Google To Support Windows XP Longer Than Microsoft

An anonymous reader writes in that Google plans to support XP longer than Microsoft. "Microsoft will officially retire its Windows XP operating system early next year, but Google on Wednesday announced it will continue to support its Chrome browser for the platform through at least early 2015. The Mountain View, Calif., Web giant announced it will keep sending out updates and security patches to the Windows XP version of Google Chrome 'until at least April 2015.'"

Comments

Google WTF are you doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just let XP finally die...

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[CohibaVancouver]

Just let XP finally die...

Why? My retired parents have a Gateway PC that runs perfectly fine and runs XP perfectly fine. Doesn't crash, doesn't blue screen, they just turn it on and it works. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[Neo-Rio-101]

The trouble is that unless it's going to stay disconnected from the internet, one day it's going to get owned, and then you'll need a upgrade plan and you won't be in any position to make a transition because your PC is toast.

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[Lisias]

1. Windows would still use IE6 (it still renders webpages, so it clearly ain't broken - hell, we could go back to mosaic with this)

Are you nuts? IE6 was utterly broken since the very beginning!!!

2. We wouldn't have spoked wheels (it's not like the original design of the wheel was broken)

The original wheel design was broken for the use the guy that invented the spoked wheels had in mind. He needed a big but lightweighted wheel, and solid wheels couldn't be properly used that way - so, it was broken! =P

3. Fiber internet connections wouldn't exist (did dial-up ever actually break?)

Are you kidding? I jumped out dial up in the very instant I could afford broadband! :-)

Constant "no carrier" breakouts, slow speed, busy lines... Dial up was used just because it was what we could afford in the time.

On the other hand...

I still have an old Athlon XP box here at my side for some retro-gaming, and guess what? It's running Windows XP. WIth all the security measures I implemented here to protect my inner network, the fact is that my XP box is secure as never it was before.

I simply don't have the slightest incentive to throw it away and waste more money on a "newer" box, as the current one is fullfilling perfectly the computational niche it plays now.

Of course I use another box to day to day computing (a Mac Mini), but why bother setting up a virtual machines if I can play my games perfectly on a 3GHz Athlon XP with a Soundblaster Audigy and an ATI Radeon 4670 with 1GB?

Until this machine is dead, I don't have a single unique reason to buy another (it handles the games I play, and that's all).

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going with "I must be stupid", because I don't see anything wrong with continuing to use something that's perfectly functional and doesn't have any issues. I'm waiting until it *actually* breaks. Windows XP has been updated ever since 2001. Is it old and creaky? Yes. But it's been maintained. Does it have all the neat new OS security features? No. That probably does make it more vulnerable overall, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it in a business or shared environment where security issues are particularly important. But properly configured it's fine for plenty of uses.

Am I cheap? Hell, yes. So, no, I won't be upgrading to Windows 7. I run Win 7 on some higher-end machines that I have, but XP on my home machine has run for years without issues. I don't see any significant advantage to Windows 7 other than 64-bit support. It runs slower on the same hardware. So, why spend more than $100 for something that is marginally better in some ways and worse in others? When the security updates are demonstrably becoming an issue because of lack of updates for XP, *then* I will install a Linux distro. For now it's only a hypothetical, and by the time significant problems crop up I'm expecting that the hardware will have been retired or failed anyway.

Don't get me wrong. If there's a good reason I'll spend plenty of money on hardware and software. But I don't see the point if the gain is this minimal and things are working well as-is.

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[JohnnyMindcrime]

Rubbish!

For any PC to get owned that is tucked behind a NAT router, it's the user that has to do something stupid first.

If all you ever do is use a web browser to go to well-known sites and you know how to read and interpret a URL, then unless one of those sites has been hacked and some malware has been injected into it, nothing will happen to you. In my experience in computer and Internet security, it's going to dodgy sites for pr0n or warez that opens the doors to something nasty.

