gareon posted this article at Go Firefox! as a follow up to the article earlier this week on how IE9 does not support Windows XP.

…More than 40 percent of web users are still on Windows XP. And that’s the first thing Firefox engineering director Johnathan Nightingale brought up when I asked him about the issue. In an ironic twist, Mozilla’s upcoming Firefox 4is supporting not only Microsoft’s Windows XP but also Windows 2000, even though Microsoft’s new browser doesn’t.
“That’s a decision that they get to make, but it sure did surprise us, because the best metrics that we’ve got say 40 to 50 percent of the web is still on XP. That’s too big for us to just leave them behind,” Nightingale said via phone. “Yeah, it’s harder work, because XP has a totally different hardware-acceleration story. You need to be using Direct3D there, instead of Direct2D on Vista and 7. It meant we had to do a lot more work architecturally to make sure we could offer a high-quality experience across both of them. But you know what? That’s the job.”… “

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