For Windows users, why switch to RM8?
You have a full feature native RM7. RM8 strips out many features, has a very different interface with more clicking and is currently full of bugs.
Mac users looking for a native app have no choice but to try RM8 and wait out the many serious bugs and nonstandard behaviors in another program like FTM or Heredis.
RM7 will surely continue to work for a very long time. But, …
Somewhere along the way, one of the WebHints API’s will be changed by the service providers, and RM7’s WebHints for that provider will break.
There may be something else that will break that I haven’t thought of yet. For example, RM7 will surely work on Windows 11, but who knows about Microsoft’s future plans.
RM8 will be getting new features. RM7 will not. I look forward to new features in the future. I will not be getting any with RM7.
Having said that, RM7 presently meets my needs much better than RM8. If RM7 and RM8 were different products from different companies, and if both were going to be improved and supported moving forward, I would choose RM7 over RM8. But RM7 will not be improved and supported moving forward. So my present strategy is to try to work around the many limitations and problems I find in RM8. My production data is still on RM7 and will remain there until I am comfortable that RM8 will meet my needs.
Windows OS is updated only once or twice a decade so that is not much of a risk but Ancestry changing the hints api is likely within 1-2 years. On the mac side, Bruce will probably stop paying for RM7 crossover pretty soon but that has no effect on Windows people. RM8 has so many missing old features to catch up on that actually new features seem far in the future (if there is one).
I have no sense of the relative problems on the windows vs mac side but both seem to have those nasty access violation errors.
I am a Windows OS user and I think RM8 is terrific. I do not get error messages. I like all the new features, and the rebuilt old. I can wait patiently for the few that remain to be added and am excited to see where RM8 is headed in the future.