Moving toward supporting recent Windows 10 releases and later (ideal target: NVDA 2026.1 milestone)

[josephsl]

Hi,

The following proposal is meant to hear comments from stakeholders on NVDA and Windows 10 support, hopefully to be done as part of 2026.1 milestone:

Background

From time to time NVDA added and removed support for various Windows releases. When first introduced in 2006, NVDA supported Windows 2000 and XP, with optimizations for the latter. Versions prior to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 were dropped in NVDA 2017.4, and Windows 7 SP1 and 8.0 support ended in 2024.1. As NVDA is moving to become a 64-bit screen reader, this provides an opportunity to evaluate support for unsupported Windows releases, including older Windows 10 releases.

Current status

As of April 2025, Microsoft supports the following Windows operating systems:

• Windows 10 (1507 LTS, 1607 LTS, 1809 LTS, 21H2 LTS, 22H2)
• Windows 11 (22H2, 23H2, 24H2)
• Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025

In addition, NVDA supports Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2, the former unsupported as of January 2023 and the latter as of October 2023 apart from extended security updates.

Rationale

While keeping support for unsupported Windows releases can provide historical information and allow NVDA to be used in legacy environments, it hinders long-term maintenance and creates problems when attempting to optimize NVDA features and internals. This is more so when newer Windows releases provide API's to improve accessibility, and supporting legacy systems means we need to support old and new ways of doing things or find ways to incorporate new technologies from the viewpoint of old ways of doing things. Further, we need to think about operating system market share - Windows 10 and later are running on vast majority of computers that report usage statistics, and migration from Windows 10 to 11 is accellerating somewhat with the impending end of consumer level support for Windows 10 2022 Update (final feature update) in October 2025.

Benefits

• Allows NVDA to take advantage of newer Windows API changes
• Improve long-term maintenance process by removing what could be considered dead code
• Shows NVDA project's responsiveness to market trends

Drawbacks

• End of support for legacy systems which can impact some parts of the world
• Can create compatibility issues if code is removed without considering their impact throughout the source code tree

Moving forward

If the community decides to move to supporting Windows 10 and later, I advise 2026.1 as the good milestone to target as that milestone is planned to be the first 64-bit release. However, an important thing to resolve is which Windows 10 version should be considered minimum version as far as NVDA compatibility is concerned:

• Windows 10 1507 (LTS): marked as synonymous with Windows 10 in NVDA source code
• Oldest client and server LTS release: this means Windows 10 1607 (Anniversary Update) and Server 2016 or later
• Oldest supported release considering Appveyor process: this means Windows 10 1809 (October 2018 Update) and Server 2019 as the latter is the environment run on Appveyor
• Mainstream client and server long-term support releases: Windows 10 21H2 (November 2021 Update) and Server 2022 or later and is the default environment used for GitHub Actions
• Windows 11: no because Microsoft is offering paid Windows 10 extended security updates for consumers between October 2025 and October 2026

Changes to be done in NVDA source code based on minimum Windows 10 release selection

The following table describes changes to be done based on the Windows 10 releases noted above:

Windows 10 release	Public release date	End of support date for the longest supported edition	Build number	Server counterpart and/or shares same build number	Key OS features and API	NVDA source code notes
1507 (original release)	July 2015	October 2025	10240	None	First Windows 10 release, no change from Windows 8.x	Marked as winVersion.WIN10 and winVersion.WIN10_1507 and is the minimum version needed for Windows OCR feature
1607 (Anniversary Update)	August 2016	January 2027	14393	Yes (Server 2016)	IUIAutomation4	Marked as winVersion.WIN10_1607 with some features requiring this attribute
1809 (October 2018 Update)	November 2018	January 2029	17763	Yes (Server 2019)	IUIAutomation6	Marked as winVersion.WIN10_1809, major changes to UIA dialog handling and performance improvements
21H2 (November 2021 Update)	November 2021	January 2032	19044	Yes (Server 2022) but build numbers are different	UIA/MSAA bridge, no more EdgeHTML based Microsoft Edge	Must account for both Windows 10 and Server 2022

Of these, I recommend Windows 10 1809 (Server 2019) as minimum Windows 10 release to account for continuous integration (CI).

Discussion points

• Should we tie Windows 10 requirement to 2026.1 milestone?
• Which Windows 10 release should be considered minimum version? Benefits and drawbacks to this choice?
• If a minimum Windows 10 version later than 1507 is chosen, how should source code changes be done?
• How should the updated Windows requirement be communicated across the community and to different stakeholders?

Thanks.

[seanbudd]

A couple of things to mention:

• We are currently only maintaining Windows 10+ at this point, Windows 8.1 is no longer under active support.
• We want NVDA to work for as many machines as possible, even if we are no longer actively maintaining Windows 8.1 support, we don't intend to fully drop support until there is a technical requirement.
• We generally only drop full Windows support when Python drops full Windows support.
• We are stuck on Python 3.11 until py2exe supports 3.12+: Support Python 3.12 py2exe/py2exe#191, or we find an alternative to py2exe. We will not be moving from py2exe in 2026.1. As such, we will only be moving to 3.12+ if py2exe gets fixed before the end of the year.
• We only update to the n-1 python version, so if support is fixed in py2exe, at most we will be moving to 3.13, not 3.14.
• Python 3.12 and 3.13 still claim to support Windows 8.1, other than this known, but poorly documented case of support being dropped for a Windows 8.1 era server version Python 3.12 crashes on invocation on Windows Server 2012 python/cpython#110375 .
• As such, there's no likelihood or imperative to fully drop Windows 8.1 support in 2026.1. We're not spending maintenance effort on keeping it, and there's no technical requirements to drop support. We will be dropping support for 32bit machines in 2026.1.

[seanbudd]

I guess a counter argument would be that Python doesn't seem to be actively maintaining 8.1 support either - so it might be safer to drop support rather than run an untested/unsupported version of python