It appears Microsoft are going to pull the plug on Windows 98 support earlier than originally anticipated. I’m somehow not surprised; sureless MS has been holding back a group of developers to sit around and fix code in ’98, developers who could be doing much more useful work elsewhere (such as in Vista!).
Personally, I think it’s about time. Windows 98 is old and clunky. I haven’t used it properly in ages. I daresay there’s going to be a lot of people out there still using it in some capacity. Most of those using it will probably be doing so for ‘legacy’ reasons. There’s going to be a significant number of businesses with legacy applications burbling along which do some arcane task and nobody has yet gotten it to run on XP, or they haven’t seen the point if it’s due to be phased out anyway.
There’s going to be a group of home users in the same position – they apply the ‘aint broke, don’t fix’ mentality to it, which is perfectly valid. Many people will be happily plodding along doing their odd bit of web surfing and emailing. There’s a workaround solution for those people; use a different browser. As long as they are firewalled and running up-to-date anti-virus software, they should in theory be OK. True, if something does still sneak onto the system it could compromise it, but then again that usually applies regardless of how recent your patches are.
Of course, ultimately the best option is to just upgrade completely. It’s always nice to have new toys anyway!