Well I managed to get some gaming in last night for the first time in ages and I did NOT have to install Windows10 to do it
It seems that there is indeed a web browser thing in the MTA client for some reason (yes I know that some help messages could open internally but were players really that excited about also reading the troubleshooting page or their favourite server's "web presence" in game, rather than just launching the default OS browser?).
Anyway, the problem (as usual) is indeed a massive corporation taking kickbacks to obsolesce old computers whilst at the same time tricking "consumers" into installing more powerful spy software.
In this case, the company is Google and the offending technology is Chromium Embedded Framework, which is essentially a smaller copy of Chrome and they've decided to no longer support old computers.
As MTASA HQ are probably auto-updating their dependencies for each nightly build, their compiler may have been infected with the W10 variant of CEF, preventing the ability to correctly target older architectures (even though the client .exe file ironically proclaims it requires XP SP3 or later).
I may already have said too much and someone may be foolish enough to update their VisualStudio licence to 2016 which probably comtains Terms and Conditions forbidding the attempt to compile for anything older than W10 (whilst also deliberately not shipping with the necessary dlls and API lookups).
Hint: Don't introduce unnecessary features that require a later operating system/compiler/plugin and you'll be able to continue using your current setup to make your software and it'll generally still function on computers owned by those people that really must have an extra pixel of DirectX37 volumetric tesseractic ray-traced bloom shaders (really useful for MTA, I know
).
If Google (or indeed any company whose extra things you may be using [ASE for here maybe or Unity if you're developing a cheap mobile/browser game] decides to make their part of YOUR software require an update to another part of your programming flow, steadfastly refuse to comply. Use an older version of their software, preferably with a means of denying updates once you have the version you need for the feature set you were aiming for. ALWAYS keep a copy of the old installer for that software, don't just install from the web because they'll just change the page contents to a version that says it won't install because you're too old.
Remember what Adobe did with Flash, when they installed a kill switch into the software several versions before the actual termination date, thereby making it highly likely that most users would have installed the auto-destruct
(fortunately safe versions are still obtainable as we can't all afford to go around "ruffle-ing" our feathers.
Never settle for cries of "security" because most of the problems that were associated with Flash were actually caused by them adding millions of uneccessary capabilities in the first place - did ANYONE do more than post a highscore to a server from within a Newgrounds game? Were banking institutions REALLY running customer account logins over a pre-HTML5 media player?!
I could even give you a dissertation on the excessive use of JavaScript if you like and why that regularly breaks CloudFlare hosted sites but I think you get the idea.
A couple of final thoughts if you are a software developer and you are using one of these components that won't work properly under older systems (usually because of an artificial lock-out), you are allowed to let your customers/clients know that their equipment isn't officially supported and some parts of your product may not work as intended (in this case, the in-game browser appears to crash to desktop), whilst still allowing them to install the thing.
Even Microsoft allows the installation of unsigned drivers (or at least it does in W7 and earlier, I wouldn't know what stupid things are going on now after their attempts with TPM and W11)
Any newbs with Windows10 or 11 can always use the inbuilt VirtualMachine if they want to use something that their operating system complains about attempting to run.
It's not so simple for someone running Windows8 to emulate DX12 (especially as Microsoft, ATI amd Nvidia aren't exactly open-sourcing the machine code instructions
or memory bus voltages
for that stuff - although if they did, Windows98 would probably be able to run Baldur's Gate III, albeit at 2FPS).
