Desktop apps for Windows XP in 2025

Intro Inspired by the Action Retro YouTube channel trying to get Spotify to run on Windows XP, I thought I'd share a quick walk through of using NW.js for Windows XP development. NW.js is a modified Chromium browser with Node.js built in. It has an older "Long Term Support" (LTS) release (v0.14.7) that supports "Legacy Operating Systems", like Windows XP and OSX 10.6. However, it is pretty old at this point and has some caveats. But we'll get there. Boot up XP First off I'm going to boot up my old Win Pro SP3 virtual machine. I'd recommend setting up your own, there are guides online for that, or just using real hardware. Download NW.js Go to this archive for version 0.14.7: http://dl.nwjs.io/v0.14.7 I'll explain the different flavors: "nwjs-sdk-symbol*" and "nwjs-symbol*" files are for advanced use cases, you won't need these. "nwjs-sdk-v0.14.7*" Is NW.js with Chromium dev tools built in "nwjs-v0.14.7*" Is the same thing, just without the dev tools, so it is slightly smaller. This is for distribution to end users Then they'll have the operating system (win, lin, osx) And then the architecture, 32-Bit (ia32) and 64-Bit (x64) I assume you'll want nwjs-sdk-v0.14.7-win-ia32.zip. But if you plan on distributing this for others to download, they probably won't need the dev tools, so you can use the slightly smaller version for them. The 32-bit version will run on both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows just fine. It will also run on XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11, and 12, and likely anything else in the future as Microsoft has always prioritized backwards compatibility. But who knows, 11 and 12 are so bad I wouldn't be surprised at what they do anymore. Honestly, having to use 11 so much recently and then booting up this XP VM is just pissing me off at much better XP is. Setting it up You downloaded a zip file, good job! You should be able to open it and drag the folder out to your desktop or wherever. Feel free to rename the folder from "nwjs-sdk-v0.14.7-win-ia32" to "MyApp" or whatever. Inside the folder is all the files NW.js needs to run, it doesn't need installed, it works sort of like a portable app. So you can just double-click on nw.exe to see a window pop up, then you can close the window. The nw.exe file can be renamed to whatever you want, MyApp.exe for example, and you can even use a tool like ResourceHacker to edit it and change the icon to any ICO file you want. You can grab a random ICO file from the IconArchive website, or use a tool like Greenfish Icon Editor to convert any image file to an ICO. All of that runs fine on Windows XP+. Creating an app Inside your "MyApp" folder, create a new folder called package.nw. All of your code and files will live inside this folder. Which makes it easy to copy it around to other versions of NW.js later. As long as the package.nw folder is next to the nw.exe (or whatever you renamed it to), it will work. Then, inside the package.nw folder create a package.json file. This is the first thing the nw.exe file will look for when it launches. It tells it what to do next. Inside the file there are only 2 required fields so we'll start with those: name - This is the name of your app. It is required because any time you open NW.js, Chromium will control showing a window, and Chromium needs to make a bunch of user-specific files. So for Windows XP that would be at C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\my-app. The "my-app" part is whatever you put in this name field. It must be a url and file-system safe name. I'd recommend all lowercase and hyphens instead of spaces. main - This tells NW.js what to load in the window when it launches. Usually you'd set it to index.html and then create that file and put whatever you want in it to make your app. However you can also set it to a URL, so we'll start there, as it will show an XP specific problem we'll need to solve. MyApp\package.nw\package.json { "name": "my-app", "main": "https://google.com" } With that in place, now when you run nw.exe, it will open a window and take you to Google.com. Or at least, that's what it would do, but instead you'll see this: Chromium dropped support for XP a long time ago. So we must use a very old version that still works with XP. However, the certificate it ships with is now long expired. We can work around this by adding one more item to the package.json file: { "name": "my-app", "main": "https://google.com", "chromium-args": "--ignore-certificate-errors" } Save that, and re-run nw.exe and now it should launch a window with Google loaded inside it. There are a bunch of other settings you can put in the package.json, including adjusting the starting window size and position. More information can be found in the docs: https://nwjs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/References/Manifest%20Format/ Version stuff At this point you can make whatever you

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "main": "https://google.com"
}

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "main": "https://google.com",
  "chromium-args": "--ignore-certificate-errors"
}

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "main": "index.html",
  "chromium-args": "--ignore-certificate-errors"
}

  
    
    
  
  
    
Hello World
     id="example">

In this example code we are:

• Styling the app with CSS
• Setting the window title with the