Two Reasons Why You Should Upgrade from XP and IE 8

1. Photoshop, The de-facto standard in photography software stops support for Windows XP

A few months ago, the official Photoshop.com blog of Adobe stated:

“The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. (Photoshop CS6 does not support Windows Vista.) In addition, all subsequent Photoshop feature updates specifically for Creative Cloud members will no longer support Windows XP. Leveraging advances available on newer operating systems and hardware allows us to deliver significantly better performance, and focus our innovation efforts around areas of greatest benefit to our customers.

Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers. The team hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we're headed with future releases of Photoshop. We encourage all customers who are currently using Windows XP to begin making their migration plans now so they can fully take advantage of future Photoshop innovations as soon as they are available.”

2. Google Apps, the choice of many SMBs for productivity, collaboration and communication, ceases support for IE 8

Around the same time, the official update feed from the Google Apps team stated: “As we announced last year, we support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and previous major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

Internet Explorer 10 launches on 10/26/2012, and as a result, we will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 8 shortly afterwards, on 11/15/2012. After this date, users accessing Google Apps services using Internet Explorer 8 will see a message recommending that they should upgrade their browser”.

Editions included:

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Education and Government”

Do you see this as a sign of things to come? In case applications you use have stopped supporting Windows XP/ IE 8, have you considered changing to another OS or browser? Share your story with us at pcquest@cybermedia.co.in.