Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

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GAPOaltPOCA

Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by GAPOaltPOCA » 2021-07-10, 03:30

If Windows 7 becomes completely unsupported and deprecated like Windows XP will Pale Moon abandon it? Currently Chrome still supports Windows 7. But if in the future Chrome drops Windows 7 then will Pale Moon follow Chrome, too?

I wanted to know your answer because I will stick with Windows 7 even when it's no longer supported before completely move to Linux. I don't like later versions of Windows. If you are going to treat Windows 7 the same way as Windows XP then I have to go to roytam1 and Feodor2, I think if they could make Pale Moon for Windows XP alive they could do the same with a deprecated Windows 7.

p/s: Why Pale Moon matter? Because Chrome depends on the host OS for certificates unlike Mozilla family of browser which handle security certificates themselves. If Chrome drops Windows 7 then quickly after that Firefox will drop Windows 7, too. The only thing left that works is Pale Moon and other UXP based browsers. The situation will be very similar to what on Windows XP now.

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Re: Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by Pentium4User » 2021-07-10, 04:44

Off-topic:
Windows 7 receives Updates via ESU until Jan 2023. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubl ... pdates-faq
I think Chrome also will be supported to this date. I don't think they wanna loose all the companies users.
I do not recommend running systems without security updates, why don't switch to Linux now?

I think (I definitely do not know) that the PM developer team will continue support for Win 7, although many computers are still running it and also many PM users are still using it.
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New Tobin Paradigm

Re: Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by New Tobin Paradigm » 2021-07-10, 04:57

Our plans in this regard have been discussed already. Unlike NT 5.x (and Vista) there is no technological benefit to dropping Windows 7 or 8.1 support in the codebase given the state of Windows development from 2012 onward. We aren't seeing the same core generational gap and the only digital divide is ahead of us in terms of the win32 api its self being under Microsoft attack code wise and threats from arm systems getting pushed as a priority.

The technical debt and burdon of support just isn't significant to justify what would right now be an arbitrary decision. Indeed, by the time or in the event it would be.. It is my firm belief that the Windows-in-name-only agenda would have to almost certainly be considered an a totally new target operating system in UXP that wouldn't have much of an effect on traditional Windows on Intel-based hardware.

tl;dr Stop looking for a way to play this gotcha game and promoting enemy morons whom are totally incompetent and have a history of stealing intellectual property, false attribution, and threatening the security and stability of core infrastructure.

I will personally push back against dropping any more Windows versions if only to keep them from chipping away at us on that front and enticing people like you from trying to justify their corruption. Just always helps when the technical situation also happens to be consistent with plans and ambitions such as this.

GAPOaltPOCA

Re: Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by GAPOaltPOCA » 2021-07-10, 17:28

I don't know if Windows 7 will be supported until Jan 2023. At this time I should have already migrated to Linux but I'm still glad that the Pale Moon team will not drop Windows 7 even when it's deprecated and no longer supported :)

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Re: Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by Moonchild » 2021-07-10, 18:45

TL;DR we will support NT 6.1 (Windows 7)/6.3 (Windows 8.1) until we physically can't, and we support Windows 10-latest and the direct previous build, and likely Windows 11, for as long as the win32 API is intact on ia32/amd64 architectures.

As a reminder, even on Pale Moon 27 our support for versions of Windows before 6.1 was limited. When developing UXP we initially had some NT 6.0 support but focused on providing support for NT 6.1 and later out of the gate, and NT 6.0 (=Vista) support was dropped early for missing essential kernel features and Win APIs as well as having a (very!) low usership that really didn't warrant making special considerations for in the platform or providing support for Vista's quirky pre-release class nature. That was our target and that is what we have aimed for. UXP is therefore Windows 7 or later.
As Tobin indicated there have been no significant changes to the way win32 programs (note: win32 has nothing to do with 32-bit binaries) interact with the OS or the kernel that would require us to consider dropping this target and looking at the developments as they are, it is unlikely that will happen aside from Microsoft moving to completely different and unsupported architectures or deprecating win32 binaries flat-out.
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shevy

Re: Pale Moon on Windows 7 in the future

Unread post by shevy » 2021-07-24, 15:17

I use Linux primarily but I have Win10 on my laptop (and WSL1 too).

Relatives tend to have Win10. I am not certain how many people are using Win7 still; probably a small share? Something around 20% or so?

Support for different OS is useful but it also draws away time. I notice this in ruby when I have to test against older ruby versions - at some
point it becomes too much effort to want to test for various versions, so I tend to support only the latest stable and +1 stable version after
that, so . e. g ruby 3.0.x and ruby 2.7.x or something.

IMO it is perfectly fine to drop support for older versions eventually. When this happens it may be best to announce it and make the
last release available for a longer time, so people can pick up on it or work with it if they want to, but other than that software tends
to change and "move along" eventually. Can't change that.

GAPOaltPOCA wrote:

> I don't know if Windows 7 will be supported until Jan 2023. At this time I should have already migrated to Linux

I did so in 2003! Been using Linux ever since but I also use Win10 on my laptop so dual-use it fine. Linux is much more convenient
and "efficient" to use IMO (I use Linux in a mostly commandline-centric way and lots of scripts; I do appreciate GUIs such as KDE
or even GNOME, but these are not really my "main" way how I operate on Linux. For instance I use icewm since some years, and
have been using fluxbox before that. It's mostly because I can be quite efficient that way. I didn't manage to go down to WMs
such as ratpoison or so ... I know some other people are even more efficient but I want a "proper" GUI, even if it is simple).

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