April 11, 2017 Vista will be EOL (end of life). Microsoft will not publish public security patches anymore for Windows Vista after patch Tuesday tomorrow. Windows 7 can run very well on Vista era hardware and should be OK on many of those systems. Windows Vista is also eligible to upgrade directly to Windows 8.1. Both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are eligible for upgrade to Windows 10. Vista era hardware may meet W10 basic requirements, but it may not perform well without hardware upgrades. It all depends on the rig you have. This is an ideal opportunity to try something other than Windows: Linux distros run great on a Vista era hardware. Browser support, if you choose to stay with Vista, will be challenging... Internet Explorer 10 and 11: Not supported by Vista Firefox: Support due to end later in 2017. The company says it will "continue to provide security updates for users until September 2017" and will set a final support end date around mid-2017. The last version of Firefox to support Vista is Firefox 52, which was made available on March 7. Opera: Version 36 is the last supported version for Vista, but the company says it will continue to offer security patches. Google Chrome: No longer supported
Web browsers on my xp machine are still working ok apart from gmail warnings there is no obvious problem outside possible security patches
Browsers are the first thing to stop getting updated. When Mac OSX Leopard reached EOL, users ran an outdated Firefox because Mozilla stopped supporting the PPC platform. That's been remedied with TenFourFox port, which has the latest updated browser for those chips. Damn Steve Jobs for making it obsolete by switching to Intel!
Vista will not regret by many. An Os with many problems, at least initially, that forced to leave XP alone to be actually richer or innovative. Someone yet loved it.
I like Vista a lot. With both service packs installed, it runs nearly as well as Windows 7, and is a massive improvement over XP.
At the moment, just about everything supports Vista, including popular security software. Google ended support for Vista in Chrome a year ago, but there are Chrome based browsers like Yandex that continue to support Vista. It makes sense to ditch Vista due to the lack of security updates. But for now at least, software support is still excellent.
Online Vista presence is estimated to be around 25.5 million users (approx. 0.72% of all Windows online usage). The most talked about 'major decision date' is January 14, 2020. This will be when W7 will be end of life, so maybe Vista users will adopt this date as their major decision date also. As long as a major security exploit does not suddenly appear that attacks Vista, there should be no compelling reason to send Vista packing. If the Vista era hardware does not keel over, staying put would be a reasonable decision also. Why bother with all the effort and cost of upgrading with an additional 2.5 years on the offer?
Running an unpatched browser is a major risk. Last FF version to support Vista is 52.0. And with Windows 7, there are 3 years left. If Windows is too expensive there is Linux. In other words, plenty of options to migrate to a more secure and up to date OS around.