Indeed, I thought the same when I read the news.

User education would be much more effective than blocking IE6 or whatever PayPal is planning.

Uh-huh…

I was thinking that its very much like cars, soon as a model is dicontinued their value drops, suddenly they become much less desirable - even tough you can still get spare parts (might not be the same in the States with different versions most years).

I Just wish they would block Ie to start an avalanche of browser migrations

XP is only supported for another 32 days 18 hours and 16 min

Not exactly. XP is only available through the end of June. It will still receive “mainstream” (i.e. full) support through April 2009, with extended support (including security fixes) through 2014. (Source: Microsoft Product Lifecycle Search)

You only have a month to buy a new copy of Windows XP, but existing computers will have 6 years before Microsoft stops shipping security updates.

“If you’re only looking at Vista and Leopard on the latest hardware, the numbers are going to be small, but if you include other releases that still have vendor support, like Windows XP, the numbers widen considerably.”

XP is only supported for another 32 days 18 hours and 16 min (from savexp dot com). Will this mean many more viable machines ending up down the tip?

I’ll have to check some global stats, but my own site is seeing 70% WinXP and 14% Vista on OS, and 36% IE7, 27% Firefox 2, and 25% IE6 on browsers. (Sadly, AWStats doesn’t break down Opera, Safari or Mac OSX versions.) Only 4% are on older versions of Windows, less than half a percent on older versions of IE, and less than 1% on older versions of Firefox.

That’s more than 84% on a modern OS, and more than 63% on a modern browser (I can’t bring myself to include IE6), even before factoring in Opera, Safari, Mac OS, or Linux.

@Jezetha: Last I heard, PayPal hadn’t actually started blocking browsers yet, just talking about it. Even so, Opera 9.2 on WinXP fits their current criteria for “acceptable” and then some.

“Well… computer nostalgia is one thing. But it isn’t unreasonable for a banking site to require a modern web browser…”

Is it reasonable to discard perfectly working machines, which are often better built than current models? Most of the time, the new superior products are being pushed just to feed the software / hardware suppliers mutal benifit in change, with the consumers just being there to pay?

Last week I was sat on the train and the bloke next to me was hunched over a new laptop playing with Microsoft Dynamics V4, with the help of the instruction manual. I got chatting to him, and he said that he was trying to work out how to use version 4, having only just mastered V3.5 it had all changed.

I know many people/families who have had the same computer for 7-8 years easily and are content with it until it no longer works. Some of these computers are running early Windows builds such as 98 and 2000 that, while a lot of people love them, are far behind by today’s standards and could easily be targeted for exclusion.

I think we the public should send a message to companies such as eBay to support graceful degradation.