Microsoft to secure IE for XP only

Found on CNet on Wednesday, 22 September 2004
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"It's a problem that people should have to pay for a whole OS upgrade to get a safe browser," said Michael Cherry, analyst with Directions on Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. "It does look like a certain amount of this is to encourage upgrade to XP."

Microsoft affirmed that its recent security improvements to IE would be made available only to XP users.

"We do not have plans to deliver Windows XP SP2 enhancements for Windows 2000 or other older versions of Windows," the company said in a statement. "The most secure version of Windows today is Windows XP with SP2. We recommend that customers upgrade to XP and SP2 as quickly as possible."

That 49.2 percent of Windows users are left out in the cold when it comes to significant updates to IE and other software.

Not only will this actively support spam and scam efforts, but also drive more people away from MS. Why pay for bugfixes and upgrade if you can have all that for free? Plus, the users of the server platforms surely won't switch to XP to host websites. Keeping a Windows server running is a painful job, even without having to migrate to another OS version.