Opera Stops Support for Windows XP and Windows Vista

Windows XP is arguably Microsoft’s most popular operating system ever. But it was released nearly 15 years ago, and Microsoft released a couple of new Windows operating systems in the meantime, so the majority of users and software developers decided to abandon Windows XP.

Microsoft also discontinued the commercial support for Windows XP, which means that the operating system is now less-secure to use. Since Microsoft made this move, software developers also stopped to deliver Windows XP-compatible programs. Yesterday, Windows XP lost the valuable member of the ‘compatible programs family,’ as one of the most popular browsers, Opera decided to remove support for this operating system. Opera browser won’t be compatible with Microsoft’s less-popular operating system, Windows Vista, from now on, as well.

Opera on Windows XP and Windows Vista to still receive security patches

The current version of the browser, Opera 36 is going to be the last Opera version to run on Windows XP and Windows Vista. So, when Opera 37 arrives, it is going to be compatible only with newer versions of Windows (Windows 7, Windows 8.1/8, and Windows 10).

The company stated that users will still be able to run Opera on these operating systems, but only if they run Opera 36. Although the Opera development team won’t offer any new versions of Opera for Windows XP and Vista, they’re still going to provide security updates for Opera 36 on XP and Vista, at least for some time.

“We do care for our loyal users, which you could recently observe with 12.18 security update. While Opera 36 will be last one with features additions on Windows XP and Vista, we are still going to provide security and crash fixes to XP and Vista platform. You will not be able to run Opera 37+ on Windows XP and Vista, we advise you update to more recent OS, if possible. Otherwise, we will have Opera 36 for you.”

We expect Opera to be just one in line of popular programs that will cut the support for Windows XP in the near future. Microsoft also did the similar thing recently, by discontinuing the support for older versions of Internet Explorer, as users are now getting updates only for IE 11.

Although Windows XP is still popular for some users, it became a quite unsafe operating system to use, since Microsoft stopped to support it. But knowing that their safety is threatened, and that a lot of programs don’t support Windows XP anymore, users will eventually have to move to a newer version of Windows, anyway.