Minor update (7) for Vivaldi macOS Desktop Browser 6.9
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This update includes fixes for a couple of keyboard shortcut issues on macOS and brings support for Catalina (10.15) to an end.
Click here to see the full blog post
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So long macOS 10.15 🫡
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First . or second...
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3rd updated
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FYI, here's the post from Google announcing that they are dropping support for macOS 10.15: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/289795700/sunsetting-chrome-support-for-macos-10-15
Once the Chromium team drops support, the Vivaldi team is forced to as well.
Soprano / Moderator (and volunteer -- I do not work for Vivaldi) • Report a Bug • Community Code of Conduct
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@xyzzy: To expand a little. Yes it is too much for us to maintain this on our own outside of the Chromium project as things stand right now. However, Chromium dropped support for an unsupported OS. Had it been supported I doubt they would have done (they do not drop support before upstream). Ultimately it is because Apple dropped support.
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And to expand a bit further on what @Ruarí mentioned, in case somebody decides to ask "But can't you?" (you know they will):
I suspect that those who ask that question does not appreciate what is involved in maintaining a version that could still work on an older (End Of Life) OS.
First of all, it would require locating all the patches that the Chromium team deleted from the source once support was removed.
Then we would have to reinsert all those patches into our codebase and make sure they don't break anything.
Then we would have to maintain those patches through succeeding Chromium updates (every two months), and make sure the patches still does not break anything.
Then, down the line it is almost certain that the SDK libraries used to connect to the OS systems will remove old APIs that only was used in the now unsupported OS.
Once that happens the code for that old OS will not longer be able to build, unless one uses an older SDK that still have support, and then the code using the newer APIs that does not exists in the older SDK will not build.
The result would be that one would have to add further patches that disable one set of code when building with the older SDK, and other patches to disable the old OS code that won't work when building the newer SDK.
At that stage, the maintainer will have to build OS version specific releases, with all the extra testing that entails.
And once other OS versions reaches End Of Life and becomes unsupported the whole thing will start over again, in parallel.
A few days ago I saw a reference in another thread here in the forums to a specialized Chromium based browser that was able to run on Windows 7, support for which was retired last year. One poster mentioned that that browser was still on the 4 month old Chromium 126 (while Vivaldi 6.9 is based on Chromium 128, and current Snapshots are based on the recently released Chromium 130).
That it is still on Chromium 126 does not surprise me; what surprises me is that the developer(s) had been able to update it all the way to Chromium 126 (from 109). What I am wondering about is whether the build has been updated by backporting security patches from v127 through to v130? And such backporting becomes increasingly more difficult as time passes, and more and more security patches will have to be discarded because they will have to be re-engineered (which is a non-trivial task).
Using an EOL version OS exposes you to not just any security vulnerabilities in the OS, but that exists in the third-party software that is run on the system.
Further reading:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/pulling-the-plug-on-expired-operating-systems/
https://vivaldi.com/blog/lets-go-under-the-browser-hood-with-vivaldis-yngve/ -
To be nit-picky, neither macOS 11 nor macOS 12 are supported by Apple anymore but are still supported by the major browsers. However, as @yngve pointed out, at some point, it becomes too onerous for developers to maintain version-specific code for older operating systems or to produce builds for older systems when upstream dependencies change or when forced to move to newer SDKs... and the day comes when you are forced to update the minimum system requirements for your product, for the good of everyone.
Soprano / Moderator (and volunteer -- I do not work for Vivaldi) • Report a Bug • Community Code of Conduct
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@xyzzy You are right about those two. What it looks like is that Chromium supports the older unsupported OS version for two years after OS vendor support ended.
In some ways Win 7 was an exception, but that was because Win7 business users could pay for support until 3 years after public support ended, and the Chromium support was ended as the paid support ended, alongside Win 8.1. (There is a similar 3 year paid support system announced for Win10 when public support ends in a year.)
So, .... In a year we will probably be having this discussion again, for MacOS 11
