Internet Explorer 10 Drops Vista Support 438
Pigskin-Referee writes "This week at Microsoft's MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 available — less than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld's Gregg Keizer: the next IE won't run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista. Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won't even run on Vista."
Re:Finally! This is Great! (Score:5, Informative)
That's certainly one way of spinning it. On the other hand, the way I see it is they are once again, illegally using one product to affect the users of another product. In this case, they are trying to use MSIE to draw people away from Windows XP and to buy Windows 7.
I'm waiting for someone to package MSIE9 for Windows XP. Maybe it has already been done....
This is easy to answer. (Score:5, Informative)
What could there possibly be in Windows 7 that Vista lacks?
Just look at the public IDL files in the Windows SDK and look at what's inside #ifdef NTDDI_WIN7 blocks.
Hint: It's not a small list.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
There's a massive architectural difference between NT-based and DOS-based Windows.
For example, all system library calls that pass a string need to use a different API on Win95/98/ME and NT+. Using SomeFunctionA will mysteriously break the moment someone tries to input a string with a letter that happens to be not present in a legacy locale-dependent "code page", or access a file with such a character in its name. Supporting both APIs is possible but is a major chore, even with wrappers like MSLU.
And this is just a tip of an iceberg. What if you want to write some persistent data? Can't use C:\Program Files\YourProgram\ since it is not writeable without elevation. Easy -- SHGetFolderPath(). But, that function is not present on Win98 that did not have a specific Internet Explorer (???) update. So you need to fall back to that fixed location in C:\Program Files\YourProgram\. And so on...
On the other hand, there are no significant changes between 2000 and Win7 where user mode programs are concerned. New API has been added, but it gives little advantage, you can do about everything the old way with no functionality loss. I think the only actual goodie are filesystem transactions.
There was a large change for kernel drivers between XP and Vista, but a program like Firefox has no valid reason to touch that. Not any program which doesn't touch debugging, hardware or virtualization -- ie, any game which installs a kernel driver has a rootkit like SecuROM included.