Bye, Windows 98

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Firefox
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Thumper
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Post by Thumper »

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).


Every member of this group belongs to the group of developers using more recent systems whose own time and effort must be expended supporting said obsolete operating systems. Please don't mistake the peanut gallery (of which I am most assuredly a member on this subject) with those doing all the hard work here. This is a simple effort/gain equation.

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Post by Amsterdammer »

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).

Yes, you are right! :P
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Post by ivanbuto »

Brief responses:

1. Microsoft's "End of Life" announcements or support policies are not particularly relevant to this issue, seeing as MS is no longer in any real sense supporting Windows 98 anyway - the current support is only for "critical" security patches, not other bugs or functional improvements, and better technical support can be obtained from newsgroups and independent forums anyway.

I will not comment further on Microsoft selling security as a major reason for upgrading to XP, because this forum is certainly not the place to have those discussions. Suffice to say Microsoft has its own reasons for the things it says and the language it uses.


2. I do understand the "effort/gain equation". If switching to Cairo is the step that is most beneficial for the future of Firefox, then I guess that is the right thing to do. Robert Callahan giving guidance on how to develop a patch and make a Win9x compatibility library is also the right thing to do, and ultimately even seems like a cleaner solution. If I had any knowledge whatsoever about programming and how to write such a patch, I would start working on it soon. I certainly hope someone will pick it up.

All I am trying to say is, there is a variety of users out there with different configurations and with computers of various ages. Let's try to see how we can accommodate each other, rather than having a "this OS needed to be killed anyway" mentality. Let's try to see what is possible and how to achieve it, rather than telling someone that there is no reason they should be able to run the newest releases.

For all developers who are putting in hours of work - it is much appreciated.
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Post by ehume »

I have been using MS Windows since version 3.1. For 13 years, I have been fighting with MS's junk OS's, and I have come to realize that none of them have been very secure. This is the only real problem with running an old OS.

You can't run a new OS on an old machine. I recall going to KiwiLand in 1999 with a HP notebook that a 75MHz 486 with 32MB RAM. Win 95 ran "like a striped ape," as someone long ago put it. It was enough for the times. But there is no way that machine could have run a less insecure OS like Win XP SP2.

These days, websites are fancy. I don't know what kind of burdens css puts on a machine, but I know that just supporting the chrome on an elaborate theme or extension can really slow things down. As one of the references above shows, about a quarter of computers are using obsolete OS's. I've seen 486 machines in businesses myself.

Old machines need old OS's and non-burdensome browsers. Firefox can't be an up-to-date browser and still support old OS's and slow machines. A browser for an old machine needs to be compiled, not interpreted, for example. Old machines should not try to use Firefox, so dropping support for Win 9x is a good idea.

If computers were cars, there would be a market for software patches on old OS's just as there is a market for parts for old cars. But the patches would have to bring in income, as parts do. MS knows it won't get paid for updating its old OS's so it won't do it any more. If someone can figure out a business plan to make a profit by updating the old OS's, I'm sure someone will. Until then, folks with old machines will operate insecurely, and without the newest Firefoxen.
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Post by Thumper »

ivanbuto wrote:Let's try to see how we can accommodate each other, rather than having a "this OS needed to be killed anyway" mentality.


There wasn't one. Win98 support could have been killed the minute Win98 was EOLed. It wasn't; it was left until such point as it was obvious that there was never going to be another trunk release which supported it. I think it's a bit more honest to make the cut now than to string Win98 users along for another eight months or so. See the Mozilla Suite, which got as far as 1.7 beta because the release team were afraid of offending its consumers even though its death was clearly imminent.

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Post by Andu »

Hm well without really being keen on getting involved in an OS war I would guess that for someone that wants to use an old box (which is probably just used for office applications) it might be a good solution to install a light weight Linux distribution and an office suite like OpenOffice. That way you can still benefit from Firefox development and you have a much more advanced and secure OS than Win9x.
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Post by Jugalator »

ivanbuto wrote:1. Microsoft's "End of Life" announcements or support policies are not particularly relevant to this issue, seeing as MS is no longer in any real sense supporting Windows 98 anyway - the current support is only for "critical" security patches, not other bugs or functional improvements, and better technical support can be obtained from newsgroups and independent forums anyway.

Actually, I think their lifetime cycles can be relevant here, because it would not feel responsible of the Mozilla developers to support a Firefox on an OS that may suffer from severe and unfixed security flaws. That would just help lead more users into thinking it's still OK to use that OS. At least now you know that future Firefox versions won't run on Windows versions that may have permanent security problems, and I hope that sends a very important message to current Windows 9x users. Not just the message that Firefox won't run, but that it's really about time to upgrade either to an NT-based OS or another entirely, just as long as they don't stick with these, for their own safety.
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Post by hussam »

Well I don't even run windows, but I don't think firefox 3 will run on win9x because of the msvcrt8 dependancy.
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Post by chob »

What will existing Win98 users do if/when a critical security problem is found in Win98 and MS don't patch it because they've ended support. If this happens (which it probably will) then supporting such an OS isn't going to be in anyone's interest, surely?
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Post by colfer »

Win98 users can work at their own risk. How about using your outdated Win98-class hardware behind a linux firewall, another good use of outdated hardware? Better than a landfill. Win98 + Firefox 1.5 works great for surfing the web. And it is safer than Win98 Internet Explorer.
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Post by hussam »

chob wrote:What will existing Win98 users do if/when a critical security problem is found in Win98 and MS don't patch it because they've ended support. If this happens (which it probably will) then supporting such an OS isn't going to be in anyone's interest, surely?

I recommend win98 users upgrade to win2000. Windows 2000 was released in 1999 one year later after win98 and has the same system hardware requirements. Windows 2000 will run happily on a Pentium mmx. ( Otherwise, take this opportunity to switch to linux. Not only will you be able to run firefox 3.0 when it is out but your IQ will increase by at least 20 points :) ).

But seriously, since official firefox 3.0 win32 builds will be compiled with VC++8, there is not way I know of to run it on win98.
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Post by auenf »

hussam wrote:
chob wrote:What will existing Win98 users do if/when a critical security problem is found in Win98 and MS don't patch it because they've ended support. If this happens (which it probably will) then supporting such an OS isn't going to be in anyone's interest, surely?

I recommend win98 users upgrade to win2000. Windows 2000 was released in 1999 one year later after win98 and has the same system hardware requirements. Windows 2000 will run happily on a Pentium mmx. ( Otherwise, take this opportunity to switch to linux. Not only will you be able to run firefox 3.0 when it is out but your IQ will increase by at least 20 points :) ).

But seriously, since official firefox 3.0 win32 builds will be compiled with VC++8, there is not way I know of to run it on win98.

XP with all the fancy theming disabled (ie, make it look like 2k) should run a bit better on machines with low memory.

xp is a lot happier running in 128mb ram than 2k is with the same.

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Post by ivanbuto »

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
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Post by auenf »

win9x is supported by vcpp 2005, cairo uses the alpha blending stuff (and a couple of other things) than requires win2k+ (yes, it doesnt run in NT4, altho when i tried it, it was a vcpp 2005 issue, not cairo ;))

Code: Select all

The procedure entry point GetLongPathNameW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll


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Re: <b>I'm the idiot who opened the counter bug</b&

Post by douray »

supernova_00 wrote:...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.
Using that logic, Fx/Thunderbird would only come in a Windows flavor ;) (Came to this thread belatedly; am a Win98SE user at the moment but will be upgrading once I decide on which direction to take. And agree about the archaic nature of Win98...come on, guys, time to upgrade. OS's don't live forever.)
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