Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Internet Explorer 9 won't work on Windows XP: So much for backwards compatability

Microsoft today released a "platform preview" of the next version of Internet Explorer (Version 9) to show developers that it's serious about supporting web standards and the next generation languages of the Net (HTML5 and CSS3).

The preview isn't a beta release of the browser; rather, it's a demonstration intended to show off what Microsoft has been working on. The main highlights are a faster JavaScript engine, support for embedded audio and video (though not Vorbis), support for scalable vector graphics, and hardware accelerated rendering.

The main lowlight is the disclosure that Internet Explorer 9 won't be compatible with Windows XP, which is still used by possibly more than a billion people.

It's not the first time Microsoft has cut off its users.

After the company restarted development of Internet Explorer in the middle of the decade, it decided not to bother making the new version compatible with Windows 2000. The much reviled IE 6 thus became Microsoft's last browser release for Windows 2000. Ironically, Microsoft rival Mozilla continues to support the platform; the latest version of Firefox (3.6) runs just fine on Windows 2000.

IE 8 is now fated to be the last supported browser release for Windows XP. Users who wish to upgrade to Internet Explorer 9 when it comes out will have to rent (er, purchase a license for) Windows Vista or Windows 7 from Microsoft.

Planned obsolescence is one of the things I dislike most about proprietary software. As I wrote last year, it leads to an unnecessarily high amount of e-waste. People end up discarding peripherals, components, and entire computers that they mistakenly think have reached the end of their useful lives. What they don't realize is that all of that old hardware is still good. It might not be able to run the newest proprietary software, but it won't have trouble running the latest and greatest free software.

A computer manufactured in the 1990s, for example, will happily run the most recent release of Xubuntu, which ships with updated versions of Firefox and OpenOffice. And Xubuntu - unlike Windows - can be easily upgraded with a few clicks of a mouse when a new release comes out. Free software like Xubuntu can do wonders for extending the life of old hardware. Research has borne this out: In 2004, the government of the United Kingdom calculated that migrating to GNU/Linux distributions like Xubuntu can result in fifty percent less e-waste.

Another great reason to make the switch to free software.

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