New Stable Windower - May 2026

In case you guys didn't notice, a pretty big update hit Windower Stable today. After many, many, many months developing and testing stuff they finally released it!
There's a plethora of new features but I'll leave the surprise to you, just explore that "config" option and reap the fat results!


So many thanks to Arcon, Nifim, Lili, Rubenator and everybody at the Windower team for working so hard for this incredibly ungrateful community we're all part of!
Thanks folks!

There are currently some problems launching on older operating systems, if you're logged in you should probably stay so for a while.

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57459/windower-v4-dev-tracker/4/#3786369

You can find more details about the announcement here:
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57459/windower-v4-dev-tracker/4/#3786349

I would postulate it's quite unstable, achually lol
Followed by 7 hook patches in 2 days. again.

If you are using windows 7 yeah there is a function that the code now uses, unsurprisingly no one on the dev branch reported that issues. but we got lots of issue reported for linux users which was the bulk of the delay in merging dev.

don't give in and support windows 7.

only an absolute nut would still be using windows 7

Ehhhhh about that. The game should work on legacy hardware and if you break it you should really ensure you fix it.

Continually updating windower at the cost of previously perfectly working scenatios aint cool.

You can't choose to not update windower

Or provide a legacy version that you stop tweaking.

The entitlement for free software, lul

Big thanks to the Windower team for still working on this!

That's literally the opposite of entitlement. Entitlement would be demanding new ***. Asking to leave it the *** alone so it continues to work isn't that.

Fixing ***that ain't broken, breaking more ***

one of the many fixes included in this update is one that impacts the `windower.ffxi.run` and `.follow` functions, in the past it has been reported that these functions could go haywire and the character would "appear" to jump some great distance forward and then back. Except it did not appear that way it actual is visible to a third party the character would appear to pos warp and then warp back to the intended position.

No one can know what is or is not broken at any given time, if they are not supporting the people coming in with these issues.

'mah old PC, they should make sure it works for ME', no entitlement at all in there.

Probably better off not responding at all since Rooks will come in and squash you like a cockroach for complaining about Windower (again), but you have to respond.

Is there a Patreon link or something for donating? (Even more so if the hook can be updated everyday, just for Eiryls sake).

it's not overly complicated to block updates from windower.

if you're using windows 7 you should probably look into doing so now.

nobody cares about your vendetta against Microsoft(while still using their products..), stop making everyone's life harder.

if you're going to be on an unsupportable OS, you should at least learn to run software on it

I noticed the guildwork.dll being updated, is there any fixes or it just got updated due to recompilation?

The latter. It won't be properly updated anymore. We will work on extracting its relevant features, and putting that into a new addon, then we will discontinue Guildwork.

As for the Win7 situation, we're still looking for a solution. Some of the underlying APIs used have been changed in recent versions of our developer tools. This is a known issue, and Microsoft says they won't go back on that. So we have to make a choice, find whichever APIs cause the issues and refactor them somehow, or continue building using older tools. Alternatively, drop support for Windows 7. If that should happen, we will provide a last working version of Windower for Windows 7, and then just develop new versions without those restrictions, while leaving the Windows 7 version frozen in time, without support from our end.

We'll let you know once we know more.

I've had windower crash twice since the start of free campaign, both times the software was running for several hours before it crashed.

When it crashed today it briefly had the sound run in a short loop similar to when the operating system (windows 11) freezes but then it snapped out of it and only windower crashed to desktop.


Is the fact that it runs for several hours before it crashes a indication for a memory leak?

@arcon,

7 came out in 2009. Regular support stopped in 2015. Security support stopped in 2020.

Whats the big motivation to keep supporting this OS? I cant be the only person who is wondering about the time/development that has gone into supporting an OS that by and large has been deprecated by at least 6 years.

I dont want to put words in his mouth at all but I will say he(and the whole team) has always came across to me as people that wants to help the largest amount of folks possible. It might be a desire not to leave fellow FFXI players without a way to play. In some ways Win7 is better than 10/11 and I wont hate on people that are worried to upgrade their whole OS. However sad reality is all this love to FFXI is given for free out of kindness so if win7 support ends then no one should be upset with the dev team.

