web page?
  - ux-app 14y ago
    From what I understand Admin rights are not needed for a chromeframe install. I'm not sure how locked down a PC would need to be to prevent its installation.
  - nestlequ1k 14y ago
    But it solves "the big problem". In a nearly perfect way. As soon as I install Chrome frame, I can now use all my old legacy custom web apps that were built by my trusty 2005 ASP3 dev team (half of whom unfortunately have died of lung cancer or liver disease since then). And all new web apps pretty much invariably use the meta tag for Chrome Frame, I can continue using whatever site I want. The IT team just has to spend the 2 hours, 2 days, or 2 months to figure out how to roll out the update. No matter how much time they spend, it will be worth it in the long run. Now we don't have to upgrade from XP for another 10 years.
    - nodata 14y ago
      Now we don't have to upgrade from XP for another 10 years. and what about os-level security updates?
      - nestlequ1k 14y ago
        Well, you know.. besides that.
codeulike 14y ago
What doesn't run on IE8 at the moment? Trello is one prominent app that steadfastly refuses.
omh 14y ago
I'm surprised there isn't more criticism of Microsoft in this article. There's one big reason why IE9 isn't available on XP, and it's commercial rather than technical. Microsoft know that businesses don't have many reasons to upgrade from XP (at least not before 2014), and they're trying to force them. I manage a few standardised XP desktops and it's going to take some work before we can upgrade them to Windows 7. If IE9/IE10 was available for XP then I'd have upgraded already.
- nestlequ1k 14y ago
  Sorry, that's crazy talk. If IE9 were available for XP, these business wouldn't use it for the same reason they aren't upgrading to Google Chrome (even though its free and available).
  - omh 14y ago
    Perhaps you missed the latter part of my comment. I am a sysadmin at one of those businesses. I can't upgrade Windows but I would look at an upgrade to IE9 tomorrow if it were possible. (In our case we have Chrome and Firefox installed alongside, but the reasoning for IE is the same). The really upgrade-averse businesses are still on IE6/IE7, but that's not really what the article is discussing.
    - nestlequ1k 14y ago
      I appreciate the info. But I still can't seem to fathom why you can / would want to upgrade to IE9 if it were available. Or how MS is trying to spur OS sales by restricting a still terrible browser when 2 superior ones exist and are available for free. Am I missing something fundamental here?
- ygra 14y ago
  Given that IE 9 builds on top of a lot of new things that have been introduced with Windows 7, most notably rendering-wise (DirectWrite, Direct2D), I guess it certainly is a technical reason. Replicating that on XP would either need backporting those APIs which is not going to happen because XP is out of mainstream support, or developing abstractions or fallbacks within IE which would need more resources within the IE team. Sure, you could use suitable abstractions from the start, but why bother for an OS that's not supported anymore? Other browsers went that way, because they often run on multiple OSes, but you probably wouldn't expect a Linux version of IE anytime soon either.
lerouxb 14y ago
What's the status on the Windows 95 and IE 5.5 crisis? ;)
csense 14y ago
How many of those about-to-be-EOL'ed customers will upgrade to newer Windows/IE, and how many will jump ship for other browsers or OS's? What's the best way the FOSS community can take advantage of this situation to gain market share?
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  Having perfect compatibility and interoperability with Word, Excel, Access (both file and keyboard/mouse compatibility) and the ability to run VBA would be a minimum requirement for a lot of them.
davej 14y ago
Straight off the top of my head, some things that don't work in IE8: * Semantic HTML5 tags (<nav>, <article> etc.) * Media Queries * Flex Layout * CSS Transforms (2D and 3D) * CSS Transitions * SVG * Geolocation * Canvas * HTML5 Video * HTML5 Audio * Rounded corners * Multiple backgrounds in CSS * Web Sockets * Web Workers --- These are are from memory, I haven't taken the time to look these up so correct me if I have anything wrong.
- meaty 14y ago
  And for nigh on 10 years we didn't need ANY of them... I'm not suggesting that the features are not nice, but to be honest, we can do without if we need to support it.
- yuhong 14y ago
  My favorite are the 10+ years old XHTML (look up "polyglot XHTML" for example) and DOM Level 2.
jahewson 14y ago
A word of advice: don't go charging your customers a "tax" which doesn't exist. That's how you get arrested for fraud. Call it a "fee" or "penalty" or "charge" but not "tax".
guilloche 14y ago
I did not see any reason to move to win8. We can use chrome/firefox for modern sites. Existing software on XP is more than enough to do anything. More bloated office 13? Thanks, there is no way that I will use it. If I want an easy life, Linux is here, it is much faster, much easier to use with tiled windows managers like dwm (much less clicks & mouse movements). More tools to use, much easier to update with package manager like pacman. Windows seem like trash for me to drag human kind down a lot.
Toshio 14y ago
Why do all these posts by mvps feel ... clueless, mindless and fanboyish? I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's the ridiculous tone of defending the undefendable that all these posts have in common.
- troyhunt 14y ago
  Which bit was that Toshio? I can't see any MS defending, the post essentially said "This is what's happening, here's what to expect, these are some of the considerations". Whether what MS has done around OS and browser integration is wrong or right is not the issue, what we're all going to do about it is.
denysonique 14y ago
Windows XP boots faster and is snappier than Windows 7. It's lightweight-ness makes it the best choice for a VM guest as well as its small post install size. Windows XP post installation base size is 1.5GB, Windows 7's is 15GB -- this makes XP more suitable for image deployed environments.
webwanderings 14y ago
You know, that Microsoft website doesn't look so bad on IE5. Information appeared to be the king, nicely situated with clean interface.
webwanderings 14y ago
"Paradoxically, the current version of Chrome runs just fine in XP." Well, actually it doesn't. As per the lead developer of the Chrome (when last time I was defending XP): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860203
- greenyoda 14y ago
  That article is talking about how Chrome is less secure when run under XP, due to XP lacking security features found in later versions of Windows. But Chrome still runs well on XP, and probably has no worse security on XP than IE8 does.
aj700 14y ago
The "problem" is that when almost none of the web works in IE6/7/8/9 is that people won't upgrade because they have no idea how to. They'll buy a new PC, which is fair enough if they were running XP, but then they'll be shocked to realise there is no start menu.

