Re: Steam finally kills Win7/8 support

On Sat, 30 Nov 2024 01:30:07 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com> wrote at 18:38 this Wednesday (GMT):

On Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:37:12 -0500, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>

these deprecations aren't directly
caused by Valve, but by their use of Chromium as the underlying
framework in Steam.

>
OH! Okay, that makes perfect sense. I forgot that there was 3rd party
browser code in Steam.
>
So they literally can't fix security holes. They'd have to release an "at
your own risk" version.

>
>
Isn't chrome(ium) open source?

Yes it is.

So Valve _could_ retroactively add support for older operating systems
into their client. Doing so would constitute an an entirely new branch
of the browser, however, and half the point of using a third-party
browser is so you don't have to maintain it yourself, but can just
download the updated source to use in your project whenever you need
it. Although there is actually already a branch of Chromium for
older Windows versions that is reguarly updated called Supermium that
they could use. But I doubt that is as vigorously tested as the core
Chromium code.

But the Chrome thing also gives Valve excuse not to have to support
older operating systems anymore. You don't need to worry about
problems --and create workarounds-- for issues that only occur on
older operating systems. From all we've heard about Valve's internals,
they don't really have good structure for things like maintenance of
older projects; it's all about the 'latest and greatest' fad, and
infrastructure projects are lowest-totem-pole assignments. So ensuring
old code remains good code isn't a priority there. Nobody there wants
to ensure that Steam keeps running on old WinXP machines, so nobody
does it. And if a few customers get shafted, well, them's the breaks.