Drop support for old Windows systems?
Posted: 2016-02-23, 22:10 UTC
TC is well known for its support for older Windows versions. It's generally great to be able to use the program on all kind of Windows versions.
On the other hand supporting all these versions is time-intensive from a programmers point of view. You have to test on all these systems. You have to manage special code for different OSes. You have to manage non-Unicode stuff for Win9x and on and on and on...
But does it have a real benefit for users? Are these legacy systems still used by many users?
I tell you a story. A few days ago I tried to install Windows XP to fid out how hard it would be to get my plugin DirSizeCalc Charts up and running. I found out that system updates are really no longer working by default. You can read about some registry hacks on the internet but this was the point for me to say this isn't working for me. Windows XP has died.
From my point of view TC 9 should at least drop support for Win 9x. The more consequent answer would be to even drop support for Windows 2000/XP but this could also be done in TC 9.5 or later when the numbers of XP users has dropped to a minimum.
On the other hand supporting all these versions is time-intensive from a programmers point of view. You have to test on all these systems. You have to manage special code for different OSes. You have to manage non-Unicode stuff for Win9x and on and on and on...
But does it have a real benefit for users? Are these legacy systems still used by many users?
I tell you a story. A few days ago I tried to install Windows XP to fid out how hard it would be to get my plugin DirSizeCalc Charts up and running. I found out that system updates are really no longer working by default. You can read about some registry hacks on the internet but this was the point for me to say this isn't working for me. Windows XP has died.
From my point of view TC 9 should at least drop support for Win 9x. The more consequent answer would be to even drop support for Windows 2000/XP but this could also be done in TC 9.5 or later when the numbers of XP users has dropped to a minimum.