[cairo] Cairo on older Windows

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

Jeff Smith wrote:
> I keep hearing about Firefox 3.0 making a major shift to Cairo, but that 
> this will result in dropping support for Windows 95/98/Me.  Is this 
> really a Cairo issue?  If so, is there an explaination somewhere as to 
> why Cairo cannot (or will not) be supported on these older iterations of 
> Windows?

Cairo is not really the reason for us dropping support for Win95/98/ME 
-- Uniscribe and complex text rendering, broken file handling, as well 
as wanting to drop large chunks of old code that exist only as 
workarounds for Win95/98/ME are all much higher than cairo.

Users of those platforms already cannot get any security or other 
updates for their OS, and account for a very small (<1%) percentage of 
the web.  Firefox 2 is available for Win95/98/ME, and will continue to 
receive security updates until the release of Firefox 4, as per our 
support policy.

That hardware can be reused to good effect without asking that the user 
run a ten year old OS; recent versions of Linux should run on that 
hardware, and will be able to run Firefox 3 and beyond.

     - Vlad