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Message from discussion Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on Windows to WinXP SP3
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Rob Arnold  
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 More options Apr 13 2009, 11:25 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.planning
From: Rob Arnold <tell...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:25:21 -0400
Local: Mon, Apr 13 2009 11:25 pm
Subject: Re: Proposal: Raise minimum requirements for 1.9.2 on Windows to WinXP SP3
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On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Mike Beltzner <beltz...@mozilla.com>wrote:

> On 13-Apr-09, at 10:33 PM, Michael Connor wrote:

>  Proposal:

>> Raise the minimum requirements for Gecko 1.9.2 (and any versions of
>> Firefox built on 1.9.2) for Windows builds to require Windows XP Service
>> Pack 3 or higher.

> Is there a reason for specifying SP3 here, in terms of development demand
> to keep Gecko compatible? Put another way, have the Windows libraries
> changed sufficiently between SP1 and SP3 that it's likely that we'll produce
> a version of Gecko that would be compatible with Windows XP SP3+ but not
> with SP2 or SP1?

There are new features in SP2 (mostly security related) such as the
IAttachmentExecute interface which the download scanner uses. We could
eliminate the old IOfficeAntiVirus code if we drop support for Win2k and XP
SP<2. The APIs are mostly the same however. We can also drop the theme
hackery that currently exists entirely due to supporting Windows 2000 (since
it lacks the uxtheme api).

> Right now the majority of our Windows users are still on XP, but I'm not
> sure it's clear how many of those users have upgraded, or intend to upgrade
> (or in some cases are able to upgrade) and while I understand that the
> platform itself isn't supported by Microsoft, I do think that keeping those
> XP users from being able to use Firefox will end up doing more harm (to
> them) than good, no matter what the intent.

We can justify dropping 2k/XP entirely better than setting the minimum to XP
SP3 because there are many more new features in Vista that we could take
advantage of (native condition variables, graphics changes, integrity
levels, etc...).

I think we should see how Windows 7 pans out. If the result is good and
users migrate from XP, then we should consider dropping XP. Of course, there
will always be people who cling to old systems like Win2k and XP and they
will be vocal.

It should be pretty safe to drop support for Win2k but I cannot think of any
reasons besides the theme APIs.

-Rob


 
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