From: "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@zx2c4.com>
To: WireGuard mailing list <wireguard@lists.zx2c4.com>
Cc: "Jeffrey Walton" <noloader@gmail.com>,
"Berge Schwebs Bjørlo" <berge@trivini.no>,
"Laslo Hunhold" <dev@frign.de>,
"Panagiotis Kalogiratos" <nodens@abnormalfreq.com>,
"Neal Gompa" <ngompa13@gmail.com>,
"Phillip McMahon" <phillip.mcmahon@gmail.com>,
"Roman Mamedov" <rm@romanrm.net>,
"Reiner Karlsberg" <karlsberg@softart-ge.com>,
samuel.progin@gmail.com, paul.montgomery@netprotect.com
Subject: Re: Should we sunset Windows 7 support?
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2021 17:35:33 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHmME9rZeksrVkbn1qOAFEtKs4F872N07EJNU5iHXSsGLi_TSg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHmME9rZHaDRRk2-c9kzhUapTRiVxybkwS2Ung_HgSCAVyOw4Q@mail.gmail.com>
Hey again,
About a year later, WireGuard on Windows keeps becoming more advanced
and integrated into the operating system, with better service
notifications, high speed multi-packet transmission, device arrival
notifications, software device management, and so on... the common
theme being that these are all made possible by Windows 8+ APIs. So
we're now carrying well over 1000 lines of Windows 7 compatibility
code, polyfills, and sometimes outright reimplementations. This is
nobody's idea of fun, and having lots of extra code (that receives
less and less testing) is usually a recipe for things to go wrong. The
added burden of Windows 7 slows progress on newer platforms.
So I really would like to sunset Windows 7 support at some point. The
party cannot go on forever.
However, according to [1], Windows 7 still makes up about 15% of
Windows installs. And I know for a fact that some pretty large
WireGuard deployments are running on Windows 7 boxes, sometimes
installed inside of ATMs... Whether or not that's a good idea, it is
happening. What to do?
My current thinking is to follow the Chromium project, or at least
watch attentively and see the fallout from their decision. After a 6
month extension due to the pandemic, Google is set to retire Windows 7
support in Chrome on January 15, 2022, which is exactly 100 days from
now. There are still some open questions, though: will Microsoft
follow by sunsetting Windows 7 support for Edge, or will they keep it
on life support even longer? Will Mozilla follow Chromium's decision
as well? Is tracking Chromium's decision sensible? It might be: web
standards tend to move awfully fast these days, and without an up to
date web browser, will Windows 7 users upgrade to Windows 11 [or
Linux]? It might not: the most important Windows 7 holdouts may well
be embedded machines that don't care about browsers anyway?
If anybody's thinking on this has evolved, I'd love to hear thoughts.
Thanks,
Jason
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-10-07 23:35 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-11-10 12:27 Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-10 12:47 ` Laslo Hunhold
2020-11-10 12:56 ` samuel.progin
2020-11-10 13:06 ` Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-10 12:57 ` Isaac Boukris
2020-11-10 15:06 ` Reiner Karlsberg
2020-11-12 8:34 ` Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-12 9:13 ` Roman Mamedov
2020-11-10 17:38 ` Andrew Fried
2020-11-12 8:38 ` Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-12 8:46 ` Phillip McMahon
2020-11-12 8:50 ` Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-12 9:03 ` Berge Schwebs Bjørlo
2020-11-13 2:56 ` Jeffrey Walton
2020-11-19 16:59 ` Jason A. Donenfeld
2020-11-19 17:16 ` akloster
2021-10-07 23:35 ` Jason A. Donenfeld [this message]
2020-11-12 21:56 ` Panagiotis Kalogiratos
2020-11-12 17:38 ` Jeffrey Walton
2020-11-12 17:42 ` Phillip McMahon
2020-11-12 18:11 ` Neal Gompa
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