Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris
I am amazed that I see people use such old versions of programs that have known security flaws and are susceptible to all kinds of nasty stuff... That alone should be a reason to upgrade or replace. For most common programs there are low-cost/free alternatives that are being maintained and actively solve security issues.
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I have some sympathy with your point of view, but there are times when finding feature equivalency is either impossible or expensive, e.g:
Developers who made use of the
well documented by Microsoft Column Handler feature in XP's shell were stranded when Vista came along. Vista
replaced it with the Property Handler feature, this wasn't a case of enhancing what was there and giving it a new name - Column and Property handlers are chalk and cheese.
Same with the document history feature that was available in
all editions of Word 2007. Sometime between Word 2007 and Word 2016 that specific feature was dropped from all editions. There is a similarly named feature in Word 2016 - but it relies on SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, which are only accessible from Office 365 for Business, not from Office 365 Home/Student or Personal - and once again it's chalk and cheese compared to the old one.
And don't get me started on Mozilla's dropping of the XUL-extension support and introduction of their WEB-extension feature - afaik without any conversion aids. I know of two people who enjoyed a modest supplement to their income from donations related to their XUL-extensions. It plummeted to near zero soon after Moz announced that future versions of Firefox would not support existing extensions - i.e. they would not work and may (would) crash Firefox. The effort to develop feature equivalent WEB-extensions was, by their estimation, either not doable or enormous. I noticed Moz added a boatload of developer enhancements in version Firefox 63 - that's about two years too late.
I believe some Windows AV vendors continue to release products for XP, and some of the bigger extension developers (e,g, Lastpass and UBlock) are still releasing new versions of their XUL extensions.
I've used a particular duplicate image finder for decades, it was abandoned in 2010. I have looked for and failed to find an equivalent product. Given it has no internet connectivity, and that I've been using it trouble free for almost 25 years, my continued use of it has zilch security implications - IMO. Would I recommend it to anyone - probably not - the UI is disconcertingly wonky these days
But it it has features I've not found in other free or modestly priced products - I did find something that claimed to have similar features - for hundreds of usa-bucks.
BR