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 HTML 5 standard -- to users of its older Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft said at its MIX developer conference in March that IE 9 won't be offered for XP. The reason, technical evangelist Giorgio Sardo said at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday, is that IE 9 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.

More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176374/