63 points by troyhunt 14y ago

chris_wot 14y ago

So use Firefox then. You don't have to run IE on Windows XP.

bdfh42 14y ago
One of the points of the post was that switching from IE to FireFox is not a straightforward option. There is a lot of code running that depends upon features, functionality (and perhaps the idiosyncrasies) of IE.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I'm really not sure you can have this both ways. Either you use a modern, up to date browser and code to standards (and thus reduce your coding workload and maintenance), or you can code to an old, out of date browser. The fact is, the main reason that he wants people to upgrade to IE10 is to reduce the support and maintenance burdens of supporting old browsers with weird javascript and rendering bugs. The heading is, after all "Old technology is wasting everyone’s time and money". The solution I put to everyone is to stop supporting IE8 and install Firefox. You can even deploy it via Active Directory and update it via Group Policy, AFAIK. So the simple solution is to switch to something like Firefox. Or you could continue to support IE8. It's really not ideal to do both, which you'll need to do if you have Windows 7 or above given you will almost certainly have IE9 or above on these installs.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    The main problem is all the internal webapps that were written to support IE6, still works with IE8, and are very costly to rewrite, upgrade or replace. So in many cases they have to _add_ Firefox, they can't simply replace IE. That means even more user training (what, they've installed a second internet with a fox on it? Which should I use??), so the more tempting option is to just sit it out and wait, because they know that they will have to upgrade to Win7 or Win8 next year anyway if they still want security fixes.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  First, you don't need to switch. Installing Firefox does not make removing IE from the machine mandatory Second, installing FF or Chrome is not viable only if you're an IT drone or similar. (blah blah corporate policy blah blah) But of course FF is to blame as well when they came with that upgrade plan of theirs (of several frequent versions)
  - codeulike 14y ago
    Firefox now do 'Extended Support Releases' for controlled environments where the admins dont want constant updates http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
troyhunt 14y ago
In most managed corporate environments, you do have to run IE. The freedom of installing your own software at will doesn't exist.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I understand, but it seems to me that if corporations change their standard to something like Chrome or Firefox, then they will have less maintenance costs in the long run. I think it's easier and more cost effective to deploy the latest version of Firefox than it is to: a. purchase new hardware for the latest OS from Microsoft, b. Get all the OS images ready to deploy, c. Train staff to use all the new applications that have changed UIs due to older versions of the software not working well on the new OS. Not only this, but as I've said ad nauseum, development costs should reduce when you use something that is updated as often to the latest standard as Chrome and Firefox.
  - tallanvor 14y ago
    Many companies use custom applications that simply don't work in other browsers. A browser like Chrome or Firefox is not appealing to companies who don't want to have to worry about a new version coming out every couple of months and having to constantly test their application to make sure it still works.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      This argument is flawed. There are really only two types of custom apps that you are referring to: apps that rely on ActiveX controls, and apps that use nonstandard eventing and DOM APIs, as well as bugs built into Internet Explorer. In each case you have a problem: those who use ActiveX will eventually find a total lack of support and updates for these apps, and those apps that rely on non-standard behaviour risk getting broken in even minor updates. Not to mention there will come a time when Microsoft will completely stop supporting the browser version the app is relying on, even for security updates. As has been pointed out by someone else, Firefox has special long term updates for corporations in restricted environments, so it's not a huge concern in terms of lots of updates being applied every few months.
