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Re: dev-apps-firefox Digest, Vol 74, Issue 6

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Mayur Patil

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Feb 2, 2012, 3:37:57 PM2/2/12
to dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
Its a bad idea to discontinue support for Winodws XP most of users and
institutes still more rely on the Windows XP due to ease of use and
application compatibility!!!

Zack Weinberg

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Feb 2, 2012, 3:52:37 PM2/2/12
to Mayur Patil
Don't worry. We are only discontinuing support for XP *without* Service
Pack 2. If you or your institute has applied SP2 you will be fine.

zw

Robert Kaiser

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Feb 3, 2012, 11:02:44 AM2/3/12
to
Mayur Patil schrieb:
> Its a bad idea to discontinue support for Winodws XP most of users and
> institutes still more rely on the Windows XP due to ease of use and
> application compatibility!!!

As Zack also has stated, we are NOT discontinuing support for Windows XP
now or any time soon. This OS is the most-used one among Firefox users,
and as long as so many people are using it, we will surely not let them
down. In fact, we even support e.g. some ways of hardware acceleration
there even though MSIE doesn't and says they can't.

We will require Windows XP users to install Service Pack 2 or 3 so that
they're able to use Firefox 13 or higher, though, as Microsoft's current
compilers requires that. From all our research, the vast majority of our
users have one of those service packs installed anyhow, so this affects
only a small number of users, and the service packs are free for any
legal copy of Windows XP.

Robert Kaiser

Axel Grude

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Feb 3, 2012, 12:02:54 PM2/3/12
to
On 03/02/12 16:02, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Mayur Patil schrieb:
>> Its a bad idea to discontinue support for Winodws XP most of users and
>> institutes still more rely on the Windows XP due to ease of use and
>> application compatibility!!!
>
> As Zack also has stated, we are NOT discontinuing support for Windows XP now or any
> time soon. This OS is the most-used one among Firefox users, and as long as so many
> people are using it, we will surely not let them down. In fact, we even support e.g.
> some ways of hardware acceleration there even though MSIE doesn't and says they can't.

they're obviously lying. there are plenty of performant APIs in DirectX which could be
used instead of Direct2d. I would also guess that it wouldn't even be too difficult to
backport Direct2D to XP (look at what XP can do in Direct3D!)

The main reason for MS not dropping XP support is because they want to push Windows 7
as it doesn't sell enough copies as many people are happy with XP. Same goes for them
pushing IE9 (based on the same reasoning) which supports D2D. It's a purely political act.

Again, if IE is properly managed as a software project it should be easy to branch it
with an XP compatible version. Instead, they put the budget for that into web
designers who keep saying to us "your browser is out of date" when we visit their
sites with IE8 / XP. In the end, it is just another ploy for scrapping XP and forcing
people to buy into DRM, big time.

If only we could open source XP!

>
> We will require Windows XP users to install Service Pack 2 or 3 so that they're able
> to use Firefox 13 or higher, though, as Microsoft's current compilers requires that.

that is a reasonable request. I know very few people who are opposed to SP3.
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