I'm surprised that Windows Vista is included in this, since Microsoft will be supporting it through April of 2017, a year after this Chrome announcement takes effect.
Just want to add, that Wikipedia article uses statcounter as the source. If you look at statcounter China is throwing off the data, it is running XP at 30%(!) Vs. USA @ 4.3%, UK @ 3.18%, France @ 4.8%, Australia+NZ @ 2.67-2.85%, Japan @ 3%, et al.
My point is, that 10% figure is misleading. China is higher, everyone else is lower.
Yeah. They say Microsoft won't provide "active support," so maybe that's why Vista is not included?
It's probably mainly because Vista has a relatively low market share: probably lower than XP. It's thus not worth supporting as the earliest version of Windows they support.
Edit: Just checked. Windows XP lost non-extended support in 2009, whereas Vista lost it in 2012.
Security fixes is the key part of support, to be fair. As long as a platform is getting security fixes, it's supported. But I imagine the user share on Vista is very low, it had nowhere near the level of adoption of XP or 7.
I think people misperceive "security fixes" as a binary thing when it's really a sliding scale. The choice to backport is often not a clearcut decision, and you need to balance the risk of the underlying issue against the potential conflicts with a legacy platform and its dependencies. Otherwise, your security update might cause quite a bit of collateral damage. So, Microsoft is understandably cautious and afaict backports only fixes for major issues.
Of course, that gets complicated when you consider something like Chrome's sandbox, which can depend on system guarantees that Microsoft may consider esoteric or just low-priority. To their credit, Microsoft is responsive when we find these kinds of issues and report them. However, it's not uncommon for the issues to not be considered important enough to backport to legacy OSes (or for the task to just be too arduous). That's why we also tend to focus our work on the most current supported versions, which also offer increasingly better mitigation technologies with each release.
IIRC Clang on Windows also announced a similar thing (supporting only Win 7+) maybe they plan on building it with Clang on all platforms and it's a result of that.
I think that Clang generated binaries won't run on Windows versions below 7, if I remember correctly it has something to do with implementing SEH but I could be completely wrong and it could also have nothing to do with their decision but it makes sense - they moved to clang for compiling Linux binaries to simplify build process and they are a big driver behind Clang on Windows.
I'd be very surprised to hear this. Clang and Rust both use LLVM, and Rust can generate binaries for XP (with a few caveats). Of course, the fact that LLVM no longer supports running on XP means that the Rust compiler itself doesn't run on XP (not that it ever did).
I fully understand about Windows XP. I'm disappointed about OS X 10.7 and 10.8, because many users with older (but still perfectly functional!) Mac hardware are stuck on those versions 4-5 years after their release because Apple won't extend support for newer OS X versions to that hardware. Apple also refuses to provide a way to upgrade a system to the maximum OS X version it supports; it's a huge hassle to do so.
It also kills off the 2008 Macbook. Apple ditched 2008 Macbooks within 4 years support-wise and left them stuck on 10.7. This was due to the 2012 release of 10.8 as 64-bit only and the cheap GPU in the 2008 Macbook only having 32-bit drivers. This is one of the reasons my girlfriend is now on a Windows machine. Paying a premium for a laptop and having it not able to run the operating system released just 4 years later was kind of absurd. The flaky motherboard played a role, too.
It affects machines from later than '06: I have a mid-2007 silver Macbrook Pro which allegedly should support 10.11, but which I can't actually upgrade past 10.7. Even getting it to 10.7 was a huge hassle because Apple doesn't make it available anywhere.
I have one of the original (SSD even!) Macbook Airs from early 2008 that isn't supported past 10.7.
I know it's a notoriously underpowered machine, but it still would have been nice to get more than 4.5 years of supported OS updates. Still perfectly functional as a portable secondary machine for mail, notes, terminal and light Chrome browsing.
Apparently they didn't want to continue to support 32-bit EFI.
which says you can upgrade directly. What goes wrong? I upgraded 10.5 to latest 10.5 then bought 10.6 in store and got to 10.6.8 a year or so ago. I recently upgraded another machine to 10.6.8 too.
I find free, smooth upgrades (not just updates) for a decade to be pretty good but guess you are having problems with "smooth".
I totally get this, but Apple made a conscious decision to not support 32bit machines. While it does suck to be caught on that border, they've done a tremendous job of supporting machines from that era that are 64 bit capable.
I don't think anyone should fault them for making that hard decision.
They first dropped support for all 32-bit only machines with Lion, then some 64-bit machines (including I think all 945 chipset machines that have only 32-bit physical addressing) with Mountain Lion.