nirvdrum 14y ago
So now we have minimum system requirements for Web pages? How is this any better or simpler than desktop apps? Moreover, what's the point of having an open spec if I need to update my browser every 6 weeks to run the latest version of site X? And what consumer is actually asking for this?
- chris_wot 14y ago
  As a rule, you don't. However, Firefox is overall more feature complete, standards compliant and willing to correct bugs in an open fashion than Microsoft is with Internet Explorer. The ROI isn't really on the end user, it's on those who develop apps and must maintain them. Incidentally, for many web apps there are indeed minimal system requirements: must do CSS correctly, must follow DOM event model correctly, must render pages in a standards compliant manner, etc.
  - nirvdrum 14y ago
    Assuming consumers lead to your revenue, you should be serving them, not telling them they're not supported. But I realize that's an unpopular opinion here. The whole "standards compliant" is now just something Web devs tell each other. Browser vendor prefix usage is at an all-time high. Devs are routinely targeting features added by browsers from draft specifications (because that never turns out to be bad). And "standards compliant" seems to always mean the latest standard, which naturally precludes any device that predates that portion of the standard. CSS 1, 2, and 2.1 are all standards too. Oh, and my question about the consumer is given the choice between having no access at all or geolocation and drop shadows, I'm guessing almost all would rather just be able to access the site. I can't see much coming out of all this browser innovation that normal people care about or would ever ask for.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      Actually, it's usually the case that the customer is forced into using an ancient and unsupported environment which is forced on them, by the custom application. That's why organisations stay with old browsers, not the other way around.
wglb 14y ago
Not quite. There are many corporate environments that fully control their desktop and don't allow chrome or IE. There are some major applications that work only in IE.

meaty 14y ago

I hardly think this is a crisis. Support it or piss off your userbase. That's your call. In our case, becaues we're a corporate provider, 65% of our userbase is on IE8 still and will be for the forseeable future. Do we have a problem? No. Why? Because we're not fickle when it comes to technology. We're not obsessed with the latest thing. We're not going to throw this policy away and it's not a crisis. Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad.

rurounijones 14y ago
Depends on your market. As you have rightly pointed out in your case supporting IE8 is very very important. For others, not important. The fact that your last few lines seem to, in your opinion from what I can tell, place you in the "right" regarding this issue seems a bit hypocritical given your first two lines. To each their own, the market (and an XP EOL next year) should eventually kill off IE8.
- meaty 14y ago
  I'm stating the truth that you can do what you like, but I don't think that is necessarily right. We still have a lot of corporate users on windows XP with no sign of them upgrading any time soon. Why? They don't need to - they're not on the public internet and everything they already do still works. There is little value in them changing. Their windows 7 upgrade is scheduled as an incremental step around 2015 but only on hardware failures.
  - Wintamute 14y ago
    Imagine you're a representative of an advanced space faring civilisation and have been given the task of safe-guarding a small stone-age settlement of promising humanoids. Their planet is rich in precious ores but the galaxy is at war and their position is precarious. Do you teach them the secrets of metal work or let them grub around in the mud for another few thousand years?
    - 14y ago

bdfh42 14y ago

Good write-up of a lot of key issues facing corporates and thus by implication all ISVs. Minor quibble - the Compaq iPaq had supplanted the Palm offerings as the "cutting edge" with colour, great sound quality and a lot of (admittedly battery emptying) performance. I was writing code for both platforms in that year.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

