Microsoft gets some heat over HTML5 plans

From InfoWorld: Microsoft came under fire from some of its rivals on Wednesday for its decision not to offer Internet Explorer 9 -- and hence support for the upcoming HTML5 standard -- to users of its older Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft said at its MIX developer conference in March that IE9 won't be offered for XP. The reason, technical evangelist Giorgio Sardo said at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday, is that IE9 is a "modern browser," and getting the benefits of the hardware acceleration and other performance gains that it will offer requires a "modern OS."

That didn't sit well with Alex Russell, a member of Google's Chrome browser development team. "Opera and Mozilla are also hardware-accelerating their browsers, and all of us are doing it on XP," said Russell, who joined Sardo and representatives from Mozilla, Opera and Yahoo for a panel discussion on the future of Web browsers.

"You describe a world where users are getting left behind," Russell said.

"I reckon this is a problem," agreed Doug Crockford, a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo. "I recommend all users of XP migrate to another browser that's not IE."

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