Updates to Chrome platform support
chrome.blogspot.com
chrome.blogspot.com
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.
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.
Reference: ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers
My point is, that 10% figure is misleading. China is higher, everyone else is lower.
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).
Mavericks introduced RAM compression, so for RAM-constrained machines it may be even better than the previous OS.
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.
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.
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.
Dropping of 10.7 cuts off machines from 2006. That'll be about 10 years of support, which isn't too bad IMHO.
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.
http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/how-to-upgrade/
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 don't think it's reasonable to expect third parties to support versions which the platform owner has deprecated.
I don't think anyone should fault them for making that hard decision.
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.
Usable maybe, updated with new OS updates though?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is that a shame? Firefox is a great browser.
I'm surprised by that. Have you tried Firefox on that machine recently (last 6 months, let's say)?
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.
If they're still using unsupported platforms, there's a good chance it's because upgrading is not a feasible option (at least not now/not easily).
(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.
1. number of users
2. PR (i.e. Linux support)Can anyone explain the Early Notifier part of the title?
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.
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.