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Google Will Retire Chrome Support For XP, Vista, OS X 10.6-8 In April 2016 (blogspot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced it is extending Chrome support for Windows XP until April 2016. The company will also end Chrome support for Windows Vista, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion at the same time. This means Google will provide regular Chrome updates and security patches for users on these operating systems for five more months. After that, the browser will still work, but it will be stuck on the last version released in April.
Now how about ending Chrome itself?
This will leave Windows Vista users without security fixes for Google Chrome, while security fixes for Internet Explorer 9 on Windows Vista continue until April 11, 2017, according to Microsoft's life cycle fact sheet.
Yes, I'm also miffed that they don't support Windows 95 and my Mac SE. Bastards.
What is Windows XP and Vista usage compare to Windows 95 and Mac SE?
Google's learning that supporting multiple OS versions costs money. I wonder what the Android team thinks.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Vista has less than 2% market share and XP is below 12% now.
Open source alternatives can be maintained as long as someone is interested in providing updates. It's far superior for updates to legacy software than the closed source alternatives. Open source browsers will continue to provide updates for these systems for the foreseeable future.
The real reason however is that certain bleeding edge HTML5 technology (webmidi, webgl2) doesn't have the necessary privilege separation on older operating systems, and the older operating systems will never have bugs fixed to resolve that.
I'm sure Chromium will keep working for a while. It's not necessary for Chromium/Node-Webkit (for all intents are the same thing) to be updated unless it's actually using the internet. Most software using Chromium as it's "cross platform" engine aren't actually using it for very much except the canvas/webgl/webaudio via Javascript. Everything else the "Browser" offers is practically useless. Unfortunately stock versions of Chromium and node-webkit package a lot of stuff that needs to be ejected if it's to be used by games:
1) Drop PDF, JPEG, GIF, WEBP, leaving only PNG.
2) Drop WebM/MP4 containers, and all video codecs except for hardware supported h.265/h.264 + AAC/FLAC. Allow playback of RGB/YUV444 h.265/h.264 "lossless" video so that there is no more of this "animation gradient banding" on video that should be highly compressible but isn't because the compression process can't figure out that a gradient can't lose half it's color data and still work.
3) Drop Extensions, Pepper, Flash and Java API's
4) Drop the development console.
Ideally developers would compile Chromium with what they need for their project and not rely on the 250MB insane "package" sizes that Chrome/Chromium/Node-webkit come with. Unfortunately this is often difficult. Sure 70MB doesn't look like much for the most stripped down runtime, but when your ANDROID app requires a 70MB runtime to run 300KB of code, there is something hugely fricken wrong.
I feel a great disturbance in the force as if millions of voices suddenly shrugged and switched to Mozilla.
Why would people using Windows XP, an OS that was retired 18 months ago, care that their web browser won't be getting updates in 2016, 2 years post OS retirement?
If Windows XP being retired didn't get them to change, this won't either.
1) Drop PDF, JPEG, GIF, WEBP, leaving only PNG.
Which would bloat download sizes by a factor of ten compared to lossily compressed textures where appropriate. Or are you recommending that developers implement texture decompression through a polyfill in JavaScript?
Drop WebM/MP4 containers, and all video codecs except for hardware supported h.265/h.264 + AAC/FLAC.
Which would require each web developer to purchase a license from MPEG-LA in order to encode background music and cut scenes. Or are you recommending that developers implement royalty-free video codec decompression through a polyfill in JavaScript?
Drop the development console.
Then how would a programmer at a game studio go about debugging her work?
...firefox being resource hungry is why I switched to chrome.
Every now and then I fire up firefox and find it's still more resource hungry than chrome.
Seamonkey doesn't look anything like Chrome, you insensitive clod!
They're already on Vista. They're use to misery by now.
Misery was RTM. Mojave was Service Pack 1 and it fixed a lot of problems. Windows Vista is on Service Pack 2 now.
seeing as os x > 6 will make my macbook slow and buggy.
So you can simply switch to chromium now and not worry about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you want a chrome rendering engine for an android app, why not use WebView? It's included in Android so you don't need to distribute it.
Does anyone even use Chrome anymore? It doesn't support Java, It can't use the standard Flash plugin and if there's a vulnerability in Flash, guess what, you're screwed until Google can incorporate it into Chrome. Then as soon as Google stops supporting an OS, guess what????, no more plugin updates for you!!! Even if Adobe still updates flash. And let's not even get started on how much of a resource hog GC is, nor how un-clean it's un-install process is, gah!
