Be prepared to read more and more Windows XP news as we fly towards the retirement date of the aging operating system. Microsoft, along with partner companies seem determined to move users away from the old platform.
And while Windows XP is all set to be discontinued next year in April, pretty much all popular third-party browsers will continue to support it beyond this date — a year beyond in some cases, or even more.
Opera yesterday joined Google and Mozilla in confirming this much.
This is decision that comes with a fair amount of risk, and security expert Graham Cluley reckons this much. According to him, it is the browsers that should be conveying the information to end users.
In a statement to PC Pro he claimed that web browsers should tell Windows XP users to upgrade:
“At the very least, browsers should take it upon themselves to spot that they are running on Windows XP and display a big fat ‘Woah! You’re running an out-of-date way-old operating system. It’s not really safe for you to be on the net like this. Learn more here…’ message when they start up, that users have to acknowledge each time they run.”
A bit of a drastic step, but not necessarily unneeded in the grander scheme of things!
Windows XP is the second most popular operating system in the world for a reason, more so at this stage of its lifecycle. The aging OS has been on the market for 11 years now and according to the latest Net Applications data powers more than 30 percent of computers out in the world.
All Comments
This article is 100% correct, but they won’t do it because they want to hinder people from upgrading their OS
Wait a minute, when did browsers become charity workers. These individuals, organizations and businesses all made the decision not to upgrade to Vista, Win7, Win 8, Win 8.1, while the whole time they were advised at every turn to upgrade for security reasons, if nothing else. You can’t help people that won’t help themselves.