If Microsoft wanted to support GPU acceleration through an alternate rendering path like two other browsers are doing on XP, they would have done so.
I find it more likely to conclude that they just didn't want to support XP and developed a browser GPU acceleration engine that wouldn't support it as a result of this high-level decision.
I suspect that it is two reasons they don't have IE9 on XP:
1) They don't want people using XP. If other browser vendors want to take it on, I think MS has decided that they're fine with that. But they don't want to enable XP anymore.
2) The test matrix is a huge test cost. Doing XP means cutting something else. I think they decided that the cost of supporting XP wasn't worth it when they looked at how it effected their roadmap.
That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but having looked at the code myself, I'd have to say someone must be nuts to have gone to extra efforts to create a new engine that specifically won't run on XP.
Huh? I never said they wrote the graphics stack not to support XP. I said that there's no technical reason why you can't have a fallback rendering path to work on XP. Chrome and Firefox show that this is possible.
You can point at the FAQ all day, but you can't deny that there is a way to do GPU acceleration of web content on XP.
Actually, chrome and firefox demonstrate that there is a technical reason, since they both only implement accelerated compositing on XP, not accelerated content layout.
Comments
It's a bogus technical reason. Chrome and Firefox show that GPU acceleration can work on XP:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/09/hardware-acceleration/
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-acceleration...
If Microsoft wanted to support GPU acceleration through an alternate rendering path like two other browsers are doing on XP, they would have done so.
I find it more likely to conclude that they just didn't want to support XP and developed a browser GPU acceleration engine that wouldn't support it as a result of this high-level decision.
I suspect that it is two reasons they don't have IE9 on XP:
1) They don't want people using XP. If other browser vendors want to take it on, I think MS has decided that they're fine with that. But they don't want to enable XP anymore.
2) The test matrix is a huge test cost. Doing XP means cutting something else. I think they decided that the cost of supporting XP wasn't worth it when they looked at how it effected their roadmap.
That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but having looked at the code myself, I'd have to say someone must be nuts to have gone to extra efforts to create a new engine that specifically won't run on XP.
Huh? I never said they wrote the graphics stack not to support XP. I said that there's no technical reason why you can't have a fallback rendering path to work on XP. Chrome and Firefox show that this is possible.
You can point at the FAQ all day, but you can't deny that there is a way to do GPU acceleration of web content on XP.
Actually, chrome and firefox demonstrate that there is a technical reason, since they both only implement accelerated compositing on XP, not accelerated content layout.