Since this is now split off from the main thread, I will respond to this now. Was avoiding a response because I was hoping the thread would get back on topic.
Kris_88 wrote: ↑2024-09-15, 04:27
On the one hand, Windows 10 has not provided anything significantly new for those users who need the Internet, Word, Excel (and maybe a couple more similar programs). Computers have not become 10 times faster in the last 10 years, fundamentally new equipment has not appeared. AI still cannot be launched on a modern home computer. Therefore, it is clear why people are satisfied with old computers.
Lumping "the Internet" in with Word and Excel is kind of misleading, I think. It's absolutely true that you could use an older computer for basic Office tasks or old games, and it will work just as well for them as it did when you purchased it. But the Internet changes rapidly. The modern Internet is much more demanding and the scope of web browsers has increased significantly since those old computers that run Windows XP were produced. In fact, a lot of the people still running it today are not genuinely resource-constrained, they are hacking up their BIOS and patching OS files to run it on newer computers in totally unsupported ways. It's becoming less and less viable to browse the Internet on a potato. In fact, using the Internet can consume more resources than a triple-A video game depending on what site you visit. A website can be as demanding as a whole stand-alone application, and less optimized to boot.
On the other hand, a browser that can run on XP - this would be a great feature. There is such a niche in the consumer market. This could be something to brag about. But as it is, there is nothing to brag about...
A great feature for an audience that we never wanted to attract in the first place, who would inevitably tie the future of UXP to constraints imposed by Microsoft's OS design 20 years ago, preventing us from taking advantage of anything newer. Also, I think that audience is more of a vocal minority centered in a small number of countries, rather than anything that would be a huge boon for us.
At the same time, some features disappear. For example, in Windows 11 you can't move the taskbar to the top of the screen (and I always had it at the top).
Which is why we still support Windows 7. Most of the useful functionality we need from newer Windows versions starts at a Windows 7 baseline, and we haven't arbitrarily moved that forward just because Windows 7 is EOL. The decision to drop Windows XP was far from arbitrary, and it would have tied us to older compilers, older versions of libraries, possibly even older versions of NSS and NSPR, etc.
As for Windows 2000, as far as I understand, the source code that was taken as a basis could no longer work on Windows 2000. So there are no questions here. And the fact that the developers stopped supporting the code for XP is also understandable. It was possible not to support, not to update, but also not to cut it out if the problem was with time and a small number of developers. There is, for example, Roytam, who deals with XP, so why doesn't he do it here? You are pushing people away instead of attracting them. And you are throwing away useful features that could have become key features.
The problem is that the further back you go in maintaining support for older versions of operating systems, the more complex the codebase gets. Being able to just remove support code for a very old OS does streamline the codebase in important ways and simplify reading the code.
I mean, it's true that we're pushing people away with some of our decisions. But that's true of every decision. We likely pushed away a lot of people by choosing to stick with this codebase rather than switch to a newer base that includes Stylo and require Rust. We probably pushed some away when we decided to have branding restrictions at all. Yeah, making decisions inherently pushes people away, because some people will disagree with them and want something different. That's just common sense. But common sense also dictates that if you never make any decisions because you are scared of pushing people away, you won't get anywhere. I feel like if we followed your path, either UXP would be trying to be too many things to too many people, and fail at all of those tasks. Or else it would alienate people who want a more traditional browser experience on modern operating systems, and those would be the ones that broke off instead. The point is, you can't please everyone.
Those key features you speak of were useful to a very small minority that would have drawn the project in an undesirable direction. They were not useful to us, nor to the audience we were trying to attract. Otherwise, we would have kept them.
Look, I get that you're trying to play Devil's Advocate here and get us to see something important, but this ground has all been covered before and I just don't see how your arguments are different from similar arguments that have been made in the past by Windows XP users. If you just look through the thread history on this, you'll see we've discussed this extensively.
Ultimately, it sounds to me like what you believe is that we lack vision because we don't see the value of the audience you think we should have been appealing to this whole time, and that our effort should have gone into key features that would appeal to that group, at the expense of other things we wanted to do.
Re: (split off) Pale Moon and Windows XP (reprise)
