"Mike S" wrote
| What can you do on Windows 10 that you can't do on Windows XP
| snip
| Run modern browsers so you can render modern web pages correctly.
?? I'm running Firefox 52. It's true that the very latest
FF won't install on XP. But the very latest is not the
same as "modern". Modern is a sneaky word. It implies
a value judgement -- up-to-date as opposed to
old-fashioned. But it actually means nothing in this
context.
My first memory of its use was with Microsoft calling
Metro trinket apps "modern". Microsoft are very adept
at twisting language to make marketing look like facts.
They were trying to define phone apps on computers,
presented as a service, as being "next-gen computing".
If you look at the average commercial webpage you'll
see that most still accommodate IE 7 or 8. What they
increasingly don't accommodate is people who disable
script, thus disabling their spyware. I keep seeing new
tricks to block functionality: CSS panels that block the
page and get set to display: none by script. Wacky
IMG tags that go to great lengths not to allow the
SRC to work....
But conversely, they try hard to accommodate browsers
and OSs because they want as many visitors as possible.
Here's a sample that shows how much they try to be
compatible. I just went to nyt.com and looked at the
source. This is at the top:
------------------------------------------
!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)] !-- html lang="en" class="no-js
edition-domestic app-homepage" itemscope
xmlns
g="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" !--![endif]--
!--[if IE 9] html lang="en" class="no-js ie9 lt-ie10 edition-domestic
app-homepage" xmlns
g="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" ![endif]--
!--[if IE 8] html lang="en" class="no-js ie8 lt-ie10 lt-ie9
edition-domestic app-homepage"
xmlns
g="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" ![endif]--
!--[if (lt IE 8)] html lang="en" class="no-js lt-ie10 lt-ie9 lt-ie8
edition-domestic app-homepage"
xmlns
g="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" ![endif]--
-------------------------------------------------------------
That code indicates that they have different page versions
for everything from IE7 (maybe even 6) up to IE11. Why don't
they do similar for other browsers? Because the others are
standards compliant. Most pages will work fine in just about
any version of any other browser. So browser usability has
almost nothing to do with OS version. Though I should note
that people on 56K modems will have trouble with the wildly
bloated 2-5 MB pages that are common today.
Even if I started using Win10 today I wouldn't install
the latest Firefox because it breaks some of my
extensions. Chrome? Spyware. Edge? That's not even
a serious question.