IE9 at MIX10: XP Not Invited
So, about that upgrade to Windows 7...you might be doing it sooner than you'd planned if you're interested in Microsoft's next browser release.
Reports coming out of this week's big MIX10 developer conference suggest that IE9 is going to be super-cool and might actually out-perform Firefox (your editor's choice) and Google Chrome. Microsoft is, as it seems to be with everything these days, "all in" for IE 9 and the emerging HTML5 standard, which it'll use in development of the browser. Cool, right?
Well, sure...unless you're part of the majority of the world's computer users that runs Windows XP, which you very likely are (as are we). IE9 and XP are not going to get along, apparently. So you're going to have to have Vis...wait, nobody would do that. You're going to have to have Windows 7 if you want to run IE 9. Dig this quote from the article linked earlier in this paragraph:
"'Building a modern browser requires a modern operating system,' Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said at a press conference at the Mix10 event."
OK, Dean, we get it. And you have a point. XP is old, and given that IE9 will be able to use a PC's processing power to show graphics, most old XP machines probably wouldn't be able to handle the new browser, anyway. Besides, browsers are free, so it's not as though a "forced upgrade" is really going to irk anybody that much, right?
Windows 7 is a hit, but IE9 might just be the final nail in XP's coffin if the forthcoming browser really ends up being as spectacular as it appears it will be. Needless to say, with the browser wars and quite possibly the market share of what Microsoft hopes will be the world's next default OS riding on it, IE9 has some work to do. Will it be up to the task? Time will tell.
What do you want from the next version of IE? Would you upgrade your OS just to use a new version of the browser? Let us know at lpender@rcpmag.com.
Posted by Lee Pender on March 17, 2010 at 8:33 PM