I use SeaMonkey and have not had very many issues. Supports plugins with no issues.
Who needs Chrome when yuo got Lynx?
Oh right, I'm not using Chrome now, so this won't make a difference.
MacOS X 10.6 is from 2009, updated until 2011 and unsupported from feb 2014. OSX 10.7 took over in 2011 and that one too became unsupported in 2014. 10.7 was a major update from an API point of view and programmers could use lots of neat new features. As a result, new software and even updated versions of existing software stopped supporting 10.6 already in late 2011. I'm surprised that Chrome didn't drop support until 4 years after most other software and 2 years after Apple.
Dropping support for 10.7 and 10.8 is not really an issue as 10.7 and newer can be updated to the newest OSX for free. Also AFAIK if the hardware can run 10.7, it can run the newest version too. This is not the case with 10.6 as starting with 10.7, a 64 bit intel CPU is needed. 10.6 has to deal with both x86 and PowerPC using both 32 and 64 bit, making software releases back then more complex than they are today. 64 bit was mostly ignored, which mean the switch to 64 bit PowerPC was never really supported in software, mainly because all the iBooks and PowerBooks (what they called MacBooks back then) never used 64 bit PowerPC due to heat issues. That's the main reason Apple dropped PowerPC.
and pirates, and people with good reasons to still be using it (I have multiple XP VMs for various things, I even have legal images and it works perfectly well for what I need thanks).
I bet XP still has an enormous user base.
Since XP was the last win32 based OS - Vista and successors being win64 based - that's a good reason for Google to drop 32-bit Chrome and do only 64-bit Chrome. Also gets around the WoW64 security bugs. I just uninstalled 32-bit Chrome and installed 64-bit Chrome instead.
What is a light weight HTMl5 compliant browser? That runs well on low end systems?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Which would bloat download sizes by a factor of ten compared to lossily compressed textures where appropriate.
Download sizes don't come into it here. He's talking about the specific use case where Chromium is being used as a local application platform and isn't accessing the Web as a general purpose web browser.
I still use Mac OS X 10.8, because that is the latest version that I am willing to run. With their recent releases, Apple has moved OS X toward looking and feeling more like iOS, which is a direction I do not like at all. I realize that I will eventually need to give up on the Mac platform altogether, but I will try to eke out another 2-3 years at least.
I guess I'll have to switch back to Firefox next year. Sorry, Google.
How is Vista server doing?
I don't see how that makes download size irrelevant. It still affects performance even if running locally.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
Midori (http://midori-browser.org/) is pretty good for a fairly thin wrapper around WebKit. It's lacking a bunch of features, of course, but it has a tiny install and RAM footprint relative to mainstream browsers.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
For a "fundamentally broken" browser, it's very good at rendering web pages, has nicely configurable settings, is quite stable, and very fast. Do you have an actual objection to any aspect of it, or are you just talking out your ass? You don't even present a subjective, much less objective, fault in the browser. I could mention a few, but eh, none count as anything like "fundamentally broken".
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Redownloading a packaged Chrome app still costs money, especially now that more ISPs are going pay-per-bit.
It's not a clone and what is so shitty about Firefox?
How is Vista server doing?
The argument above seemed to be that 1.5% market share was so little that these few users should just give up the platform and move along. When we are talking about more than all of the desktop Linux distro users combined.
Slashdot often say the same about Windows Phone, and joke about "that one user" or similar. Ridiculing how few/no one uses this OS, for a platform that has 50% higher market share than desktop Linux. It was just a comment on the perspective.
Don't hate me but, I kind of liked Vista. I also liked ME. :/ I had a box that was designed for ME and ran ME nicely - it was pretty damned stable. Hell, it ran an OpenNap server hub (don't ask) and regularly had a few months of uptime - or more. So long as the hardware was quality, it was alright. Vista? Yeah, it was pretty crappy at first but SP1 rolled down the pipes and it was great.
This is coming from a guy who uses Linux. Hell, I exclusively use Linux now, on my computers. (I've got a Windows phone being shipped to me from back home. I do own an iPod somewhere and I have VM images for a bunch of OSes.) Oh, I might still technically own a MBP but I'm thinking my daughter absconded with it when she last visited. I'm pretty sure I got a kiss on the cheek and a, "Thanks Daddy!" I can't swear to it. It seems likely, history and all that.
