Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop 257
Billly Gates writes "Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in 2014. Fortunately for its users who want to keep browsing the web, Google is continuing to support Chrome until at least 2015. Firefox has no current plans to end support for XP. Hopefully this will delay the dreaded XPopacalypse — the idea that a major virus/worm/trojan will take down millions of systems that haven't been issued security patches. When these browsers finally do end XP support, does it mean webmasters will need to write seperate versions of CSS and JavaScript for older versions if the user base refuses to leave Windows XP (as happened with IE6)?"
Update: 10/29 17:31 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that Mozilla doesn't have plans to drop XP support any time soon.
All right (Score:3, Insightful)
Only an idiot would run a browser on an OS with unpatched vulnerabilities. Windows XP will not get any security issues fixed after April 2014. If you ignore those simple facts, you deserve becoming a part of a botnet, sending your passwords and credit card numbers to the botmaster.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought i read not too long ago on /. that Chrome support would outlast Microsoft's support?
Article: "Both Mozilla and Google said they WILL continue to support XP"
Slashdot: "OMFG NOBODY WIL SUPPRT XP NE MOAR"
Seriously timothy, Fuck you.
F$CK UNITY! err, wait, what?!... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lousy goddamned Fisher-Price tabletized piece of crap. This is a real big-boy computer I use to get real work done on, not some damn device for consuming BookFace and MeToobe videos. Plus there's no signed W7 driver for the lab control interface card. Mabel II would be very unhappy if that stopped working.
Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:0, Insightful)
TIMMAY!
Re:Enough is Enough (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been over a decade, guys.
Windows XP was still being sold on new PCs until two or three years ago, guy. Those PCs are still perfectly capable of doing most things that most of their users want to do. Why should they dump them just because Microsoft won't support its products?
WinXP in a VM for VPN clients (Score:3, Insightful)
I've found WinXP running in a VM the sanest way to connect to the VPNs of various clients that I work with. Many VPN clients attempt to take over the entire network stack and direct all your traffic through their VPN which creates havoc with accessing company servers.
With WinXP I can clone a VM for different clients. I tried this with Windows7 and ran into activiation nightmares. Possibly not strictly legal, but I refuse to fork out cash just because different VPN clients won't play nicely with each other on the same instance.
Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:3, Insightful)
Reading the official Google Enterprise blog post linked to in the article that slashdot linked to "we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015."
The official announcement is a minimum date for support, not a date where they plan on killing updates. Google isn't stupid. They make most of their money off of searches, so keeping a healthy ecosystem of usable web pages for everybody is in their best interest. A better web experience->more time online->more searches & visits to ad partners->more ad revenue for Google. A better web experience for more people was their primary reason for pushing Chrome into the market to begin with. I'm sure they would like to stop supporting XP at some point (e.g. Win2k isn't supported), but not if that would alienate too many people from having an up to date browser.
If there are enough computer users willing to buy antivirus for XP, then a company will be willing to sell it to them. Personally, I find antivirus to be too big of an intrusive hassle to deal with, eats too many resources, and does nothing against my primary thread of "potentially unwanted programs." Using Chrome, it has warnings for sites with malware and even once told me when I downloaded a virus. That's plenty for me. On rare occasion, I would like to be able to scan suspicious files on demand, but it's not worth the hassle of maintaining AVG or Avast for a year or two per scan (especially if Chrome did the last one for me). With so much of my computing in the cloud, it's much easier to just plan to reinstall everything when there is a problem or even partially automate regular reinstalls.
patches aren't everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone talks like the patch treadmill is absolutely necessary. It's not. The only reason this treadmill is marched by IT depts is to protect their jobs from the logical fallacies of management. The proof is the false assumption that the system's secure once the latest patches are installed, coupled with the rash of new patches the following week. Windows is fundamentally insecure. Hell, just about every OS is insecure if setup incorrectly no matter how many vendor patches are applied. If you're going to use an OS in a networked environment, just accept that, and when planned for accordingly, it's not the biggest issue in the world. Everyone posting here should know how to mitigate risks like this by now, patches or no patches.
Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:0, Insightful)