Win 98 is dying, Win XP is mortally ill, Vista in't born yet.
what's the problem with finishing win 98 support, nobody works on it (?)
Cusser wrote: Firefox 3.0 is a year or more away. That means a year or more of official builds that work in Windows 98 and a year or more for people to organise a hacking community that produces working and up-to-date Windows 98 builds. The SeaMonkey project is managing pretty well. I suspect if enough people are interested and ask MoCo nicely, it might even be possible to borrow resources, but then again, finding a third-party builder shouldn't be amazingly ifficult
Well, there's a lot of good points being made. But when is enough, enough? In regard to OS'es becoming hugely HUGE both in install size and carrying extra bulk and cruft that is not even necessary. I don't want to even see what kind of monster Vista will look like counting both future security lapses and chugging resources. The problem with the future is that... it's going nowhere. The more "bigger and better" it supposedly is, is also being touted falsely and leaned towards more to getting somebody to buy it... just because you made it. A marketing gimmick. There is just too much of a problem w/ Microsoft leading the OS'es in this regard.
This wasn't meant to be a "OS'es are futile" rant, even though MS is. But that somebody and I mean somebody desperately needs to ramp up the OS genre with something unbelievable. Not just some visually flashy crap. People aren't just buying into OS X's of Mac like they should [especially now that Macs have to been hacked to run Windows successfully] and Linux is becoming an ever dwindling OS regardless of what statistics are telling you. No bumbling end user is going to install Linux or OS X on their computer b/c they're simply afraid of change, unaware/uneducated and bought their prebundled shit off Dell, Gateway or some other distributor. And that my friends is a fucking insult! Never have I seen the choice to have my Dell come PRE-LOADED with a OS other than that of Windows. Talk about favortism and selling to the highest bidder - It's disgusting. Until that changes, prepare for crappier, more frequent MS OS'es that bust after two years or less before they ship off on a new version. And less quality work on the quality OS'es that can actually keep up w/ the future as everyone shifts their "changing with the times" ass to Vista. "Out of mind, out of sight."
Anyway, on the Fx end, the newer features of course can not be translated to 98SE simply b/c the systems are so different than the current Windows platforms, that nobody can protest. Maybe if we weren't building on Cairo, 98SE would still be able to run the current spec of Trunk right now minus some features that 98 can't naturally handle? I thought we were still pushing Trunk builds w/o Cairo unless that came to an end, effective immediately?
Basically, as long as you have a decent working build of Firefox on 98, I would just keep using that. Even though it's missing some 'annoying' fixes that the lucky ass Cairo is going to get, maybe somebody can tweak the patches or just build them into the 98 version w/ a third party build and see if they don't bust. Actually I think I know just the guy to do this....
Of course, you are going to miss out on future Themes and Extensions made for the higher versions. That is the price to pay for using archaic software. I'm on Win ME btw, so I'm not some XP convert.
Current: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b2pre) Gecko/2007112000 Minefield/3.0b2pre
For kicks: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
I thought we were still pushing Trunk builds w/o Cairo unless that came to an end, effective immediately?
It did. The changes which finally broke the tree were unrelated to Cairo but didn't come with configure options to disable them. Hence, simply disabling Cairo wouldn't give you a working Win98 build anyway.
As for the rest of your post, please mind the language for the sake of not getting the thread shut prematurely. And if you think Linux is dwindling in popularity you haven't been paying a lot of attention to it recently.
supernova_00 wrote:EDIT: and look at these stats from w3c
2006 WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT W2003 Linux Mac March 72.9% 11.9% 2.0% 0.3% 1.8% 3.4% 3.5% February 73.3% 12.3% 2.1% 0.3% 1.8% 3.4% 3.6%
2005 WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT W2003 Linux Mac April 64.0% 19.7% 4.1% 0.8% 1.4% 3.3% 2.9% March 63.1% 20.2% 4.7% 0.9% 1.4% 3.2% 3.0%
2004 WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT Win95 Linux Mac April 49.7% 30.2% 8.7% 2.2% 0.3% 2.7% 2.5% March 48.0% 31.1% 9.4% 2.4% 0.4% 2.6% 2.4%
Win 98 has dropped 7 percent in last two years down to 2.0 percent last month. In theory that would mean 0 percent by 2008 or later when fx 3 is released. I'll give it 1% just for talk...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.
