Mozilla knocks Microsoft's decision to snub XP

A Mozilla executive last week said he was surprised that rival Microsoft has abandoned support for the 10-year-old Windows XP operating system in its new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) browser.

IE9, which Microsoft launched a week ago today, runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7, its 2007 and 2010 operating systems, but not on 2001's XP. Microsoft has said the decision to not support Windows XP came out of its move to accelerate some browser chores, including composing the page, by tapping the graphics processor, or GPU.

"We knew we didn't want to optimize for the lowest common denominator, you need a modern operating system," said Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE, in an interview last week. "[Supporting XP would have been] optimizing for the lowest common denominator. It's ten years old. That's not what developers need to move the Web forward."

Microsoft and Mozilla have argued about the path to hardware acceleration each has taken, with the former claiming IE9 is the only browser that "fully hardware accelerates the entire Web platform," a claim some at Mozilla have disputed.

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