SilverCircle
Well-known member
It does very well matter even though it only matters for those who have access to it. Being a Windows 7 user, I'm glad they took this step because the difference between IE9 and IE8 is so obvious it makes you hard to believe there could be anything wrong with the decision to get rid of old rendering methods.
Fact is, the only way to significantly improve the rendering speed is to get rid of the old technologies. Windows GDI is like almost 20 years old and any developer knows how much it sucks and how slow it really is because it makes almost /zero/ use of modern graphics hardware. Also, compare the "quality" of GDI font rendering (mainly caused by the crappy ClearType and its lack of proper subpixel AA) to the font rendering on a Mac. Text looks so much better on OS X.
The solution for this generic problem is Direct2D offering hardware accelerated 2d rendering (very important for the HTML5 canvas element) and MS stated they cannot backport this to Windows XP because it would break so many things (including all video drivers and more). Of course, that's probably only half of the truth. We know there are business and marketing decisions behind the scenes as they always play a major role at MS, often overruling pure technical decisions. We also know, MS really wants XP to die, but so far with little success, because it simply is a good and stable operating system. That said, IE9 is probably part of their strategy to kill XP, besides, the high percentage of XP installations mainly come from corporate and/or enterprise installations. I would assume that on private PCs and notebooks, Windows 7 is already more popular. Also, these numbers will look very different in a year from now.
Sometimes, it is simply necessary to get rid of old technologies. By the way, XF is a good example of what can be done when you throw away old concepts and do something new, from scratch. Software development is a lot about looking forward and making progress - you cannot always look backwards and make sure your code still runs on 20 years old systems. If we did, we would still all sit in front of 80x25 text screens, "enjoying" perfect backward compatibility. Not that I hate text consoles, in fact, I use them a lot but my personal preferences are not really relevant here.
I can see why many web developers view the unavailability of IE9 for XP as a big problem and it really is a problem, because web designers will have to live with the "oddities" of IE7/8 for years to come. Still, IE9 is a good thing because it shows MS has finally accepted that they have to stick to common web standards. All their plans to cannibalize the standards and introduce their own web technologies basically failed in an epic way. IE9 is a step in the right direction, whether or not it comes too late - we'll see.
