Microsoft's raw deal for Vista users: IE10 for Windows 7 only | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's raw deal for Vista users: IE10 for Windows 7 only

arstechnica.com

14 pointsshawndumas10 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447927

Translation : Microsoft wants Windows Vista to die as soon as possible.

So by the end of the year us web developers will have to support IE 6, 7, 8, 9 and now 10 on 3 different operating systems..

Maybe it's time for a change in profession.

Well, the matrix is a little more straightforward than that.

XP won't get 9 and 10. Vista won't get 10 IE 6 is being EOL'd, most new applications don't support it.

So, you need to support XP w/7,8; Vista with 7,8,9, and Windows 7 with 7,8,9,10.

But, (And, not being a web developer, I'm very curious about this) - does the operating system really matter that much - Doesn't IE 7 perform reasonably simliar on XP, Vista and WIndows 7? Is it the security model that makes most of the difference? Or the included version of Java? Where do operating systems have the largest impact on Web Development?

Just as an example, I had a font rendering issue with the defaults in XP in IE, but not under Vista. It was a while ago, so I can't remember the exact nature fo the issue, but I think the fix came with defining a different font preference order with a specific style applied.

Only last week I had a bug reported by a client that selects within Safari in Windows XP Classic mode only did not have drop down arrows..

It took me rather a long time to work out this was a bug within Safari itself, but just shows how different operating systems can make as much of an impact as that of different browsers.

Seems like the primary motivator for doing this would be the 'native'-ness (all the hardware acceleration and whatnot) - and so maybe someone should tell Microsoft that we don't care about all that, what percentage of websites need that stuff? Certainly none of mine.

A single-platform browser these days just feels like a waste of time.

I thought microsoft had done enough to screw vista customers, with their slow and bloated OS. But theres more, now they can deprive them of IE10 when there seems to be no technical reasons.

Because they haven't just brought out IE9...

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