Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate Released

Quillz said:
No, it doesn't work on a 10-year-old operating system.

Should I go complain to Apple that Safari 5 won't work on Mac OS 9?
Click to expand...

My computer is 2 years old. And yes, at the time, everyone was wiping their ass with Vista. So whats your point? I should go out and buy Windows 7 so I can surf the net? Get outta here...
 
Kier said:
If MS had made IE9 compatible with WinXP we could all have had a party. Unfortunately they didn't, so we will have to deal with IErubbishVersion for years to come.

FAIL Microsoft, fail.
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Well, let's look on the bright side, XenForo renders very nicely in IE9. Shame the same can't be said for a certain competitor's product.
 
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The UI still looks like a joke on my non-Aero theme
 
IE9 is a Godsend. I am so happy to see it :D. Unfortunately, I just cannot run it as Parallels is refusing to boot up my Windows virtual machine. I'm so mad that I'm going to move back to my Windows laptop until Parallels sorts itself out. I still like the UI in defaults though. I'm so glad to see Internet Explorer embracing modern, emerging technologies, and be as well as follow crucial paradigms in the industry.

Now, where's the rest of that kool-aid gone?
 
Don't get me wrong, I think IE9 is a massive improvement over IE8 (though that's not a particularly high bar to pass) but not allowing XP, which still has a vast install base, to use it is nothing short of a disaster, and ensures that Microsoft will remain the bane of web developers' lives for a significant time to come.
 
LOL, maybe we should all order the 'Kier preload' for our next box !

PS: One question.. How is the Windows licensing handled within that set up ??
 
dutchbb said:
Well Mac OS and OS X are very different OSes. And Safari 5 works on XP :)

Also let's not forget 66% of all Windows users is still running XP (44% of total market), while almost no one is running Mac OS 9. This should be an important factor when determining backward compatibility.

My guess is that MS is trying to force XP users to start using their latest OS by simply ignoring compatibility with XP in new software releases. It might backfire if XP users just start using a compatible browser.
Click to expand...
Obviously, this is one important point and you can't really blame them for it.

But there are other, more technical reasons. One of the reasons for IE9 being so much faster is its new rendering engine which is based on Direct2D and DirectWrite - two technologies that are not available on XP and cannot be ported over easily, because they require fundamental changes in the core operating system (one reason why Vista got a new display driver model).

Sure, they could have been using a fallback mode, basically the same thing Firefox 4 is using when Direct2D is not available in which case it uses the old GDI-based rendering with some Direct3D9 (alternatively OpenGL) features for accelerating layer composition. Then it could work on XP, but the code would be much more complex and ultimately slower than a pure Direct2D based renderer, written from scratch with all the old legacy code wiped. The results speak for themselves - IE9 renders /really/ fast, it beats Firefox (even the latest version 4 builds) in almost every benchmarks and with many pages IE9 feels even faster than Chrome.
 

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