Incidentally, the ME box was my first run in with AMD. I'd simply never tried them before. It was also a "cheap" computer from a company that I'd never used before. It was Acer with an AMD K6-II 350 MHz that I OCed to run at just below 500 MHz. It was awesome, thanks.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You should move to a modern country and get a decent ISP! ;)
There is not a different download or code base for Vista vs Windows 7, so I am not sure I understand what Google means by this announcement. The odds that the chrome.exe will magically stop working on Windows Vista before the end of 2016 seems unlikely to me.
I'm running 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) (posting from it, in fact), so this decision affects me.
I realize software companies have to pull the plug sometime, but this decision is a hassle for me. Already Apple has stopped updating Safari. I moved to Firefox which was so buggy and crash-prone I got frustrated. Moved to Chrome, which has worked well. This puts me one step closer to no browser.
My gripe is that my hardware is working perfectly well. I have no REAL reason to buy a new computer except for the fact that software companies force me to. This machine (a Mac mini) is working absolutely perfectly.
I face the same issue with Itunes, which I can't update because the new version requires a version of OSX I'm not running. Furthermore, not only has the latest version of OSX gotten pretty 'meh' reviews, it's pretty clear installing it on older hardware takes a working machine and turns it into a deadweight - the latest OSX works terribly on a Mac Mini purchased in 2010. (The charts show it is possible, but the user reviews all say "this was a mistake").
Not sure what I'll do with this machine - make it into a media box or something, or flash it and install FreeBSD or something. But I'm annoyed - this hardware works just fine; I have no reason to go out and splash down another thousand bucks just because software companies decide to give up on it.
Finally, connect the dots, people: each year software companies give up on old hardware a bit faster. In another decade they won't bother supporting anything other than machines sold that year, and we'll have moved computing hardware into something disposable, which is ecologically ridiculous. Already they've got you throwing out your old iphone every two years so you can have the latest and greatest - imagine how rich you'd make the magnates if you threw out your desktop every two years, too.
This sucks.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
*** SMACK*** is the sound of dave420 going down eating his words getting bitchslapped by apk http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
server2008 is actually ok.
You should move to a modern country
Emigrating from the United States "to a modern country" costs more time and money than a lot of people have. I've read that it often includes a master's degree and classes to reach the level of proficiency in the national language that "a modern country" tends to require before it becomes willing to grant a work visa to an immigrant.
I don't pirate movies.
Covering up alleged copyright infringement is by far not the only example of a reason why one would desire privacy. For one thing, the law has become so complex that people commit far more crimes than they're aware of. (See Three Felonies a Day by Harvey A. Silverglate, ISBN 1594035229.) And if you handle confidential information in the ordinary course of work, such as trade-secret computer program source code or patients' health information, would you be comfortable with live-streaming every keypress you make to Microsoft and its "marketing partners"?
I don't have metered internet access
Good for you. It might not be so good for others reading this, who might have to not only buy a copy of Windows 10 to replace a copy of Windows Vista but also find a new job in a place offering unmetered Internet access and relocate their families to such "an area with 3 high speed Internet choices, including two fiber to the home options."
Then you moved the goal posts.
I apologize for not having addressed all conceivable ramifications of telemetry in Windows 10 in a single post. If I later thought of additional questions to ask, should I have instead asked them as an additional reply to #50913183 rather than as a reply to #50913599?
And if you handle confidential information in the ordinary course of work, such as trade-secret computer program source code or patients' health information, would you be comfortable with live-streaming every keypress you make to Microsoft and its "marketing partners"?
But since I don't do any of that, I don't care, and 99% of the people don't have to.
I disagree with your claim that only 1 percent of Windows users use Windows for anything subject to a confidentiality agreement.
Do you have any numbers for how much data Windows 10 uses, compared to Windows 7?
No. I can offer a qualitative guess once it is clarified whether the 3 GB per machine automatic download of the Windows 10 upgrade installer is charged against the Windows 7 total or against the Windows 10 total.
I would support a ruling that high speed Internet of at least 25 megabit be a "right"
Until such a ruling comes to be, we have to work around what is, not what ought to be.
No. I can offer a qualitative guess once it is clarified whether the 3 GB per machine automatic download of the Windows 10 upgrade installer is charged against the Windows 7 total or against the Windows 10 total.
If you're on a metered connection, then you should have it set to being on a metered connection...
And that download is charged to Windows 7, not 10, IMHO... since it doesn't download on 10...
Opera.
If you're on a metered connection, then you should have it set to being on a metered connection...
I'm curious as to what Windows 10 will do if all connections available to a given PC are marked as metered. Will it fall behind on security updates?