Do you have a Windows XP retro virtual machine or, god forbid, run Windows XP on your primary machine? You’re going to need a sort-of up-to-date browser, and it turns out Mypal68 offers just that. Terrible name aside, it’s Firefox 68 ported to and maintained to run on Windows XP SP3; SP2 and lower are not supported, but some people do seem to have some success getting it to run on those.
There are issues, of course: there’s a 1.5GB memory limit, and the browser will crash when it reaches that limit, and 64bit builds simpy don’t work at all, so there’s only a 32bit build. Version 74.1.0 was released a few days ago, but that version number doesn’t actually mean the browser is now based on Firefox 74; they had to change the reported version number for extension compatibility.
I’m currently setting up a dedicated Proxmox PC for retro virtual machines, and Windows XP will obviously be one of them. I’m definitely going to try this out.
Nobody runs Windows XP 64-bit anyway, the only reason people want to run Windows XP is compatibility with Windows XP 32-bit apps and drivers (and DRM like StarForce that comes with Windows XP 32-bit kernel-space drivers). Windows 64-bit barely existed (for the nitpickers: I am talking about the x86-64 edition, though the Itanium edition wasn’t exactly popular either).
As an aside, a good thing about Microsoft rushing Vista was that we got only two generations of Windows driver compatibility: Windows XP 32-bit and Windows Vista 32-bit+64-bit, since Vista coincided with the wide adoption of x86-64 in PCs. If Microsoft had waited one or two years more to polish Vista a bit more, we’d have another generation of compatibility called Windows 64-bit (since Windows XP drivers aren’t fully compatible with Vista even for the same bitness, I had a TV tuner from AverMedia with XP 32-bit drivers that didn’t work with Vista 32-bit).
@alfman, yes, I know some drivers require a very specific version of Windows, I am talking on general terms
kurkosdr,
Than I would be that nobody. I mean ~15 years ago.
The Vista driver change was for practical reasons. Before that, everything was a free for all wild west. I had a Sound Blaster for example, the good one with optical input for 5.1 audio capture and hardware DSP for sound effects. But it only worked with its own stack, and had terrible interactions with other software.
And Creative being Creative only provided two options: (a) a very broken Vista driver that almost never worked. (b) a basic Windows WHQL notarized driver that only provided 2 channel stereo. (Guess why they are pretty much forgotten by now).
Same with nvidia, they had terrible drivers crashing Vista. At the time we blamed Microsoft, but turns out it was not their fault (the same happened in Linux).
Why?
The previous drivers were actually much more secure (ironically). Well they were running in ring-0, but there was not much abstraction layers than HAL in NT.
With Vista, they had to separate the User and Kernel parts, and that seemed to break the coding capabilities of hardware vendors. They did not get this right well into the Windows 7 cycle.
Ironically, Microsoft still hasn’t kicked driver vendors out of the Windows kernel, despite PatchGuard on 64-bit versions supposedly preventing drivers from patching the Windows kernel. The recent Crowdstrike incident (caused by a driver patching the kernel) is a reminder of that.
But still, Vista 64-bit showed driver vendors they are not welcome in the kernel and they should avoid fighting PatchGuard unless absolutely necessary, so that’s something, I guess.
Also, everyone knew back then that Vista’s new driver model was for the best, but everyone baulked at the compatibility breakage with what was still-new hardware as well as the steep (for the time) hardware requirements of Vista itself, at a time money was tight and anti-consumerism sentiment was high (hint: Lehman Brothers, GFC). People saw no immediate benefit and stuck with XP for some years more.
> Nobody runs Windows XP 64-bit anyway
I run it, and I have written about the experience:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_win_xp_in_23/
As a habitual Linux user, it was a great experience. It’s fast and responsive with a pleasingly harmonious UI that no Linux desktop can match.
Which is remarkable as it was Win XP that drove me away from Windows, after 15 years, into the waiting arms of Linux in 2001.
I run MyPal on it and it works very well indeed.
Congrats on the article. It was a great read.
There is a difference between running Windows XP once for the jiggles and running Windows XP for a reason (on a semi-regular basis), the people who run Windows XP for a reason do it because they want to use some app or driver that only works with Windows XP 32-bit.
I run Windows XP 64-bit. It runs a real workload I have been maintaining for nearly two decades on a variety of platforms and I finally found something stable, functional, and remarkably lean on resource usage. I can operate a 64-bit XP VM in under 100 MiB of DRAM. Typical memory usage is around 20 to 21 MiB of DRAM and the rest of the system’s footprint on the virtualization host is practically nil. One 64-bit Windows XP install has voided the need for the ton of bespoke monitoring software I’ve written over the years to make sure the thing I care about is still up and running. Drivers have little to do with it; the 64-bit XP edition was built off of the Windows Server 2003 codebase and runs what you ask it to run. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t reboot. It just does its job and lets me focus on other things.
I’ve used it before on XP and it was rough.
Just grabbed the latest and still fails some browser version checks for common sites. Grabbed the SSE version this time around and seems to run a little better at least.
I’ve had better luck with K-meleon still.
The most compatible browser I’ve experienced so far on XP has been Supermium but sadly that’s chromium-based. I use it when I have to but avoid when I can.
There’s been a handful of others I’ve tried but they’ve offered even less.
An essential application for people trying to daily drive ReactOS!
I am joking of course. That said, there seems to be some more energy in the ReactOS world of late. The recent work on improving the test suite is encouraging, especially the bits about syncing with Wine 10 and allowing for APIs newer than Windows Server 2003.