FFXI was originally released with Windows 98 compatibility.

The team has been avoiding obvious things that break backwards compatibility with 7, because windower 4 was released with support for it, but the march of time is merciless. This may not be the day, but some day somethings gotta give.

Fwiw I agree that my experience with windows 7 was better than windows 10 and 10 better than 11. Microsoft has gotten better at extracting value / money from people but hasn't fundamentally innovated in a way that changes my user experience, so every subsequent OS is worse. However, my solution (vs. using Windows 11) is to switch to Linux and use Lumoria for ffxi. The transition was honestly not bad.

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 7 nearly six and a half years ago. They stopped supporting Windows 10 just over half a year ago. That's a significant gap in time between the two versions. Microsoft changes things very frequently, and sometimes those changes break things on older platforms. The windower team is providing the community with a service and spending their own leisure time to produce it. Sometimes people take that for granted. If modern updates make the old versions too problematic to keep stable moving forward it's perfectly reasonable to drop support, and everyone in the community should be able to understand and respect that.

I'm just glad they're still working on the project and maintaining it. Thank you team, for all the effort you've put in over the years.

This sums it up. We would love to give up on Windows 7, but too many people are still using it. Yes, they should move on, either to a newer Windows version or to Linux, especially now that Lumoria is a thing. And it is only a matter of time before it stops working for good. But it's not my place to tell them to do that. But if people on Windows 7 can't play FFXI anymore, and it's only a matter time, I don't want it to be because of us. As a point of comparison, we only stopped supporting Windows XP when it literally stopped being able to connect to GitHub due to lacking TLS 1.3 support, which was around 2020.

We're still trying to see if we can fix these issues. But if it turns out to be too much effort, we may just release a "final" Windows 7 version, which will be incompatible with new plugins and possibly addons, and move on with our lives.

I'll throw my 2 cents in as a Win7 user. I'm playing on a crappy budget PC I got in 2010. Frankly it's a miracle the thing still even works, but obviously FFXI is a pretty easy game to run so that part isn't a problem. However, I don't have the specs to upgrade to Win10. If Win7 were fully dropped, I would lose access to Windower entirely until I can manage an upgrade.

It's an MMO from 2002. Some of us are just old fogies with outdated hardware that's good enough to run a PS2 era game we're still addicted to. That said, if the decision is made to cut support, I'd understand it. I would personally be totally fine with it if they just dropped a legacy version that reverted back to the Windower we had a few days ago and lost this update's new features, with gratitude for them keeping it running as long as they have.

Very happy with the update so far. Before this when I'd /shutdown on my three characters only one would actually shut down correctly. The other two would remain open with black screens that had to be manually closed by clicking the X in the corner of the window. Now they all shut down just fine.

would highly suggest looking up how to block updates to windower.

i realize you are being relatively understanding but you cannot expect them to keep a free program up to date for a 20 year old OS. time to take matters into your own hands

My god. I didn't know about the fast POL login until now. I have been logging in the original way since 2004, so this is a wild update to me. Thank you to everyone who worked on it and put it forward!

came here to say this, thanks team Windower!

So Windower isn't likely to suddenly stop working one day. The big incompatibility happens when some feature or bug fix requires a new version of a library, and that library relies on some underlying Windows API that wasn't around during those earlier versions.

Basically stuff like hook.dll, LuaCore.dll, Config.dll and so forth. The day very well could come that to support process hooking on Windows 12 requires some newer version of hook.dll that dropped support for Windows 7. Or some new Windower lua functionality requires a newer LuaCore.dll that simply doesn't work right on Windows 7.

Well, not quite. The new dev tools purposefully break Win7 compatibility, like Arcon said.

Anything built with newer dev tools, which you need for compatibility with Win10/11, will not work on Win7 even with no code changes to the application other than building with newer dev tools.