It's a 10 year old OS that still has 42% share of the market. It's still the most popular OS right now. Anyone with half a brain can see that their only reason behind not supporting IE9 on it is to try and force people to spend 100's of dollars upgrading their OS when they already have a perfectly fine and working one.
To claim that people are being _forced_ to upgrade is a tad extreme. IE9 is using newer APIs to enable better performance and functionality in the default OS browser giving users _one more_ reason to upgrade. What is wrong with Microsoft trying to incentivise their users to upgrade to their newest OS?
Microsoft's position seems to be to make their newest OS run the web best. Nothing wrong with that; and they've ensured a vibrant application ecosystem for XP that has led to many browser vendors supporting that OS well. XP users aren't exactly left high and dry.
Also, it's naive to think that everyone else's interests are merely to make a better browser: Google does it to get people spending more time on the internet under the assumption that they'll use Google to search and click on their ads.
Business arguments aside, I really wish they would support IE9 on XP. If indeed IE9 has better web standards support than its predecessors, I, as a web developer, want IE users to switch.
It's hard enough to convince users to upgrade their browser. If you ALSO have to convince them to upgrade their OS, there's basically 0 chance of that happening.
I'm not saying MS is or isn't making the right decision for their business. I'm just saying that IE9 is a lot less exciting for web developers if it's got this big roadblock to adoption.
It's a 10 year old OS with a 42% marketshare because Microsoft has been one of the better, if not the best company out there supporting their old products, much more so than Apple. Microsoft worked very hard to maintain backward compatibility for newer OSes and to avoid newer products breaking on their older OSes. Really.
If Microsoft had stopped supporting their olders OSes, stopped backporting new features and just shipped security updates, the figures would probably have been different.
Ask yourself: What incentive does Microsoft have to support users who paid them $15 for an OEM license a decade ago? I genuinely don't get this entitlement the users of legacy-Windows seem to have here. I've yet to see users of Slackware 8 cause massive uproar because Compiz haven't been backported to their 2001 OS. So what's different about XP?
If the mentality that "people are using the old product so Microsoft should fully support old product and backport and make everything work there" were to rule, basically Microsoft would go bankrupt since nobody would ever need to buy a new product from them. That's not how you become one of the worlds biggest software-companies and that's not how you get your OS supported in the future.
Microsoft may have themselves to blame for the remaining large Windows XP userbase having provided too good support in the past, but that in no way translates into obligations to keep on doing that in the future.
They've continued selling it, that's why they have to support it. It was all very convenient for them to offer it cheap to fend of Linux on netbooks because Vista sucked, so they can honour the implicit bargain they offered.
