Re: security
It's indeed likely that more security flaws for Windows 98 will be found after July 11. If it's something really critical, there might even be a 3rd-party patch. Still, even if there are no patches, I think the extent to which this will represent a practical and real threat on the internet is negligible. Microsoft, of course, needs to hype this for their own purposes, which is selling upgrades.
There is no way I will be upgrading two Pentium-III level machines in my family (and one Pentium machine) to Windows XP. Putting the financial aspect aside, it just doesn't make sense to upgrade those machines (and in some cases is not even possible) for many reasons, including speed, existing configuration, compatibility, etc. They work well for what they need to do.
To all those using internet security as a selling point for Windows XP (note that I am not arguing about the internal security of the operating system and the tools that are available, such as system restore), perhaps you should look at the number of critical patches for Windows XP vs. Window 98 over the last few years, and you should also look at the operating systems which allowed the spread of certain internet worms without any user intervention (Windows 98 was not among them).
Anyway, I feel that this security discussion is largely beside the point, so enough about it.
hussam wrote:Well I don't even run windows, but I don't think firefox 3 will run on win9x because of the msvcrt8 dependancy.
Hmm... could you explain? Is this part of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005? Does Firefox have to be compiled with this particular software?
My understanding was that the main problem has come up due to CAIRO. If someone decides to implement a Win9x compatibility library, will there be some other factors that will not enable future Firefox 3.x releases to run on Windows 98?
Thanks,
Ivan