Ask HN: Should my site support Windows XP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should my site support Windows XP?

1 pointamingilani5 comments

I'm using Cloudflare's universal SSL on Nazdeeq.com, and a ticket was opened about Windows XP support.

Windows XP was released in 2001, and reached EOL on 2011.

My SSL certificate gives a handshake error on Windows XP, but gets an A+ rating on SSLLabs.com

Adding support for Windows XP means switching to LetsEncrypt certificates that would reduce my rating to an A.

Is this a wise decision to make?

How likely is somebody still using Windows XP (6.5% of all desktop users, according to [1]; most of them Chinese running pirated copies, I would guess) to buy what you are selling?

[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

You make a fair point. However, since I'm in Pakistan, I found one person I wanted to demo the site to that uses Windows XP :/

I was super surprised when that happened.

Firefox ESR has TLS support and should work on XP until next year, at least. Telling people to switch browsers to use the site isn't great, but it's certainly an easier sell than switching the OS.

I'm guessing people still running XP are running Firefox or Chrome anyways, I'm not sure if IE8 can even render most pages on the internet. That would be like trying to surf the net with Firefox 3.5 :O

The certificate has basically nothing to do with anything here. It's a bad sign that you've convinced yourself that's relevant to your problem.

The usual issue with Windows XP (specifically Internet Explorer on XP since e.g. Firefox works fine) is that it doesn't do Server Name Indication. Without SNI it isn't possible to implement virtual hosts for HTTPS sensibly. The only option is to assign a dedicated IPv4 address for each site to be hosted.

Cloudflare can do that for you, but they will charge. If it's important to have Windows XP Internet Explorer work, you should pay Cloudflare for one of the commercial options that they spell out as supporting Windows XP specifically.

Switching to Let's Encrypt won't make any difference to whether Windows XP works with your site _or_ to the SSL Labs score.

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