Windows XP x64 support?

Support board for people running on (retail/OEM) Windows XP (32/64-bit).
Forum rules
This is a self-serve support board for our community. The development team can't provide any support for Windows XP (and compatible versions of Pale Moon for it) any longer.
BaronHK

Re: Windows XP x64 support?

Unread post by BaronHK » 2016-09-17, 03:24

Supporting XP is not reasonable anymore. Stats show that the percentage of PC users on XP is somewhere between 3-6%, and maintaining support for a 15 year old OS that hasn't been supported by the company that made it in over two years, at the expense of the 94-97% that are using something newer is having its toll on Firefox.

One of the things Pale Moon has done has been removing a lot of the bad decisions that Mozilla has been making that are causing Firefox to creak and clank, or are just outright dumb . If Mozilla wants to placate the few XP users that are left at the expense of the enormous degradation of quality it is wreaking on Firefox, that's their problem. They're an organization that has been in decline for years.

The only way XP is going to go is down. It will never be legally installed on a new computer again because MS isn't producing new product keys, and even (shall we say) less-than-legal installs are impossible on recent hardware because the drivers don't exist. Even if the drivers existed, they wouldn't come close to running the hardware optimally because hardware works differently now and emulating the assumptions that Windows XP makes would result in a markedly inferior user experience.

That's even the case with trying to run hardware from the last two years on Windows 7....

Looking into the rearview mirror isn't going to help you move forward. It's way past time to let XP die.

Like I said, if Mozilla wants to degrade their product, then it's their product to degrade. There isn't a world in which continued support of XP makes sense though. It's not just security technologies that have gotten drastically better in recent versions of Windows, it's the across-the-board improvements.

Improvements that Firefox isn't taking advantage of because some guy is still sitting in front of a computer with a Pentium 3 going "I don't see why you can't support me! Is it really so much to ask that you make your software crap for everyone so that I never have to buy a modern PC!?". Really? Okay......

Opera recently made one final release of Opera 12 to make it "work" again for XP user in light of the fact that websites are disabling support for insecure ciphers and to protect XP users from cipher downgrade attacks, but even they admitted that they have neither the time nor the resources to justify actively maintaining a product for an 15 year old OS whose installed base is only going to continue declining.

If you ask me, I don't think software developers should do anything heroic to keep programs working on Windows older than Vista with the Platform Update....

That's still pretty old, but at least with the Platform Update you're more or less dealing with Windows 7 tech.

If you're on XP, it's well past time to have a migration plan to a supported operating system. PC's have come a long way in 15 years. You can get the cheapest computer they make and it will be a heck of an upgrade for most XP users.

Microsoft let the XP debacle go on for too long, and as a result, they let people get the idea that it was going to be supported until the year 2525, and I'll bet that some people would try installing XP to a toaster if they thought they could get away with it.

Thehandyman1957

Re: Windows XP x64 support?

Unread post by Thehandyman1957 » 2016-09-17, 04:10

BaronHK wrote:I'll bet that some people would try installing XP to a toaster if they thought they could get away with it
What do you mean? My toaster runs great on XP. ;) I love extra peanut butter on my toast. :lol: :mrgreen:

JodyThornton

Re: Windows XP x64 support?

Unread post by JodyThornton » 2016-09-22, 15:02

And for those that say "Oh but Firefox still supports XP", well watch out. :o

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1303827

ESR 52 and Mainline v51 will be last call for XP.

Astara

Re: Windows XP x64 support?

Unread post by Astara » 2016-09-27, 02:46

Oh, didn't see this got unblocked -- I wanted to apologize feeding the trolls...
I never intended or thought this would open some flamewar. I just wanted to get a semi-useful browser even if it was outdated for x64-xp as it was better to use than the IE6 that came with it (upgraded to IE8 later).

Just to be clear -- I certainly wasn't asking for any current work to go toward XP, I'm a computer techo-dweeb -- I know how to screw myself up just fine -- and wouldn't recommend XP for other people.

Nor, would I, BTW, recommend Win10 at this point, though MS, will likely start screwing over Win7+8 users next month. This last tuesday was the last offering of being able to choose what patches you accept or not -- since the new MS-patches will be in one giant package, with successive patches containing the previous ones. So those that avoided various blue-screen causing patches, should likely just turn off MS-updates NOW, since next month you won't be able to cherry pick the safe ones -- you'll get the big fat whole-MS enchilada right up your update-lovin' er, um, computer! Ick! I guess the days of end-users managing their own computers is ever faster coming to an end. :-(

Locked