I know that in the past, when you fought to upgrade a machine past Apple's recommendations, you could end up with a machine that was technically working, but so slow it was practically unusable.
It's possibly the case that Apple's lack of upgrade support is a feature, not a bug (though it introduces the complexity of eventual lack of security support).
1) It's up to the user to decide whether a machine is usable for their needs or not, not Apple.
2) Locking users in at an older version and then refusing to support that version even just 3 years after it's come out is just too short a time window.
3) Offering no way for users who need an old version to get it except illegally is a non-starter for any purpose, security or not, again, because 3 years old is just not old enough to so completely phase it out.
While I agree that lack of usability is a concern, it seems to me that between lack of upgrade-ability, short OS version lifespans, and early phaseouts of old versions, Apple is intentionally forcing users to consistently upgrade once every 3-4 years at most. Fine business model, terrible for the end user, and a real detriment to Apple for me personally when the competition doesn't behave that way to that extent.
>It's up to the user to decide whether a machine is usable for their needs or not, not Apple.
Well yes, but it is also a business decision. Further supporting an old machine with a changing toolchain means additional costs for development, testing and troubleshooting. Those are costs that Apple has to bear.
I won't contest your point that 3-4 years is too early, just saying that there's more to supporting old hardware than just including the same drivers as in the last release.
You're absolutely right, but at the same time, if something WILL work but may not work optimally (or may not be supported for business reasons), I think it's more appropriate to say "hey, this is not recommended and if you do it you're on your own" than "you may not do this, no matter how well you know the risks." Apple chooses the latter path.
In particular, Mac OS X don't even run well with only 4GB of RAM anymore, and older machines use DDR2 where 4GB SO-DIMMs (and any other sticks based on 2Gbit DDR2) are rare and expensive. I wonder what is the current status of this bug BTW: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/42426/can-i-upgrade...
> In particular, Mac OS X don't even run well with only 4GB of RAM anymore
It actually runs great. I'm using a 2011 Air w/2GB (cheapest back then) and El Capitan and it's almost as fast as my 24GB Mac Pro.
I push it a bit with Logic Pro X + drum samples (for my V-Drums), but it handles that without complaints. But for web, videos and programming there isn't much of a difference.
It's not apathy or incompetence that means people are using these old OSes, usually it's that you can't upgrade (and the users don't have the money to upgrade the hardware). Windows 7 won't run on a typical XP machine due to lack of RAM and OSX 10.9 doesn't work on 32bit machines (pre 2007).
Halting support won't do much about this issue, people will just use vulnerable browser on these old vulnerable OSes because they can't afford a new(er) one.
A 10 year old computer ought to still be usable. Especially if you think about developing countries where often people can't afford new computers. Microsoft and Apple have failed the users and now Google is too.
Last time I checked, Debian and many other Linux distributions still work perfectly on 10 year old computers.
Microsoft, Apple, Google (and to some extent, Canonical) might have collectively decided that there's no money to be made from people in developing countries with 10 year old computers, but if you look at it from another perspective, this is the perfect chance for FOSS to increase mindshare.
Those either costs money to develop (if we're talking point, security etc updates to long dead OS versions), or stalls the development of new features (if any new OS version must run in 10 year old PCs).
I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older machines.
Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or more easily. A 2006 Macbook had 512MB (upgradable to 2GB) and 1.8Ghz CPU, which is not really much different to modern netbook.
>I'm not sure that it does to be honest. UI effects can be disabled on older machines.
Yes, but UI effects are just the tip of the iceberg of new features. Some depend on the specific hardware capabilities (e.g. bluetooth being present, or even specific version), others involve several components working in tandem and depend on increased speed of later machines, others require specific cpu/gpu support, etc.
>Cameras, Cars, Microwaves, Washing machines & DVD players all last 10 years or more easily.
And all of these have 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less complexity, plus they're not general purpose devices.
Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike Firefox but my experiences with Firefox on OS X has been less than stellar compared to Chrome. Also, being an educational model iMac with an old C2D, Chrome runs noticeably faster than Firefox.
I haven't got any conclusive stats to hand, but I get the impression that Firefox performance is gradually improving. This is one example of an upcoming feature that should offer some performance improvements:
He is on a non-admin account and can only visit a few white listed sites that I've pre-screened. The chances of him getting hacked are basically zero and I don't have the money to replace a perfectly functional computer with a newer one just so it can run a more recent version of OS X.
He also loves the built-in applications like Photo Booth that lets him record own videos and apply silly special effects to send to the grandparents. So, moving to Linux or Windows is really a non-starter.
