Windows XP and Opera

johnbull44

johnbull44

I have just made Opera my default browser after many years using Google Chrome and am absolutely delighted with it.

Opera is so close to Chrome in layout and operation that I cannot tell the difference and feel I have lost nothing. Now I have configured the bookmarks bar exactly as I have it on Chrome, the similarity is almost 100%. What is more, I find Opera faster than Chrome which was generally sluggish.

Question ?
Having being forced to make this beneficial change due to Google withdrawing support for Windows XP this coming April, my question is :-
Will Opera soon dump Windows XP and join the Micro-softies and Google Chromies, so that I will have to find yet another browser ?

leocg

leocg Moderator Volunteer

Will Opera soon dump Windows XP and join the Micro-softies and Google Chromies, so that I will have to find yet another browser ?

Both Chrome and Opera are based on Chromium so i guess there are high chances that Opera will drop support for XP sooner or later.
Also, being the OS no longer supported by Microsoft, there are also high chances that lots (if not all) of softwares will stop supporting XP sooner or later.

blackbird71

blackbird71

From the chromium development site - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=579196 - (Jan 19, 2016):
"Following the announcement of deprecation of XP/Vista http://chrome.blogspot.ca/2015/11/updates-to-chrome-platform-support.html we can start removing and simplifying our code base to only support Windows 7 and above. "

Sooner or later, this is going to ripple through to a Blink engine update that will likely impact Opera and other non-Chrome, Blink-engine-based browsers. Browser developer groups can delay when they adopt a certain Blink engine version, but unless they elect to create their own code fork (and almost all won't), the handwriting is on the wall.

To keep this in perspective, you couldn't reasonably expect apps software to still be supporting Windows 98 (though there might be a few small or simple programs that still do). That train has long since left the station. The WinXP departure train is now building up steam and starting to move out of the station as well. I've lived through this before with Win98 and Win2000; there's nothing novel happening here with XP. Software and hardware specifically supporting XP will become fewer and fewer; eventually even XP-compatible antivirus programs won't be available and taking an XP system online will become an ever riskier venture. You'll be increasingly forced to either run software without any updates (security or otherwise), keep your system offline, or just take your chances of becoming hacker road-kill out on the Internet Highway. I don't say this in harshness... I really do understand. But you are going to have to deal significantly with the XP obsolescence issue sooner rather than later.