Both XP and Vista users will be supported on Slimjet 10 branch

After spending a lot of time trying to get Slimjet 12 compatible with Vista, we have decided to give up on that effort. Although we have managed to get Slimjet 12 to run and browse sites properly under Vista, it is not able to load any plugins under vista, most importantly, the flash plugin. That means you will not be able to watch any videos since Slimjet doesn’t have h.264 codec support on Vista. With the pace the chrome guys at Google is quickly introducing vista-incompatible features and API calls, it will be a losing fight for us to hunt out their changes from the huge code base and find a workaround for each of them.

Therefore, we have decided not to continue Vista support in Slimjet 12. Since it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to create a separate branch just for Vista users, we have decided to continue both XP and Vista support on the Slimjet 10 branch. Slimjet has the best support of all the legacy features, including Java and NPAPI.

If you are visiting the download page of Slimjet from an XP or Vista PC, you will be automatically redirected to the download page of Slimjet 10. If you do want to try Slimjet 11 or 12 on Vista, you can get it from the Slimjet version archive. Slimjet 11 works just fine on Vista. Slimjet 12 can’t load any pepper plugins on Vista. 

Thanks a lot for your understanding.

13 thoughts on “Both XP and Vista users will be supported on Slimjet 10 branch”

  1. Hello to the team from Greece!

    Being on Vista SP2 (Home Premium) 32bit is the main reason I switched over to Slimjet when Google Chrome stopped supporting my OS (still on extended support by MS till April 2017).
    It is very frustrating to be on the same boat again after five months 🙁
    My main browser is Firefox, but I also like to use Chromium based ones for various reasons
    (which are off-topic here) …

    I am writing this from a portable (PAF) version of latest Slimjet 12.0.1.0 (on Vista SP2 x86), so
    very pleased indeed with the outcome of your efforts; here is an excerpt of my “slimjet://version” page:

    Slimjet: 53.0.2785.89 (Έκδοση προγραμματιστή) (32-bit)
    Revision: 49dccdea6645f6759fc6e779e12e81930ede2d4a
    OS: Windows
    Blink: 537.36 (@a905cffb2d18baa410d0a19cc9d3941349f2d4b6)
    JavaScript: V8 5.3.332.37
    Flash: 23.0.0.181
    User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.89 Safari/537.36
    Command: “G:\PortableApps\SlimjetPortable\App\Slimjet\slimjet.exe” –user-data-dir=”G:\PortableApps\SlimjetPortable\Data\profile” –disk-cache-dir=”C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp\SlimjetPortableTemp\Slimjet\” –no-default-browser-check” –flag-switches-begin –flag-switches-end
    Executable path: G:\PortableApps\SlimjetPortable\App\Slimjet\slimjet.exe
    Profile path: G:\PortableApps\SlimjetPortable\Data\profile\Default

    Some remarks on my part:

    1. In the 11.0.8.0 Release Notes you state:
    > Disabled auto-update of flash plugins for vista users to avoid compatibility issues.
    > (Flash v23 or later doesn’t support xp or vista)
    Yes, this is true for version 23.0.0.162 of the PPAPI plugin; Adobe are aware and are
    currently working on a fix:
    https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2208589

    Already, the latest beta version of the PPAPI plugin (now 23.0.0.181)
    WORKS AS EXPECTED, at least on Vista (haven’t tried it on XP SP3).

    2.You said:
    > Although we have managed to get Slimjet 12 to run and browse sites properly under Vista,
    > it is not able to load any plugins under vista, most importantly, the flash plugin

    Again, this is something I am not experiencing here;
    “slimjet://plugins” shows 4 loaded plugins, including (PPAPI) Flash!
    “slimjet://flash” reports:

    Slimjet 53.0.2785.89 ()
    OS Windows Vista or Server 2008 SP2
    Flash plugin 23.0.0.181 G:\PortableApps\SlimjetPortable\App\Slimjet\PepperFlash\pepflashplayer.dll

    And PPAPI 23.0.0.181 works OK on all sites I’ve tried!

    3. You said:
    > That means you will not be able to watch any videos since
    > Slimjet doesn’t have h.264 codec support on Vista.

    Again, THIS IS NOT TRUE; Windows Vista SP2 fully updated (with Platform Update Supplement for WinVistaSP2 (KB2117917)) HAS NATIVE SUPPORT FOR BOTH h264 and AAC, through MSE.
    Hence Slimjet, Firefox, Opera36 and other browsers that don’t ship with patented codecs
    (like Chrome) are able to handle standalone MP4 files and MPEG-DASH streaming via HTML5
    without the need for Flash plugin; so I don’t see where your claim is coming from (?)…

    Please, don’t give up on Vista, at least not until its official EOL!
    Again, my endless gratitude for your tremendous work so far!
    (and apologies for the length of this comment, but important
    things needed to be communicated!)

    Regards

  2. … Not only my previous comment wasn’t made public, but:

    > If you do want to try Slimjet 11 or 12 on Vista,
    > you can get it from the Slimjet version archive

    … Slimjet 12.0.1.0 (x86) has vanished from the archive:

    http://www.slimjet.com/release/archive/

    What’s going on, really?

    1. Slimjet 10 is supported as well. We just can’t migrate it to the newer version of Chromium.

  7. Hi Stephen,

    I use NPAPI quite a lot on an XP computer, therefore Slimjet has been great for me! Thanks so much for your work.

    Do you intend to provide ongoing support on the Slimjet 10 branch in the mid-term?

    Thanks again.

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