"IE9 and Windows XP: Readers speak out."

The biggest is that IE9 won't work on a lot of computers. That's because the new browser is incompatible with Windows XP, an operating system that -- despite being two generations old -- is still widely employed in businesses and at homes. (IE9 works on Windows Vista but is really made for Windows 7).

Several readers posted comments on the XP snub. Frieddoughwrote: "So this puts my five year old computer with Windows XP one step closer to being obsolete. Sorry, I refuse to drop another grand, at least, so I can read my email from home for the next few years before that becomes obsolete."

Reader johnnynobody was equally frustrated: "Lack of XP support turns me off to this browser," he wrote.

And then there was juscurious: "They do this KNOWING (and not caring that) their customers will be XP'd off."

But some readers were more sympathetic to Microsoft's side. "You all realized that XP is 10 years old..," wrote drvax. "I bet you cannot name one company that offers support for a software product that old. Apple, Oracle, Novell, IBM, HP etc. NOT a one."

Adds harbor521: "C'mon people...I'm a die hard XP user and even I can figure out that you can't keep making new products compatible with things forEVER...the problem is not that IE9 doesn't work with XP, it's that XP is too old to work with the new tech in IE9."

This couldn't have been an easy choice for Microsoft. Sure, it would have been nice for XP to work with IE9. But the chief benefits behind IE9 come in embracing modern Web standards and technologies that are incompatible with the older operating system.

Meanwhile, one of the other problems I had mentioned in my review was that I couldn't log into online bill pay with IE9, though I had no difficulty doing so with earlier versions of IE. Microsoft informed me that a "compatibility tweak" was applied to the back end and pushed via a seamless IE9 update. In my case, it resolved the issue.