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Firefox to Drop Pre-Windows 2000 Support
cyclomedia writes "While more and more platforms are getting (or aiming for) Firefox ports, the trunk itself seems to be going the other way. In an effort to clean up the API calls used and reduce the codesize a patch was posted at Bugzilla removing support from pre-W2k versions of Windows. There's a fiery discussion going on over at the Mozillazine forums about this after a counter bug was filed. The official position appears to be that Firefox 3.0 will maintain this un-compatibility, but developers are, obviously, free to work on a separate Win 98 compatible 'port.'"
So you mean to say that 50% of the users are still on 98 and earlier... the only relevant statistics I could find was 16% in 2004. Those machines have been dropping like flies since then in my experience.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
You realise that most network worms *only* affect Win2000 and WinXP, right? Win98SE is probably the most stable and least problematic version of Windows ever. Seriously.
Score: 4 Insightful? Holy crap, at best it should be Score: 4 Hilariously Funny.
Ignoring the laughably ridiculous stability comment, from a worm perspective the only factor that "saves" non-NT based Windows versions is a complete and utter lack of functionality. Worms generally target functional systems, and 98SE users seldom ran SQL Servers or Exchange boxes or network services, so they were "immune", but not because of any pinnacle of design. Of course users who ran IRC clients or messaging clients or simple file sharing or virtually any other listening service quickly found themselves owned.
Windows 98SE was the final polishing of a stinky piece of shit (I'm excluding Windows Me!, as it was adding peanuts to the shit). Revising history to paint it as a good point in the Windows legacy is outrageously ridiculous, and I'm agog that there were idiots that moderated it up.
i have both a w2k box and a win98se box and the win98se box has a far longer uptime than the 2000 box. saying win98se is a piece of shit is stupid.
WINDOWS 98 SE IS A PIECE OF SHIT. The entire design of the operating system was a holdover of a terrible compromise from the era when computers had 16/32 processors and 1MB of RAM. There is absolutely no other way to describe it. I find it extraordinary that anyone would defend.
the win98 boxes dont have their filesystems crap out after a year of usage unlike win2k and are far better in practice to admin.
Admin? There is no admin on a Windows 98 box, as it has virtually zero protections or services that can be administrated.
As far as the filesystem, that's just dumb. Apart from my extensive anecdotal evidence, there are corporations running strong today on Windows 2000/NTFS, installed when it first came out. NTFS is technically and practically an enormously superior file system over the piece of shit FAT, though of course it won't defend you from garbage hardware.
It's all the bitchy responses to something like this that makes me believe people who champion OSS's "free"ness is much more about users wanting something for "free" as in "don't have to pay" rather than "able to do what I want with it". Want support? Download the source and support it you cheap ass pansies.
Or maybe upgrade to an operating system from this century.
Win98 is pretty much free of Microsoft control bullshit these days. They didn't have their arm-in-arm with Big Brother shtick quite down to a fine dance back when Win98 was in production. Unlike today. . . When was the last time that Win98 secretly dialed up Microsoft from your home? Never. I know where all the bugs are and how to make the system fly.
There's a neat parable about fighter jets which is applicable here. . .
The Canadian and the American air forces have friendly contests each year to see who can out-fly who. The Canadians consistently win. Why? Because the Canadian Air Force has old jets which haven't been updated in a long while. They are not state of the art, which means that the pilots must work with the same gear year after year, getting to know their machines really, really well.
The American pilots, by contrast, are presented with new, high-tech aircraft with too many new gadgets which are updated regularly. This means the U.S. pilot, no matter how brilliant, doesn't have time to groove into a deep, instinctive knowledge of the machine being flown, and as a result, cannot perform to the maximum level of efficiency.
Anyway. . .
How does one save an extension on one's system for later installation? I knew this whole "live install" thing would eventually cause problems.
-FL