My speculation is that abandonment point will be reached much sooner, rather than later, given the realities of code updating involved. Likewise, chromium XP incompatibilities impacting SlimJet will sooner or later force them to either stay with a last known-good chromium engine that they can keep patched for XP users (a costly forking process that I doubt they can economically withstand) or else they will have to abandon XP users just like other chromium/Blink browsers are now doing. Unless Opera were to somehow fashion patches for chromium vulnerabilities in Opera's own GUI layers sitting on top of the chromium/Blink engine (which may not even be possible in various cases), future chromium vulnerabilities (and these will indeed occur) would still have to remain unpatched for XP users. In other words, the inherent incompatibility of chromium itself with XP will only grow over time. With time and normal chromium code evolution, more and more vestigial pieces of any remaining XP-related code will be pruned out of the engine. Note especially that deprecation does not just mean that chromium developers won't test any longer for XP compatibility, but it means that any specific XP-related chromium code will be removed whenever various parts of the chromium code get worked on for whatever reasons. In particular, security patches for the chromium engine itself will no longer ripple down to XP users via chromium updates routinely embedded into new browser updates, since the engine itself has deprecated support for certain XP-related specific code peculiarities starting with chromium 50.
I finally did read on Slimjet's website where it says that "Slimjet will continue to support Windows XP for as long as technically possible." Well, while that's definitely better than hearing that a browser will no longer support Windows XP, there's also no guarantee that that "as long as technically possible" doesn't suddenly turn into "will no longer support Windows XP" rather soonish.īut, what you need to fully understand is that any XP support, even by Opera, will be a winding down clock at best. If not, then how the frigg are we supposed to keep Opera 36 from updating itself to Opera 37?ĭoes Firefox still support Windows XP? Sea Monkey? Is there still a Safari for Windows? just that it was supposed to no longer be safe? Is that the case here? Will we Windows XP users still be able to use Opera 37 and above, just supposedly now not as safely? WHAT EXACTLY should us Windows XP users expect upon Opera 37 arriving? Does "dropping support for XP" mean that Opera for us will suddenly be an unusable BRICK? Or is this supposed to just be more of like the case when Microsoft "dropped support" for Windows XP and we could of course still use it. So I'm still set and good to go." But, now that I read that Opera is gonna do the same thing.
Opera's always been my browser of choice and has been the only one that works ideally on my systems.
I already knew Vivaldi was doing this, but I figured, "Ehhh, no biggie. let me make sure I understand what exactly "drop support for XP" means and what I should expect.