XP compatibility in the future

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greyowl2
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Joined: December 30th, 2009, 8:04 pm
Location: Canada

XP compatibility in the future

Post by greyowl2 »

I have just started using SM on my older laptop that runs XP sp3. I expect to be using XP for the future. I really like SM.

I am wondering if it is the intention of SM to continue to be compatible with XP in the years to come.

Thanks
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James
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Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by James »

Well... if Mozilla does indeed drop support of WinXP and Vista as of Firefox 53.0 then SeaMonkey will likely be affected also. SeaMonkey 2.49 has same gecko as 52.

It is getting harder for Mozilla to deal with issues and doing testing on WinXP now days along with the costs.

This is not a recent decision as for example Mac OSX 10.6, 10.7, 10.8 support has already been dropped as of Firefox 49.0 Release and Linux had the big change from GTK 2.18 to GTK 3.4 and higher requirement starting 46.0.

For reading as the general issues tracker Bugzilla is not a discussion forum. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Bug 1130266 - (xp-eol) Drop support for Windows XP/Vista

However Firefox users at least will have the Firefox 52.0 ESR option in still getting supported with security updates and Firefox 45.8.0esr will be out when Firefox 53.0 is Released.
greyowl2
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Joined: December 30th, 2009, 8:04 pm
Location: Canada

Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by greyowl2 »

Thank you for the information.
Anonymosity
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Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by Anonymosity »

Does Apple really change their operating systems more drastically than Microsoft does? Mozilla has been a lot more restrictive for older Mac OS versions than for older Windows versions.
LordOfTheBored
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Joined: December 7th, 2005, 8:36 pm

Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by LordOfTheBored »

Anonymosity wrote:Does Apple really change their operating systems more drastically than Microsoft does? Mozilla has been a lot more restrictive for older Mac OS versions than for older Windows versions.
My impression is Apple sells at retail what on Windows would be a free service pack. So if software says it requires XP Service Pack 2... on the Apple model that is three OS releases, not an OS release and two free service packs.

Apple does also break compatibility much more frequently than Microsoft.
The burden of success: there is a big pile of Windows code that will upset a lot of people if it suddenly stops working.
barbaz
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Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by barbaz »

Anonymosity wrote:Does Apple really change their operating systems more drastically than Microsoft does?
On the inside, yes.
Anonymosity wrote:Mozilla has been a lot more restrictive for older Mac OS versions than for older Windows versions.
Yeah, but it's not just Mozilla being like that - https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic ... 39#p317139
rsx11m
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Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by rsx11m »

James wrote:Linux had the big change from GTK 2.18 to GTK 3.4 and higher requirement starting 46.0.
At least SeaMonkey 2.46 will still be built with GTK2 rather than GTK3 due to theme issue with the latter.

It is under consideration (for this and other motives) but not decided yet if SeaMonkey will continue on the regular release train after 2.49 or switch to the 52 ESR branch then, thus following Thunderbird's release model, in which case support for XP and Vista should be retained for a while.
greyowl2
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Joined: December 30th, 2009, 8:04 pm
Location: Canada

Re: XP compatibility in the future

Post by greyowl2 »

Thank you for the clarification.
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