Windows XP support ended today. Now what?

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Some of my projects are web-based, and although I would not consider myself a web-guru or the like, I do spend a lot of time reading what other developers post onto Stack Overflow, and the general advice I get is to target Firefox as the primary browser, Chrome and Safari after that and have a stab at getting IE8+ compatibility.

I don't use too much javascript/jQuery, aside from a bit of AJAX and a few graphical enhancements courtesy of JQuery.

My sites do run in IE8+, but I didn't have to do much.

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HMV failed to see the writing on the wall... thanks to the Internet, downloading and 'on demand' services, physical media (the lions share of HMVs business as far as i can see) has been a steadily diminishing interest.

The reason why HMV lost my business is because of the glue used on their price and security stickers is impossible to remove, and I'm an experienced sticker remover thanks to my retro addiction.

That's even with going out of my way to support them, purchasing at-least 30 items from them in 2013.
 
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Operating_system_market_share_for_Nov_2013.jpg

windows 8 now has over 10% and is growing, crikey!! Vista isn't all that far from the total number of OS X users

i guess most of us are also included in the "other" section ;)


total Microsoft market share of 90.73% ain't bad either

graph-3.jpg


Explorer useage is very surprising, i thought Firefox would be higher, but useage figures don't lie :)
 
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Explorer useage is very surprising, i thought Firefox would be higher, but useage figures don't lie :)

Firefox has really declined of late. I've found that rather saddening, as I'm something of a FF aficionado. Both Chrome and Safari have surpassed it in popularity.
 
hi Andy :)

still a firefox user here :) so keep the faith lol
still was genuinly surprised to see that much explorer usage:o
 
I'm still using Firefox 3.6 at home, but I've been giving Pale Moon a try - it's a Firefox fork that keeps the guts current but strips away a lot of the nonsense added in later versions. It's pretty good.
 
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Firefox for me, too. There's some extensions I just couldn't do without. :thumbsup:
 
I am constantly amazed at the popularity of Chrome. When I design a site I have to check it in all browsers and IMHO Chrome is by far the worst. Some browsers (like Firefox) are a lot better than IE, so it makes sense for people to change to them. But Chrome??????

With all the advertising muscle I can understand why so many people try out Chrome. But once they have done, and found it is not as good as IE, why do the not switch back? Or better still try other browsers and find the best one (which IMHO is Firefox).
 
Shame you can't get the newest versions of browsers to Windows 2000. Also what's the latest version of Avast that supports Win2000? Or are there any better alternatives?
 
I am constantly amazed at the popularity of Chrome. When I design a site I have to check it in all browsers and IMHO Chrome is by far the worst. Some browsers (like Firefox) are a lot better than IE, so it makes sense for people to change to them. But Chrome??????

With all the advertising muscle I can understand why so many people try out Chrome. But once they have done, and found it is not as good as IE, why do the not switch back? Or better still try other browsers and find the best one (which IMHO is Firefox).

Elaborate please; why is Chrome by far the worst?
I mean for web developers, not how the client behaves cause it's getting quite resource hungry as I've noticed in recent versions.
Though imho the UI and management of Chrome is cleaner than IE, plus it's not embedded in 12 places in the OS, so easy to ditch and switch out if you want.
 
I don't use chrome myself, but I have found that it runs Facebook games more smoothly than Firefox, so that could be your answer.

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I use fire fox, but I would like to change if i could just find something EXACTLY like it, but disent eat up ram and fail to release it..
its a bit of arse when you check task manager and see that firefox is using 2gb of system ram and plugin container is also using 1gb..
There simply is no reason for it. Use the ram.,. then when you go to use some more release the un-used ram. dont just keep stock piling it up. and its not just when you have flash enabled pages open either "although they will speed up the issue" and its not that it actually is using that ram at the time either.
Analogue-x's maxmem app will free it up for you and that only frees ram thats not in use. hadnt used that app since i used windows 98. im glad its still around though.
and futher to prove its not in actuall use. if you close fire fox (end process tree in task manager, or you will be wating forever to open a new fire fox) and it loads up all the same tabs you had open, its not using any where near as much ram..

to me thats called a memory leak. And as far as im concerned firefox has ALWAYS had a memory leak. and they need to fix it. how difficult is it to release un used memory?
really annoys me because i prefer fire fox to any other browser, but this memory leak thing cripples it. and dont even get me started on flash player.

(i guess thats a rant lol)
 
Firefox 3.x used to be pretty bad with that, why I switched to Chrome.
Now it's about the same, 5 chrome processes use about ~300MB, though 8GB of RAM on this rig.

You can always close some tabs and restart the browser occasionally.
:o
 
So, a new vulnerability affecting versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 of Internet Explorer and Microsoft OSes with that tightly integrated has been discovered; No fix for Windows XP, of course.
 
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new Firefox is out now, 29? any good? looks pretty different to Firefox and a lot more like Chrome

Yeah, and if I'd wanted something that looks like Chrome, I'd use f**king Chrome. :Doh:

Although, to be fair, it still appears to function much like FF28 did.
 
Haha, naturally. But to some degree it can't be avoided, since Microsoft so tightly integrate it into their OS, can it?
 
Elaborate please; why is Chrome by far the worst?
The reasons I don't like it are:
1) Takes too long to load itself.
2) Takes too long to close itself down.
3) If you want to change settings etc or use any tool, they are too buried. It takes too long and has too many pages (finding what you want is often like playing a memory test game - "Now close your eyes and try to remember everything you saw last time")
4) It cannot handle RSS (I think this was deliberate, to try to force you to use Google Reader, but Google Reader does not exist anymore).
5) It thinks your computer exists simply to serve it, and will gobble up resources like it is trying to run SETI all by itself.
6) (This one is more personal preference) I don't like the lack of a permanent status bar, or the way URLs pop up in a temporary one.

I mean for web developers.
Point (3) is the biggest pain for slowing down site design. As I also create RSS feeds by hand sometimes, (4) is also a big problem. So Sometimes is (5). (1) and (2) are annoying, but "live-with-able".

However the main reason for never using it for web design has nothing to do with how good it is. It is because it is not the most used browser. The majority of people still use IE, so you have to design with IE and then check compatibility with the rest, regardless of which you use for personal surfing (which for me ain't Chrome either, it is the burning foxy one).
 
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