A report on daily driving Windows XP
[Go Back]Last year I daily drove Windows XP for an extended period of time. This is what it was like:
Why?
The sole reason I wanted to daily drive Windows XP was because I wanted to . This demands no further explanation. I was curious and wanted to see what it was like.
Establishing a foundation
Internet Explorer 6 is no good, so I needed a new browser. The last time I had daily driven XP was in 2018. One thing that I learnt is, that things tend to change quickly in this regard. While I got away just fine with using Firefox 52 back then, I needed a more modern browser. I decided to go with Mypal 68, but I later switched to Mypal 32. A lot of this was simply trial & error
The horrors of Mypal
Mypal will f***ing explode if you throw JS at it
Mypal, while being quite a neat little browser, is absolutely terrible with handling JS. This lead me to discover alternative frontends to popular sites. I didn't like the way Mypal 68 looked in comparison to the rest of the OS. I quickly jumped ship and replaced the official versions of certain websites with alternatives. One of them is that I switched from using YouTube.com to an Invidious instance. Another thing that I did was using NoScript. If you don't know what NoScript is, it basically blocks all JS, making you responsible for enabling certain ones. This helped so much.
Compatibility
Except for rather basic applications, you'll have trouble using them on Windows XP. Office 2010 is the latest Office version to run on XP and lots of modern frameworks don't support XP anymore. If you're into something that requires a very certain set of softwares (or something equivalent), you'll either have to consult old versions or face the reality that sometimes, there are no versions for XP at all. In this sense, Abandonware is your friend.