Internet Explorer 10 Drops Vista Support

Published: April 16, 2011

Microsoft has stepped up the pace in browser development — and taken strong measures to deal with a legacy of browser problems.

This week at Microsoft’s MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 available—less than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer: the next IE won’t run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista.

Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won’t even run on Vista. In a statement to Computerworld, the company said “Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware.”

Michael Muchmore @ PCMag.com

Via Slashdot, where sgbett assesses the matter thus:

“In seriousness, this is the best thing [Microsoft] could do. The debacle that has been backwards compatibility of windows and ie in there various combinations [have] been horrible. Best thing to do is get all those grotty old windows/ie users upgraded. They are like people who drive around on modern [roads] in clapped out unsafe jalopies.

Internet Explorer 9 Released

Published: March 15, 2011

From a recent post at Slashdot:

Yesterday Microsoft released IE9 and since then we’ve been getting tons of submissions about it: It’s hard to tell if it is a threat to web development or the fastest thing on the web or even a waste of time. You’ll just have to decide for yourself … if you are one of the 9% of Slashdot readers who actually uses IE.

IE 9 Released, Media Has Opinions @ Slashdot

From the comments:

I’m glad we’re at least finally able to have a discussion about IE’s competitive performance versus other browsers, instead of the number of rendering bugs, workarounds, and hacks required to support it. I don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to the latest browser benchmark news with regard to cheating, but it’s clear that the IE team has made enormous improvements. Look at the relative performance of IE8 versus the field, and IE9 versus the field. They’ve gone from orders of magnitude behind to being one third of the front-of-the-pack regarding performance. I never thought I’d see a performance battle between IE, Opera, and Chrome for the top spot, but here we are. Firefox will catch up I’m sure, but I’m still extremely impressed with the ground that the IE team has made up.

Slashdot comment