The good
So many features we all have been waiting for years. Yes finally rounded corners :-P
Seriously: Massive improvement in JS performance, DOM events, XHTML, SVG, CSS3 selectors... we now need to test how all that works together in real pages.
The bad
Only for Vista and 7. Yes, they say that it's too early to talk about the final version, but if you don't want to talk about the supported platforms right now, how can we have any faith that you will respect most of your customers and won't leave them stuck with the previous generation like you did with Windows 2000?
Don't say that it's due to the drivers or anything like that. All the other browers work perfectly in Windows XP so that's a lame excuse.
You can test it by downloading the preview from http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
2 comments:
I don't fault Microsoft for not supporting IE9 on XP. I'm a Mac user & only use XP on a virtual machine so while I'm not thrilled to have to buy an upgrade just to test the browser, XP is 9 years old. Apple dropped support for OS X 10.3 (release in 2003) with Safari 2 (released in 2005). While MS tends to do a lot more for backwards compatibility, it's getting time to move on from XP.
P.S. Thanks for tip about Fennec + Android in your more recent post.
The only reason to not support XP at all is just due to the desire to sell windows 7 licenses.
Apple has always dealed with its customers as people that will do whatever they say, so if they put out a new OS they know that their clients will buy it and say that it's the best thing. Combine that with the little marketshare of Safari 2 and no one cares about it.
On the other hand, XP is the most used OS at the moment, and given the trend it will still be that way next year and who knows how many more years people will keep using it. Even the new Office 2010 supports it. During all those years that peoples keeps using XP (with IE6-8) we will be forced to keep supporting those versions of IE (IE8 at least for sure).
We are not talking about bringing the hardware acceleration to XP, if it works much better in 7 then that could be something that could help people to realize that the 7 base is better, but if they see that they can use in XP a browser like Firefox or Chrome that is so much faster and better, they won't use IE and when they finally upgrade after a few years to the new windows version, they will keep using that browser.
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