
Why Firefox 4 isn’t abandoning Windows XP - thankuz
http://www.geekwire.com/2011/firefox-4-engineers-decided-stick-windows-xp
======
kprobst
Hardly surprising, but it's an interesting situation. The only company in the
world that wants and needs Windows XP to disappear is Microsoft; for everyone
else XP is an enormously bountiful source of users and revenue. It would be
suicidal for Mozilla or Google to say "we won't support XP", just as it's
fatal for Microsoft to linger on an 11-year old platform that eats into their
revenue stream. Interesting dilemma.

~~~
contextfree
How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there
an opportunity here?

~~~
cookiecaper
ReactOS is just WINE on top of a custom Windows-like kernel. All of the real
action in reimplementing Windows occurs in WINE, afaik.

It's pretty far from "full XP compatibility", but a lot of stuff works just
fine. I'd love to see WINE considered a big investment center for people like
Canonical. I think WINE and open graphics drivers are the two biggest parts
holding back desktop Linux. Even if WINE could get .NET compatibility, that'd
be a huge step forward (right now it has trouble running any of MS's .NET
frameworks correctly). The reality is it's going to take a lot of money and
especially time to cause the lock-in of Win-only apps to fully regress; it'd
be a lot faster to work with it and cause almost everything to work perfectly
on WINE. Office and .NET are the biggest hold-ups atm.

The problem with major investment in WINE is that as soon as MS thinks that
suing CodeWeavers/any other WINE investors or distributors would be less
harmful than allowing the project to continue without the extra attention,
they're going to drop some big patent litigation all over that. MS is not just
going to sit back while WINE plays a fundamental role in killing Windows -- as
soon as it becomes serious, look for a major, relentless attack by MS.

~~~
bad_user
AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers. And the best option you've
got for .NET-compatibility is Mono.

But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal
problems.

~~~
cookiecaper
Yes, the ability to use native drivers on ReactOS stems from writing a kernel
that mimics the Windows kernel API/ABI as closely as possible. The ReactOS
userland, however, is provided primarily by WINE. You can think of ReactOS
primarily as an open kernel compatible with Windows's kernel API, and WINE as
an open userland compatible with Windows's userland APIs. ReactOS isn't
rewriting WINE, they use WINE extensively. The main unique work of ReactOS is
the Windows-compatible kernel.

Mono is helpful for pure .NET directly from a Unix environment. However, Mono
is more of an open .NET development environment than a .NET compatibility
environment; while Mono can run a lot of .NET apps that are made for Windows,
that's almost incidental of compatibility with the CLR bytecode. There are
important implementation differences that Mono is aware of and has no
intention to correct because, unlike WINE, Mono is not really a compatibility
layer.

Additionally, many Windows programs launch .NET programs directly, and afaik
it's not very easy to get them to use Mono by default. For instance, I
recently purchased C&C 4 on Steam, but it's a pain to make it work because
circumventing the .NET-based launcher wants me to include an EA ID (I could
use a fake auth server but just don't feel like putting that much effort in),
and launching directly doesn't work because of the .NET-based launcher (.NET
doesn't work). Further, more and more products are relying on .NET components,
including Visual Studio, Office, and other big things. I think getting the
.NET runtimes working well should be one of the main goals for WINE devs.

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ZeroGravitas
So what's all this nonsense about XP being 10 years old and so customers who
bought it not being worthy of a newer browser? Do you know when Microsoft
actually stopped selling XP to customers?

Trick question, they haven't. Despite several passed deadlines the latest
plan, as of July 2010, is to continue selling downgrade licences to businesses
up until two years after Windows 8 ships!

~~~
BenSS
Right. Very large companies are still tied to XP, and therefore Microsoft is.
IBM's standard load is still XP, and I haven't seen any Vista or 7 plans yet.
I do suspect that they'll skip right to 7 when it's considered "mature" and
they allocate the resources to clean up the enormous technical debt
accumulated with the in-house applications.

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pointillistic
The elephant in the room is that Chrome is compatible with XP and this might
the real FF competition. Heck, even Safari works on XP.

~~~
bad_user
Why is it an elephant?

Firefox 3.x works perfectly fine on WinXP too.

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ja27
According to a friend that just got a new work laptop, Windows XP is still
standard issue at IBM. I imagine plenty of other large companies are in the
same position.

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ck2
Neither Chrome nor Opera are abandoning XP either.

All three will support hardware acceleration on XP.

Only one that left tens of thousands (maybe millions?) of XP users out in the
cold is Microsoft.

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joelackner
i think this is a smart move by mozilla. i hope they see a significant uptick
in browser share on those platforms.

i'm sure it wasn't easy to dedicate all the extra work up front and over the
life of the project...

~~~
zdw
Also will probably bleed into future platforms - people stick with what
they're comfortable with, so once they switch to FF/Chrome/Safari they'll
likely seek out that browser on whatever new machine they get after their
hardware dies.

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devtesla
It's at a point where I don't see anything wrong with going either way.

I don't think IE9's abandonment of XP is going to slow the adoption of new web
technology all that much, something that Mozilla seems to suggest. There is a
lot of momentum behind them with mobile devices supporting them so well.
Still, 40% of web users, even if those are among the lowest value web users,
is worth developing around.

Mozilla isn't around to make a profit, so spending on XP users makes more
sense. Abandoning them would have also made sense.

