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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Very funny, End of Life for a popular product just means more trouble for 3rd-party-devs since they need to continue supporting the product as long as a significant chunk of their users don't feel like upgrading, but with support for the required SDKs cut off. Case in point: WindowsXP's End of Life was 2 years ago, but between 25% and 35% of (mostly casual) gamers still run it worldwide (this is heavily skewed by XP installations in China): http://hwstats.unity3d.com/web/os-win.html, http://hwstats.unity3d.com/pc/os.html.

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Yeah. Microsoft may no longer support them but we'll be stuck supporting them until june 2018 at least, when the tls apocalypse may cause holdouts to upgrade - or just complain loudly at Web developers for "breaking my Internet".

I am in this situation. A good chunk of my users are stuck on xp so I am stuck on supporting xp too. There is no way around this for me as the reason my users are stuck on xp is because of hardware. Arg!

They can still install Firefox.

Firefox probably won't help with non-browser software, if that's what the parent comment was referring to. I also have to develop an app for a client for XP because of some proprietary hardware that still doesn't have a Windows 7/8/10 driver.

Yes this is my problem. The hardware manufacturer does not want to support upgrades (they want to sell new hardware) and so I am stuck supporting XP.

In my situation there is not even hardware the customer can upgrade to as the original hardware supplier has left the market. We are all stuck with XP until something catastrophic happens.

Is the hardware expensive enough that reverse engineering the driver would be economical?

It would be worthwhile doing, the problem is the cost is really high for an individual lab.

I know a chemist still stuck with a windows 98 machine for a similar reason (it's the most recent OS that a particular piece of lab equipment has a driver for).

There are developers out there who would be willing to write new drivers if the manufacturers won't and the labs are willing to pay.

The problem is for an individual lab the cost is very high - there needs to be some sort of forum where labs can get together and put a bounty together for new drivers.

The problem is hardware. The amount of equipment out there running on XP with no ability to upgrade is a nightmare.

> They can still install Firefox.

Latest versions of Firefox cannot be installed on XP. Though, Chrome still works.

This seems really short-sighted on Firefox's part.

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