XP Holdouts Will Hold Back Progress

The web has been moving ahead quickly as vendors trip over each other to implement the latest standards such as HTML5. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and even the upcoming Internet Explorer 9 have all pledged allegiance to the web. The future of the web looks bright, but I fear that the future will take a long time to arrive because of Windows XP.Windows Vista had me clinging to XP on several systems until last year, when Windows 7 arrived. Microsoft did a great job on Windows 7 and it has deservedly started to gobble up market share. In fact, it has already matched Vista's share of the market in the short time since it was released.

I'm glad I stayed with XP for so long, and even happier that Windows 7 delivered a worthy successor. Now that XP is coming up on a decade of service and nearing the sundown period of Microsoft support, it's time for everyone to consider a switch. Even if your company can't or won't move off XP, there is one thing you absolutely should upgrade: the web browser. Windows XP shipped with Internet Explorer 6, and unfortunately many businesses have let themselves become trapped in that 2001-era vision of the web. IE6 is not a modern browser, and it cannot deliver anything close to a good experience on the 2010-era web.

XP holdouts that have stuck with IE6 will be faced with a tough decision if they decide to upgrade just the web browser. Microsoft has made it clear that the company does not intend to support XP in Internet Explorer 9, supposedly because it needs advanced graphics technologies only available in Vista and Windows 7. Yet other browser makers have delivered their products on XP, and those products usually perform better than Microsoft's browser. Perhaps IE9 will truly outperform the competition, but it's not quite fair to compare the early IE9 beta to the shipping and stable products already available from others.

The bottom line comes down to this: if your company plans to stay with XP well into 2011 and you're still using IE6, you've got to upgrade that browser. Knowing that IE9 won't support XP, you can safely move to IE8 knowing it's the end of the line for IE on XP. Or, you can move to Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera -- but a company that's still stuck on IE6 isn't likely to be that adventurous. The web developers of the world will be happy with anything that gets you off IE6.