Hi,

On 13/02/2019 16:56, neel@neelc.org wrote:

I don't think this is the right mailing list.

This is entirely the correct mailing list as it is discussing a technical policy of the network team. This policy can be found here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/Supporte...

You probably shouldn't be using Windows XP, otherwise the EOL'd OS would be a weak point in security. One option could be to dual-boot Windows XP and Linux/*BSD, using Linux/*BSD for Tor and browsing, and XP for applications that haven't been ported.

It is worth remembering that most people do not have the privileges to install software on the computers that they use.

Unfortunately, the current policy of the network team is that they will not even accept patches for Windows XP support and will merge changes that break Windows XP support.

I would be interested in statistics that show the current Windows XP user base, especially in countries with users that can most benefit from Tor. The policy has been drawn up primarily on technical considerations but if it is shown that this has negative impacts for large numbers of users then it may be reconsidered.

Thanks, Iain.

Hi,

On 26/02/2019 10:42, Georg Koppen wrote:

I am not sure whether that's actually the intention of the original question. Assuming with "get Tor updates" it's actually meant to get *Tor Browser* updates (there is no tor update mechanism for Windows afaict) let me add the browser related bits here.

Mozilla stopped supporting Windows XP starting with Firefox 60 ESR, which is the browser version underlying Tor Browser 8.x. We decided that we will follow Mozilla here as maintaining an even larger fork supporting XP is risky both security- and resource-wise. Thus, even if tor would not have the respective policy for Windows XP, the browser would not run on that outdated and unmaintained Windows version.

I think this is perfectly reasonable given the size of the codebase.

In February 2017, Windows XP made up 8.4% of the Firefox userbase. After this there are no metrics on how many Firefox users there are, or Vista users, I guess because those OS are no longer supported. It's also not clear where these users are located and what was preventing them from upgrading.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

Tor Metrics does not have per-version data on Windows users, only Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux.

I think that if there was a strong desire to have Windows XP/Vista support for Tor Browser though, it would need to have that support reintroduced in Firefox.

Thanks, Iain.