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A comment on Is IE9 a modern browser?. Parent comment

Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by Isofarro on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @02:57PM (#2222960)
[backporting IE9.0 to Windows XP]: "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."

It's not within Microsoft's strategy of planned obsolescence. For their continued survival they need people buying newer versions of the same software.

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Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by pedrocr on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @03:13PM (#2223057)
XP came out in 2001. According to Apple, Safari 5 requires OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard), released in 2007. Microsoft actually has a pretty good track record when it comes to supporting older versions of its operating systems. Just a bad record getting everyone to upgrade to newer versions.
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Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by alanh on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @05:59PM (#2223792)
Stop the presses. Apple software like iTunes and Safari STILL RUN ON WINDOWS XP. The difference is in how many users are on XP (50%?) vs. older than OS X Leopard (low single digits).

Related: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Chrome Frame are all more advanced than IE9 and all run on Windows XP.

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Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by pedrocr on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @06:34PM (#2223961)
>The difference is in how many users are on XP (50%?) vs. older than OS X Leopard (low single digits).

And the reason for that is probably that Microsoft keeps so much backwards compatibility that the cost of not upgrading the OS is much lower than on OSX.

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Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by Silhouette on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @03:41PM (#2223178)
> For their continued survival they need people buying newer versions of the same software.

Or they need people to be paying for commercial support of existing products. I'm not privy to any sensitive details, but I'm guessing they make the bulk of their real money from businesses, and that most large/profitable business customers have some sort of ongoing/bulk deal with Microsoft rather than paying for licences individually. Curiously, those large/profitable business customers are probably also the ones who don't like things like pushing updates every few weeks, because they (perfectly reasonably, IMHO) want a controlled software installation on their standard staff PC and they want to test any changes in-house before committing to adopting them.

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Re:Is IE9 a modern browser? by Isofarro on Tuesday February 15, 2011 @05:08PM (#2223587)
That rings a bell. Commercial support of existing products. http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/08/despite-petiti...
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