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Firefox to Drop Pre-Windows 2000 Support
cyclomedia writes "While more and more platforms are getting (or aiming for) Firefox ports, the trunk itself seems to be going the other way. In an effort to clean up the API calls used and reduce the codesize a patch was posted at Bugzilla removing support from pre-W2k versions of Windows. There's a fiery discussion going on over at the Mozillazine forums about this after a counter bug was filed. The official position appears to be that Firefox 3.0 will maintain this un-compatibility, but developers are, obviously, free to work on a separate Win 98 compatible 'port.'"
i'd be hard pressed to find someone who runs anything pre-win2000 as their main/only computer and also has technical sense enough to want to use firefox.
I dunno, it's what people said when they found out IE7 wouldn't support 98.
I guess it's a little mean to the 98 people, but I think it's reasonable. It's hard to support a lot of platforms, and with Vista coming out that would have been 4+ Windows platforms to support without dropping 9x. Also, since it's open-source, there's plenty of opportunity for people to make a fork designed just for Win9x if there's enough interest. 9x people should really upgrade though. Win2k, FYI, is one of the easiest Windows to pirate. There's a hack that someone found to make the CD not even ask you for a key to install. I'm sure most of the ISOs at http://www.isohunt.com/ have it, if anyone needs it. Or here's another place to get your upgrade.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I use Windows 95 OSR2 on several boxes at home, and nasties don't happen. Why? Because OSR2 doesn't support many of the infection vectors present in newer Win32 flavors. It's too old.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
You can't play the statistics card to win this one, unfortunately.
Only 3.3% of people are using Linux. Might as well drop support for them, too.
And who's maintaining a Mac build for only 3.6% of the population? WTF?
"It's too old", by the way, doesn't mean "Nobody bothers to find infection vectors for it", it means "they were never implemented."
Other than the TCP/NetBIOS stuff (that never, to the best of my knowledge, had a remote exploit that let anyone take control of the box), a box running 98SE runs no services. No uPNP exploit. No DCOM/RPC. No Messenger. No nothing. For all intents and purposes, it's already firewalled when you plug it into the wall.
Warning: Rant coming on.
I'd go so far to say that 98SE out of the box, plus Mozilla, is more secure than XP ever was. After a user actually runs the malware, it's a draw. 9x has no security model, and the XP box wins in theory: an OS that supports privileged/nonprivileged users is at least capable of defending against user stupidity. But in practice, the 2K/XP malware uses privilege escalation bugs to turn XP's security model something effectively identical to 9x's: "None at all."
9x is also IMHO more recoverable than XP; replacing a borked .DLL for an updated (or downgraded, because some idiot installer overwrote it) .DLL is easy when you've got a "talk-to-the-bare-metal" DOS prompt and there's no OS in the way telling you you can't overwrite the file. DRM? What DRM? You can't do DRM when you've got no security model. 9x doesn't phone home. 9x doesn't care - doesn't know - if you make a drive image (ah, a DOS prompt again!) of your boot partition, burn it onto a CD, and file it away until the user hoses something badly enough that it can't be recovered.
Sure, the OS was a fancy DOS shell that sucked balls compared to any real OS if you were trying to develop software on it, but it made a damn good single-user home/gaming platform. If it weren't for the 137GB drive (not partition, drive) size limit and the 512MB RAM size limit, I'd run it today as my gaming rig.
OK. Rant over.
I suspect that the real reason the Mozilla team is dropping support for 9x is because the OS sucks balls, and the ball-sucking makes it not fun to develop software on it. It's got nothing to do with security. Because the OS that runs no services, doesn't get 0wn3d.
Its a bit misleading saying Firefox/Mozilla is dropping "pre Win2k" support. It would be more accurate to say it's dropping NT4/Win9x support, and going NT5+ only. Windows 2000 was released late 1999/early 2000, and Windows Me was released later mid 2000. WinMe (and therefor parts of Win9x) is newer than Windows 2000. Anyway, I don't know how this will affect people. I use Windows 98SE on some older systems. My mother uses Windows 98SE on her only system. (mostly Pentium MMX 233MHz w/ 96-256 Megs RAM). Using something like WinXP on those systems would be a joke, and even going with Win2k isnt good. They'd run a lot slower and lose all support for DOS. Win98SE runs perfectly stable on the systems we use, and all of our programs work. I know we're not the only ones who use computers like those. If Windows 98SE "just works" - why upgrade? Most of the software out there now runs on older computers and operating systems - at least on the Windows platform. That's one reason why Windows is still so popular. Backwards compatibility. It's a shame to see Firefox specifically drop support for an older OS.
I use them rather heavily. Since I have an 8-port KVM switch at home, I can use a rather large mix of boxes on a regular basis, and I find that I tend to bounce between Warp 4 and Win95 OSR2 most of the time.
One of the Win95 OSR2 boxes is my secondary desktop box at home which I use almost daily (mainly things like Word 97, StarOffice 5.1a, FireFox, various MIDI apps for my Yamaha keyboard, Visio, etc.) and which is still my main gaming box (I play a lot of classics like UT, Tribes 1, TA, SC, AOE2, HomeWorld, NFS 3/4, Madden 2001, etc).
A second Win95 OSR2 box is my main fileserver (a Proliant 2500), and a third is smaller fileserver dedicated to MP3 files (an IBM IntelliStation 6899, which is a VERY nice PPro box).
Most of the others are multiboot boxes which are booted into other things most of the time (Linux variants, eCS, or OS/2), but which are booted to Windows 95 OSR2 with a QuikMenu 4 desktop if I want to put together a gaming LAN, so those copies are mostly idle. That much less reason to upgrade them, though.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I am currently at work using Windows 98. From my perspective, using Windows 98 is getting more and more awful. Especially since I have to coordinate with Engineers using AutoCAD 2007 on Windows XP machines, making it work with my Acad 2002 win98 machine.
Arguing against stopping support for windows 98 makes about as much sense as being against companies stopping support for DOS or CP/M. Windows 98 is in the same boat, eventually the only users will be people running highly specialized custom niche software that CANT run on any other OS.