The following notice is from the NV Access Web site.
NVDA 2017.4 drops support for Older Operating systems
August 31, 2017 2:25 pm
After much consideration, NV Access has decided that NVDA 2017.3 will be
the last version of NVDA to support older Operating systems such as
Windows XP and Vista. NVDA 2017.4, which will be released around the end
of November, will require windows 7 Service Pack 1, or Windows Server
2008 R2 Service Pack 1 to run. Those users on older Operating Systems
can continue to run NVDA 2017.3.
It is becoming increasingly harder to maintain support for older
Operating Systems while at the same time fixing bugs and adding new
features for newer and more secure Operating systems. With only 4% of
our users now on these older Operating systems, we feel it is no longer
worth the investment, especially now that it is starting to impact the
majority of our users. To add to this, Microsoft no longer offers any
support for Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 with no Service Pack. This
means that users are running these Operating Systems at great risk to
security. Many other mainstream applications including browsers such as
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have already dropped support for these
older Operating systems.
NV Access acknowledges that this decision will be unpopular to some, and
also understands that there will be users who will not be able to switch
to a newer Operating system. Therefore NV Access will continue to offer
the NVDA 2017.3 download on its website, even once future NVDA versions
are published.
Increasing the minimum Operating system version requirement for NVDA
allows us to focus efforts on the stability and security of NvDA, by
leveraging features and optimizations both in the Windows Operating
System itself, and the modern development tools Microsoft provides.
For those in the community who choose to run snapshot or rc versions and
provide feedback, from today these builds may no longer run on older
Operating Systems. In the coming days, these snapshots will refuse to
run on anything below the minimum Operating System version, and will
display a Windows dialog alerting the user to the fact. The NV Access
update server is now already offering NVDA 2017.3 to any user running a
snapshot or rc version on these older Operating System versions and will
not offer any future NVDA version above 2017.3. For those on supported
Operating Systems, you will see no change.
We certainly look forward to continuing to develop and provide more
stable, secure, and feature-filled versions of NVDA to the community,
ensuring that blind and vision impaired people across the globe have
equal access to computers.
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David Goldfield, Assistive Technology Specialist Feel free to visit my
Web site WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info