It’s not the final nail in the coffin, but it’s yet another sign of Windows XP’s decline. Microsoft is officially dumping Windows XP support in the next iteration of Internet Explorer. Here’s the why and how and what’s next from Microsoft…

If you didn’t know, Microsoft is positioning IE 9 to have some advanced features, like supporting HTML5 and hardware accelerated image creation through Direct X’s ‘Direct 2D’ introduced in Windows 7 (Microsoft’s rendering platform.) That’s part of the reason IE 9 won’t run on XP. But there’s also a far more basic explanation.

According to PCMag.com ‘s Michael Muchmore probing of the IE9 Team :

And how modern is modern? Well, IE9 preview won’t run on anything less than Windows Vista SP 2. That special Windows 7 Direct 2D rendering platform actually got added to Vista in SP2, so you’re in luck. Muchmore also poked around to see if Microsoft thought about doing a non-Windows version of IE9 — because once upon a time Microsoft developed IE for Mac. He reported that Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch gave a resounding “No.”

So what does that mean for the bulk of Windows XP users in the wild? Well, there are still plenty of “modern” browsers that’ll run on an ‘antiquated’ operating system. Chrome, Opera, and Safari are just a few to mention. But just because Microsoft is ditching their browser support of their dying creation, doesn’t mean that  XP is really ‘dying.’ Once upon a time I mentioned how 3rd party people breathe new life into old operating systems (like Mac OS 9).

Still, it’s worth noting that XP is a nearly 10-year-old operating system and the last service pack  released for it was nearly two years ago. I think it’s time for XP curmudgeons to at least take a gander at Windows 7. We know you held out through the Vista madness, but it’s really time to upgrade…

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