Looking at those stats it looks like if we should drop support for Linux ...
"So firefox should cater to 3% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business."
I thought that is what different about this one
Can't help feeling like I did when Mozilla dropped "The Suite" because it wasn't cool enough.
You are "open-source" when it's convinient, and "a business" when it suits you ... Attitudes like these will only push more people to things like Opera ...
In response to the comment from Robert O'Callahan:
Since trunk has switch to cairo, and trunk builds no longer work on Win9x, we've also taken the chance to remove a number of WIn9x compatibility hacks that were complicating our code. Those hacks could be put back in in a cleaner way that does not complicate our code, but again, this depends on someone who cares volunteering to do the work.
I am only a Firefox user and have caught this discussion; my technical understanding of these issues is limited. If "a number of Win9x compatibility hacks" have now been removed from the trunk code, have those hacks been precisely documented, so that it will be possible for someone to still work on supporting Win 98 for FF 3 and beyond? So that Win 98 support indeed isn't "killed"?
ivanbuto wrote:I am only a Firefox user and have caught this discussion; my technical understanding of these issues is limited. If "a number of Win9x compatibility hacks" have now been removed from the trunk code, have those hacks been precisely documented, so that it will be possible for someone to still work on supporting Win 98 for FF 3 and beyond? So that Win 98 support indeed isn't "killed"?
All code changes are logged indefinitely, so anyone with the correct date period could find out what the changes were and re-do them.
Although Windows 98 may be found on numerous aged consumer machines, it's little-used in corporations. In a 2005 survey, for instance, Canadian asset-tracking firm AssetMetrix said that Windows 98 was running only about 5 percent of enterprise PCs.
About that numerous amount of aged consumer machines, some estimates say that amounts to 16% of pcs.
It doesn't really make any difference anyway, as I said when I begrudgingly quoted better statistics than W3Schools (people using a range of real web applications as opposed to whoever visits W3Schools). Market share isn't playing a part in this decision, time and money are.
Cusser wrote:It doesn't really make any difference anyway, as I said when I begrudgingly quoted better statistics than W3Schools (people using a range of real web applications as opposed to whoever visits W3Schools). Market share isn't playing a part in this decision, time and money are.
It's not really the market share, or the time and money thing. It's that what once was the open source rebel against the big bad Microsoft would have done it differently. Essentially those are the people who went to Seamonkey and those who took over the Mozilla Suite's name, even though they didn't want to use it (shades of AOL/Netscape), have made a time and money decision.
This is revisionism. The source was released before AOL bought Netscape. The browser was funded by AOL for years, and one of the first things that happened after MoFo was created was that Firefox was pushed as a browser for a specific subset of users. Compatibility as this point was "if it doesn't build send us patches", which is exactly how it should be and is again.
I can't understand why people think they have the right that trunk builds run perfectly fine on their machines... using trunk should be a way to help improving the software, not just complaining...
...anyway I can only hope that more and more software products abandon Win9x so that it will finally rest in peace.
Bazzi wrote:...anyway I can only hope that more and more software products abandon Win9x so that it will finally rest in peace.
This is exactly the type of attitude that I have a problem with. There are time and money factors, or development factors that cause the trunk to abandon Win9x? OK, that's understandable, and can be discussed.
Yet it seems there is a whole group of people who feel that they are on a "mission" to kill off support for a particular OS (in this case Win9x, mainly Windows 98). Such an attitude is, especially in an open source environment, something that I find very questionable.
The basic problem is that CAIRO does not run on OS prior to W2K. You have to port several interfaces which are only available for W2K ff back to W95. This requires addidtional work and there is currently none who can and will do that. If there are some volounteers this may change.
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ivanbuto wrote:Yet it seems there is a whole group of people who feel that they are on a "mission" to kill off support for a particular OS (in this case Win9x, mainly Windows 98). Such an attitude is, especially in an open source environment, something that I find very questionable.
What I hate is people who stick to old technology long enough in order to overcomplicate or block development of new one. There is absolutely no reason anymore to run the newest software releases on a Windows 98-based PC.
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