Likewise for email - don't use a client like Outlook that has deep hooks into the OS, use a lighter client and always delete emails that are from sources you don't trust.

Security has very little to do with what's built into the OS, it is far more about educating users to understand what the likely attack vectors are and to moderate their own behaviours to mitigate their risk of being exposed to those vectors.

Re:Google WTF are you doing?

[Aqualung812]

Your experience is wrong.

Cross-site scripting has allowed ads on very normal sites (MSN.com, CNN.com, etc) to infect XP computers that are fully patched.

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice one Google. I really appreciate how you are keeping support for XP when there will soon have been four new releases and 13 years since XP was released, and yet you dropped support for the latest version of RHEL.

for most retired people, up-to-date Chrome (no IE)

[raymorris]

These retired parents probably aren't playing massive online games, so approximately all of their online activity will be through the browser.

As long as the browser is a) up-to-date and b) not tightly coupled with the system shell, that's almost an up-to-date system as far as the internet is concerned. What I mean regarding coupling is that if Explorer gets exploited, the system is owned because Explorer the browser ~ Explorer the desktop ~ Explorer the file manager. If Chrome gets exploited, the worst that can happen is that web pages get messed with, not the system.

Re:for most retired people, up-to-date Chrome (no

[VortexCortex]

Hell, if that's use the case, install GNU/Linux. Did that for lots of old folks at the community center who were in the same boat. Few, if any complaints. Wine can run most old programs -- Even re-united a guy with a few of his old DOS games via DOSBox. Most folks are surprised the system can actually run faster in most cases, and that it's free... So are the updates. "Why would anyone pay for Windows if this is free?" I just shrug. Beats the hell outta me. Going from XP to XFCE or Mint/Cinnamon is far less of a shock than Windows8 or Unity. Chrome and Firefox work the same.

Throw in a spare RAM sim from my junk cache to top it up and you're good to go for as long as the hard drive holds out -- Laying down a new format track gives 'em a bit more life, and in most cases I can leave the XP partition there for dual booting into if they really need to run windows for some odd reason afterwards.

Also, sure Chrome may be updated, but it talks to the OS and its that OS interface that'll get exploited through chrome whether the browser is up to date or not. Just ditch the OS, and learn your lesson: Don't use an OS you don't have the source for or be prepared for planned obsolescence.

Re:for most retired people, up-to-date Chrome (no

[JohnnyMindcrime]

Sorry, you do not know what you are talking about.

In the *MAJORITY* of home installations, people access the Internet via a NAT router that "translates" the internal *NON-ROUTABLE* IP address of the user's PC to the *ROUTABLE* IP address of the router's Internet interface, as assigned by the user's ISP. Note that the router's IP address is not usually a static one and will change as a result of DHCP on a reasonably regular basis anyway.

A hacker will therefore only ever see the IP address of the router, not the IP address of the user's PC. Yes, the hacker *COULD* attack the router and *IF* the router has a security hole he/she could exploit then an attack is possible. However, unless the router has crappy firmware, has an administration interface with a crackable password exposed to the Internet, and/or an open incoming port that routes into the internal network, then any attack is extremely unlikely.

If you get a piece of malware on your computer then, yes, it can have the ability to open a connection to a hacker and allow him/her to do what he/she wants. But in a home environment, that malware will exist because the user has done something stupid - either gone to a dodgy web site and dowloaded it or installed it as part of some warez the user has got hold of.

Hackers are not particularly interested in wasting their time on "small fry" home users. They prefer to attack bigger targets like corporations and usually leave it to bots and scripts to find ways of owning user PCs that can then be used as owned machines in mass attacks on those bigger targets.

There are millions and millions of devices on the Internet, scripts and bots have limited intelligence and therefore if you know some of the basics about Internet security (essentially not opening unnecessary ports on your router, turning off Internet-exposed router admin interfaces, not installing dodgy software, not visiting dodgy sites, not opening dodgy emails) then you are reasonably secure no matter what OS you run.