~~~
kenjackson
Mozilla wants its cake and to eat it too. They'll whine that IE9 doesn't
support XP, and then whine that IE9 isn't modern. If it's not modern then it
really doesn't matter if it supports XP or not.

I personally can't stand XP as an OS. But I do understand Mozilla from a
business perspective. Although I wish they weren't so sanctimonious about IE9
not supporting it since they really don't care and I think it just continues
to make Mozilla look like whiners rather than doers, e.g., Google/Chrome.

~~~
grhino
Mozilla is trying to position FireFox a as superior alternative to IE9.
Therefore, there's no cognitive dissonance at all with Mozilla saying that 1)
IE 9 is worse than Firefox because it doesn't run on XP and 2) IE 9 isn't
really modern while Firefox is.

Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to be modern, but more than that, it doesn't want
users to think that IE 9 is modern. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to have any
compelling features whatsoever.

A negative marketing campaign will always backfire to some portion of your
audience.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Mozilla do want IE9 to be "modern", that's entirely in line with their mission
as a non-profit that promotes the open web. It's ironically Microsoft that's
scared most of a truly modern IE9.

What Mozilla certainly don't want is marketing BS confusing users into
thinking IE9 is modern, while it holds the web back and drags its feet about
updates. Nor does it want any browser controlled by Microsoft to have dominant
market share while Microsoft still sees the web as a threat that it can fight
mostly by go-slow tactics like having IE6-8 hanging around preventing new web
technologies hitting critical mass.

They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel
threatened.

~~~
kenjackson
_They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys
feel threatened._

I suspect it may have more to do with the fact that some features are easy to
do as addins. There are several spell checkers available for IE. Given that
the IE team seems resource constrained, it seems more useful to work on things
like perf, compliance, security, than features that are easy to add by 3rd
parties. I'm not saying it wouldn't be nice to have, but given that IE9 still
has HTML/CSS gaps, I'd much rather they work on those.

~~~
archangel_one
Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team, who
managed to add a spellchecker years ago? I'll admit that I've not gone
looking, but I've not ever heard of anyone using one of these third party IE
spellcheckers - it's just been a feature which I expect a decent browser to
have that IE clearly lacked. Surely that perception hurts them more than the
cost of a few developer-months to take one of their existing spellcheckers and
drop it into IE?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The IE team is resource constrained because it's not in Microsoft's interests
to build a good browser. If it was in their business interests, like XBox,
then they could throw tens of billions of dollars at it. But it's not, so no
spellchecker and no WebGL and no IE9 for XP.

~~~
kenjackson
You do realize that the XBox team is also resource contrained. For example,
you can't run any XBox or PC game on an XBox 360. Had to cut something.
There's not even a web browser in the XBox 360.

Everything is about tradeoffs and constraints. You may not be familiar enough
with the industry to know that they're there (ppl think that MS and Apple have
enough money to simply do everything, but they don't), but trust me, these
products have serious resource constraints across the board.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Strangely, you seem to think Xbox trying to conquer the living room without
bothering to include a browser supports your case that Microsoft loves the
web, but just consistently runs out of money across its various products
before getting around to supporting it properly, whereas I would have had that
right up there with the lack of spellchecking in IE as a clear example of
Microsoft quietly hoping the web will go away if they ignore it long enough.

I'm not asking or expecting them to support everything and anything with their
minuscule bank account and negligible market power. I'm just pointing out that
the web is kryptonite to Microsoft and their PR to the contrary is laughable.
If you want to believe it's simply mismanagement on a massive scale that leads
them to fail at the web year after year then good for you, but I personally
think it's just smart self-interest on their part.

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tomkarlo
It's hard to make money selling stuff to cheap people, and it's hard to gain
users by chasing people who are ok still using XP, for whatever reason.

It's nice that Firefox is still supporting XP, but I don't think the decision
should be based on the % of web users still on XP. It should be based on the %
of them likely to be interested in downloading a new browser.

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pnathan
I sort of take the Apple philosophy: Thou Shalt Upgrade Thy Software.

Keeping software modern is a good thing.

~~~
rmc
Forcing an OS upgrade is in ms's interest since its likely people will likely
stick with the built in one, which is Microsofts browser.

Keeping backwards compatibility is in mozillas interest since people are
likely to change their browser than their OS. This means xp users are likely
to switch to mozilla than Microsoft.

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trustfundbaby
You can't always make decisions based on dollars and cents, sometimes its
about just being good to your users and that is one thing that Microsoft has
proved incapable of over the years.

For them its always business ... which is why I hope they eventually lose the
browser battle.. They act like people on Windows XP didn't also pay money for
their copies of windows ... but all this will do is give people a solid excuse
to use other browsers on Windows XP as IE 8 starts to age.

Thanks for letting Chrome and Firefox an unencumbered run at your market share
Guys!

~~~
CJefferson
Maybe they are having problems, like Apple, with spending money on old
operating systems?

Windows XP users would never pay for IE 9, and Apple claim they can't give
XCode 4 away to users from an OS released 18 months ago.