I was hoping for some discussion of how viable Chrome Frame was as a solution in corporate environments. My current feeling is that it's not worth the bother and you'd be better installing full Chrome and hiding IE unless you also need the compatibility for internal apps.

lloeki 14y ago
Chrome Frame is viable and a solution we push for. The reason is that our product is sold to a variety of customers, some wanting "cutting edge" and keen on automatic upgrades, while others are more reluctant and want a more static panorama (control issues, or 'special' demographics that would be lost on a browser switch), yet both want convenience features like file attachments via drag and drop. We have limited resources, therefore we stay focused on our area of expertise and stick to standards (zero flash/java/silverlight to minimise support area and odds of yet another thing possibly going wrong), develop edge (HTML5, CSS3, responsive...) first, and have fallbacks for less compliant browsers (e.g IE9), and possibly block access to part or entirety of our products to old browsers, while clearly informing the user as to why he should live with it or get on board, and that he can use Chrome Frame to not change anything to his habits but raise the "features" bar (most of the resistance comes from ivory tower project managers and BOFH sysadmins, while users mostly don't care or agree). This is, for us, the only viable solution in the long term.
Joeri 14y ago
I've observed several attempts at pushing chrome frame to large multinationals with IE6 and IE7. Couldn't get traction. It's too much of an unknown, and in one case they were using a custom browser around IE's browser control and chrome frame wouldn't have worked.
taylodl 14y ago
I work for a Fortune 200 company and I just recently led the effort for them to adopt Chrome Frame. We were using a charting package that we could either render in Flash or SVG and because of our BYOD strategy we chose SVG but the performance in IE8 was abysmal. Chrome Frame fit the bill nicely. You include a tag in your HTTP header to request Chrome Frame. If it hasn't been installed then IE8 renders the page. The nice thing is the site self-selects that it wants Chrome Frame so your legacy sites continue to get IE8. Even better, your users are still launching IE so you don't have the support hassle of this site requires this browser while this other site requires this other browser. Meanwhile this gives us an opportunity to modernize our legacy web applications. Chrome Frame has been a great solution for us.

jpswade 14y ago

With "Google Chrome Frame" this is hardly a problem any more.

Yaggo 14y ago
Google Chrome Frame needs to be installed, often not possible for the end-user. Besides, who wants to _install_ something to view a web page?
- ux-app 14y ago
  From what I understand Admin rights are not needed for a chromeframe install. I'm not sure how locked down a PC would need to be to prevent its installation.
- nestlequ1k 14y ago
  But it solves "the big problem". In a nearly perfect way. As soon as I install Chrome frame, I can now use all my old legacy custom web apps that were built by my trusty 2005 ASP3 dev team (half of whom unfortunately have died of lung cancer or liver disease since then). And all new web apps pretty much invariably use the meta tag for Chrome Frame, I can continue using whatever site I want. The IT team just has to spend the 2 hours, 2 days, or 2 months to figure out how to roll out the update. No matter how much time they spend, it will be worth it in the long run. Now we don't have to upgrade from XP for another 10 years.
  - nodata 14y ago
    Now we don't have to upgrade from XP for another 10 years. and what about os-level security updates?
    - nestlequ1k 14y ago
      Well, you know.. besides that.

codeulike 14y ago

What doesn't run on IE8 at the moment? Trello is one prominent app that steadfastly refuses.

omh 14y ago

I'm surprised there isn't more criticism of Microsoft in this article. There's one big reason why IE9 isn't available on XP, and it's commercial rather than technical. Microsoft know that businesses don't have many reasons to upgrade from XP (at least not before 2014), and they're trying to force them. I manage a few standardised XP desktops and it's going to take some work before we can upgrade them to Windows 7. If IE9/IE10 was available for XP then I'd have upgraded already.

