Internet Explorer 9 released!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12737013

Hardware accelerated canvas in the latest official Internet Explorer at last! This means fast HTML5 games in IE. Hopefully over the next few months it will replace most of the old IE installations. Will be interesting to see how its share increases.

Looks pretty interesting.

But I can't test it, don't know why MS stopped supporting newer versions of IE on XP.

Yeah, really weird that they dropped support for XP when all their competitors still fully support it! Makes it seem like everyone else is doing a better job of supporting Microsoft OSs than they are...

They just don't care anymore. They suppose to give up supporting xp at the end of 2010, thougth I'm still getting live updates.

Well, I guess they reckon that by dropping support for IE9 on XP they'll encourage more people to upgrade the OS.

yeah, they thought that with dx 10 and 11 too

I think if you're an XP user, it's much easier to switch to a free alternative browser like Chrome than to upgrade your entire OS. So I guess it is aimed at encouraging OS upgrades, but it looks like it might backfire for a lot of people. Everything that makes IE9 cool is available in alternative browsers which also work on XP.

IE always has been , and forever will be completely hopeless.

I just got sick of the non-stop malware magnet that IE is, with it's huge memory footprint (not even a footprint, more like a canyon) and buggy code support.

Try loading a co.cc domain in IE and see what happens? Apparently I'm not connected to the internet (according to IE when trying to view a co.cc site)... but FireFox can view it just fine.

Why does 95% of everything Microsoft makes have to SUCK SO BADLY? With all that money and stuff, you would think they could do things the right way, but it's just so hard for them. It makes me sad really since things could easily be so much better.

~Sol

IE9 ditched XP because much of that fancy GPU accelerated rendering cannot be done (well?) in XP. I've read that while FF4 works in XP, it falls back to software rendering, so it's not that impressive anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/review ... viewed.ars

I tried it and it seems nice. I'm still more used to the FF interface, so I'll probably keep using that.

I've read FF4 uses DirectX 9 on XP, and Chrome is hardware-accelerated with OpenGL on XP, so it is perfectly possible to write hardware-accelerated apps for XP (just think of all the 3D games that have been released for it anyway )

According to this page, Firefox 4 in XP uses Direct 3D for accelerating compositing, but not content rendering. So no HTML5 Canvas acceleration in XP. I'm not sure if that page is outdated, however.