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Comment by infinita740 | Hacker News Reader

Look way more decent than I thought, google is apparently the only one really supporting ie5 as their interface seems absolutely unchanged.

Also noticed the irony of microsoft.com being the worst, maybe it shows that the company wants to move forward, maybe it's just lazyness/rationalisation.

Also it's kind of abvious that amazon works well, they don't want to lose potentials customers (maybe same for google)

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Doesn't shock me. They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. They created http://www.ie6countdown.com/ after all.

It's also probably near impossible to get their current site working on IE5, and to make a completely separate site just for them (and it's a really really small percentage of worldwide users) would be highly cost prohibitive.

> They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers.

Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

Windows XP supports up to IE8, Vista IE9 and 7 IE10. There's only so much you can do when an OS is on life support, and making sacrifices just to give an OS another version of IE is just stupid.

The very latest versions of Firefox and Chrome don't seem to have a problem supporting older versions of Windows.

Can you tell me more about these sacrifices that would have to be made? I'm genuinely interested.

I absolutely love the irony there. Then again, I can't really knock them for not making their website work on IE 5 since they don't support that browser any more.

It looks like the microsoft site is "feature detecting" at some level, and serving up a really basic mobile-oriented site. Think feature phone web browser.

I doubt Google "supports" ie5, their home page is just ultra-stripped down. Before they added that toolbar at the top, it was a text box and three or four links. Not much to mess up.

No, that's recognisably the more basic version they serve to older browsers.

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