nestlequ1k 14y ago
Sorry, that's crazy talk. If IE9 were available for XP, these business wouldn't use it for the same reason they aren't upgrading to Google Chrome (even though its free and available).
- omh 14y ago
  Perhaps you missed the latter part of my comment. I am a sysadmin at one of those businesses. I can't upgrade Windows but I would look at an upgrade to IE9 tomorrow if it were possible. (In our case we have Chrome and Firefox installed alongside, but the reasoning for IE is the same). The really upgrade-averse businesses are still on IE6/IE7, but that's not really what the article is discussing.
  - nestlequ1k 14y ago
    I appreciate the info. But I still can't seem to fathom why you can / would want to upgrade to IE9 if it were available. Or how MS is trying to spur OS sales by restricting a still terrible browser when 2 superior ones exist and are available for free. Am I missing something fundamental here?
ygra 14y ago
Given that IE 9 builds on top of a lot of new things that have been introduced with Windows 7, most notably rendering-wise (DirectWrite, Direct2D), I guess it certainly is a technical reason. Replicating that on XP would either need backporting those APIs which is not going to happen because XP is out of mainstream support, or developing abstractions or fallbacks within IE which would need more resources within the IE team. Sure, you could use suitable abstractions from the start, but why bother for an OS that's not supported anymore? Other browsers went that way, because they often run on multiple OSes, but you probably wouldn't expect a Linux version of IE anytime soon either.

lerouxb 14y ago

What's the status on the Windows 95 and IE 5.5 crisis? ;)

csense 14y ago

How many of those about-to-be-EOL'ed customers will upgrade to newer Windows/IE, and how many will jump ship for other browsers or OS's? What's the best way the FOSS community can take advantage of this situation to gain market share?

stan_rogers 14y ago
Having perfect compatibility and interoperability with Word, Excel, Access (both file and keyboard/mouse compatibility) and the ability to run VBA would be a minimum requirement for a lot of them.

davej 14y ago

Straight off the top of my head, some things that don't work in IE8: * Semantic HTML5 tags (<nav>, <article> etc.) * Media Queries * Flex Layout * CSS Transforms (2D and 3D) * CSS Transitions * SVG * Geolocation * Canvas * HTML5 Video * HTML5 Audio * Rounded corners * Multiple backgrounds in CSS * Web Sockets * Web Workers --- These are are from memory, I haven't taken the time to look these up so correct me if I have anything wrong.

meaty 14y ago
And for nigh on 10 years we didn't need ANY of them... I'm not suggesting that the features are not nice, but to be honest, we can do without if we need to support it.
yuhong 14y ago
My favorite are the 10+ years old XHTML (look up "polyglot XHTML" for example) and DOM Level 2.

jahewson 14y ago

A word of advice: don't go charging your customers a "tax" which doesn't exist. That's how you get arrested for fraud. Call it a "fee" or "penalty" or "charge" but not "tax".

guilloche 14y ago

I did not see any reason to move to win8. We can use chrome/firefox for modern sites. Existing software on XP is more than enough to do anything. More bloated office 13? Thanks, there is no way that I will use it. If I want an easy life, Linux is here, it is much faster, much easier to use with tiled windows managers like dwm (much less clicks & mouse movements). More tools to use, much easier to update with package manager like pacman. Windows seem like trash for me to drag human kind down a lot.

Toshio 14y ago

Why do all these posts by mvps feel ... clueless, mindless and fanboyish? I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's the ridiculous tone of defending the undefendable that all these posts have in common.

troyhunt 14y ago
Which bit was that Toshio? I can't see any MS defending, the post essentially said "This is what's happening, here's what to expect, these are some of the considerations". Whether what MS has done around OS and browser integration is wrong or right is not the issue, what we're all going to do about it is.

denysonique 14y ago

Windows XP boots faster and is snappier than Windows 7. It's lightweight-ness makes it the best choice for a VM guest as well as its small post install size. Windows XP post installation base size is 1.5GB, Windows 7's is 15GB -- this makes XP more suitable for image deployed environments.

webwanderings 14y ago

You know, that Microsoft website doesn't look so bad on IE5. Information appeared to be the king, nicely situated with clean interface.

webwanderings 14y ago

"Paradoxically, the current version of Chrome runs just fine in XP." Well, actually it doesn't. As per the lead developer of the Chrome (when last time I was defending XP): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860203 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860203

greenyoda 14y ago
That article is talking about how Chrome is less secure when run under XP, due to XP lacking security features found in later versions of Windows. But Chrome still runs well on XP, and probably has no worse security on XP than IE8 does.

aj700 14y ago

The "problem" is that when almost none of the web works in IE6/7/8/9 is that people won't upgrade because they have no idea how to. They'll buy a new PC, which is fair enough if they were running XP, but then they'll be shocked to realise there is no start menu.