My white MacBook was in the same boat. I still use it as a media computer, so I formatted and installed Ubuntu Mate 15.04. If your son is just using the web browser, I doubt he'll notice the difference in OSes. I don't know how old he is, but it could be a fun weekend project for you guys.
If it were just the web browser I would have probably moved him to some incarnation of Ubuntu. Unfortunately, when it comes to applications like Photo Booth that are easily approachable by a 6 year old the situation becomes more complicated.
> chances of him getting hacked are basically zero
How do you know that? Your machine is probably still susceptible to POODLE.
He is on non-admin account doesn't mean the OS doesn't contain bugs that allow privilege escalation. And Apple is definitely not going to fix those bugs.
Flash can be upgraded independent of Chrome (and it's not entirely clear why you're worried about sites sending exploits via Flash but not about those sites using the numerous RCE exploits that have been released for 10.7 but not patched).
Yes, I know that Flash can be manually kept up to date. However, it's nice to have Google taking care of that issue via updates to Chrome.
Regardless, for me it's more about risk management. What's the more likely scenario? That an attacker compromises my internal network in order to launch attacks on my son's OS X box to compromise it via some known service exploit or an attacker serving malware that targets Flash vulnerabilities via a compromised host or ad network?
I tend to read more about the latter category than the former.
> Starting April 2016, Chrome will continue to function on these platforms but will no longer receive updates and security fixes.
Wouldn't it be better to stop functioning? Without security fixes, it will get hacked, and it would be better for everyone if compromised browsers weren't used.
And people being forced to go to browsers that may have stopped getting security fixes even earlier is worse. It's not like you can simply ban an OS version from the Internet.
The Chrome team doesn't want to support multiple distinct Linux binaries, so they drop older platforms once library versions skew enough to cause this. (This page claims it's libstdc++: http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/ .) I think the Chrome binaries are built on Debianish systems so it's always a small miracle that the RPMs work anywhere.
(Why only support one binary? There's already a disproportionate work_required/users_served ratio for Linux vs the non-Linux platforms even with a single binary, and multiple binaries would mean multiple nonmatching stacks in crash-catching and a more elaborate testing matrix. You can find Chromium builds of the equivalent code that are built with the appropriate toolchain for your platform anyway.)
Disclaimer: I worked on Linux Chrome many years ago, all of the above is just guessing based on what was true back then.
Which makes total sense of course. However, if you're going to choose a limited set of Linux distros to support, it seems like RHEL (and thus CentOS and Fedora) would be a good choice. There are lots of companies paying money for the supported version of those distributions and are compelled by corporate security policies from upgrading various components to them at will.
In a joking-but-actually-kinda-not sense, the only justification for Linux Chrome existing is so Google engineers test the websites they make in the browser used by Google's users. So the only Chrome they really make is the one that runs on the engineering workstations. (On the Linux team I liked to joke that 80% of our users were coworkers.)
Is there still any reasonable way to upgrade from XP? I intended to upgrade to Windows 8 a few years ago on an ancient machine, only to find that Microsoft had eliminated the upgrade, and now you seem to need to buy a new copy of Windows for an old computer AND reinstall everything.
Seems unlikely most users will see this announcement. Would be nice if it is shown to them within the application if they are using the affected operating systems. Maybe put a notification bar across the top that can be dismissed but comes back each time it is launched.
I think it's useful to keep in mind that the ideal number of platforms for a product to support is 1. Every additional platform makes it more difficult to ship new features and more expensive to maintain/support. Applications like Chrome ultimately make decisions about which platform they will support through the lens of:
Sure, but products don't just appear out of thin air. Companies build product to drive business goals. Once upon a time support for Windows XP was critical to the success of the product. That is no longer the case. Hence they are removing support for XP. That's simply how business works.
With the PosReady tweak XP will be around through 2019
But whew, just moved from XP to Windows 7 this week, I needed the memory for virtual machines for testing and didn't want to use the 64G hack because of instability.
I cannot describe how much I dislike Windows 7, everything simple in XP has been horribly mutated into something much less configurable and "dumbed down".
Classic Shell makes a dent but it is not enough.
Even the Cleartype tuning is a pain in the *ss on W7
Fortunately Firefox has made the change less painful, it looks virtually identical from XP to W7 because it has its own cleartype manager and is mostly independent from the OS otherwise.
Seriously, "Windows 7 is horrible compared to XP" is years behind the times. Oh I remember the good old days of "Windows XP is Playskool, give me back Windows 98!"
Wouldn't be an update year if there weren't people complaining about the latest version of Windows, forgetting everyone had the same complaints about the previous version of Windows that they love so much.
