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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.'"
MS has basically stopped supporting pre-2000 so why shouldn't firefox? Anyone using their computer to browse the web with firefox should probably make sure they have 2000 or better just to keep the nasties out of their system.
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.
Deciding on when to drop compatibility can be a tough problem. I think a good policy would be to drop support for an OS when support from that OS has been dropped by the vendor. In Windows' case I believe the majority of home users are on XP while the majority of office users are on XP or 2000. So it would seem reasonable to drop support for the older OSs.
The last version of Firefox to support 98 and earlier should be kept up for easy download.
Developers: We can use your help.
It seems to me that the developers of Firefox have fallen down the same pothole-filled path that Microsoft has - forget about your past, focus only on the future. As an guy who does quite a bit of home-based computer repair, I see a lot of people who are NOT using Windows XP and are using older versions of Windows (pre-2000 - I use W2K myself). What's happening to Firefox is that it's getting splintered apart slowly. I wouldn't be suprised to have four or five distinct versions of FF in the next few years (note I'm not saying ports, but distinct versions).
Firefox is already much slower-loading that it used to be a few years ago, loaded with a lot of things that probably aren't really necessary. Not all of us require the latest and greatest thing to do what we need to do and I feel that the developers of FF have lost touch of that, being driven by feature creep and "keeping up with the neighbors" mentality.
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There's about 10x more Windows 98 users on the Internet than there are Linux desktop users. So the numerical argument doesn't fly.
It's a technical decision -- Win98 doesn't support the transparancy APIs or something like that.
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.
9x/ME/NT support is dropped. Check the Bugzilla bug linked to in the article, it states it right in the title.
Because then, no-one would upgrade. Upgrading = More Money for MS/Intel/Dell
Hell I'd love to try out Windows 3.1 with the abstraction layer that emulates Aero Glass! Watch my i386 become l33t before your very eyes!
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
Windows Millenium can barely be considered as an Operating System.
How skewed can you get?? W3Schools is not a good representation of the people out on the web. The only people that will go to this site are those that are savy (like /.ers); your average everyday person (many of which still run 98) will not visit this site, and their numbers will not be reflective in the total.
My company's statistics list 98 and below ranging from 12%-20%. On a daily basis. Again, ours is skewed to the non-technical user. But its not 2.1%.
Your best bet is to use statistics from major portals, Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc, ones that will give a good random sampling rather than a random sampling of a specific demographic.
Firefox 3.0 is a long way away, and there's still Firefox 2.0 along with its security releases through Firefox 3.0's early lifetime as well. By the time 3.0 is absolutely necessary, the pre-2K computers could have already upgraded to Ubuntu.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
You want me to dumpster this, invest in a new box -- and why?
I believe the gp actually said you should install Linux on it, not dumpster it.
He recommends Debian, but if you don't know a Linux guru, I recommend Xubuntu. You can try out the live cd and see if you like it without hurting Windows.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
What's wrong with this? Does anyone care if Firefox runs on 7 year old Linux distributions? No. Do Mac users care if an application still runs on OS 9? No. There is no reason why anyone should be running anything less than Win 2k. If they are, they certainly shouldn't expect to be able to run the latest and greatest of software. If they are OK with an OS older than 2000, they should be OK running a browser version stuck in 2006. I say clean up the code and drop legacy support. Don't make Microsoft's mistake.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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?
Current numbers:
W3Schools Browser Stats
This says that as of April 2006, the site had the following OS breakdown:WinXP W2000 Win98 WinNT W2003 Linux Mac
74.0% 11.2% 1.8% 0.3% 1.9% 3.3% 3.6%
Obviously this is not a totally valid study for the Internet as a whole (it also says 25% of the browsers in April were Firefox), but if we say the W3Schools demographic is about the same as the Firefox demographic, and also consider the user base for Win98 is dropping by about .2% per month, then the developers really shouldn't feel too guilty about not adding new features for Win98 users after v2.0.
On a related note, is there another free browser out there that specifically tries to be compatible with as many EOL'd OSes as possible?
I mean, win98 is 8 years old. . . That's OLDER than most people who use web browsers these days!
If we don't remove support for old stuff like that then there will never be any room for new things.
I'm not saying that every time something new comes out that everyone should upgrade, but when there's a significant change to a significant change from the old software (vista to xp to win2k/98) then I'd say its about time to abandon those who seem unwilling to change.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
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 think one way of looking at this, maybe a pragmatic way, is as a resources issue, sort of along two different lines. First, is maintaining the backwards compatibility burdensome to FF devs? Gotta balance the advantage of Win9x support with the burden of keeping it to those who actually produce and maintain FF -- might those resources be better devoted to keeping FF as good as it is? Second, does the expanded codebase and unwieldy coding impact the usership -- either by performance reductions, bloat, or whatever? So you'd have to also balance this concern with the benefits of Win9x compatibility. I mean, I know one goal of FF is to keep the install package small; Win9x compatibility can't be good for that. Not being so hot on the technical aspects, I can only speculate about the performance impact, but if there is one, I would think it's silly to hold back the vast majority of users to accommodate a qiuckly vanishing minority. Especially when you've got an app that's on the move, like FF.
Maybe it is mean to Win9x people, but I think that FF has to (a) be well-coded; and (b) efficient, to maintain its level of competition. I think those are edges it has over IE7, and I'd hate to see it squandered on less than 3% of users...and note, that figure is only going in one direction: it's not as if we'll see an explosion in Win98 users sometime.
Or maybe I'm still running 98 because it does everything I need and other than Doom 3 (which my PC won't run any way), I've not found any reason to update. Maybe you've got a spare £100 to waste on an OS, but as a student I don't have this sort of spare money laying around.
And no I can't switch to Linux untill I get a new modem since mines a Winmodem. Which again costs money.. So that leaves me using 98 happily or using my DS to play pictochat alone. Which do I pick now?
I like muppets.
There are lots of people in the world that are still using Windows 95/98/Me. More than Mac, Linux and UNIX combined. Many have older machines that don't support Windows 2000. Most have no idea how to upgrade an operating system. Some only get a new operating system when they buy a new PC. Many can't afford either a new PC or a new OS. None have a clue what Linux is or how to use it.
But, many of these people can, with a little help from a webpage or a techie friend, install a new browser. One that can protect them from online nasties. One that doesn't let people install random bits of code. One that lets them explore new areas online. This is far easier than an OS upgrade. Or a new PC. And it's free.
Firefox officially dropped Windows 95 support quite a while back, but it does still run fine on Windows 95. I keep instructions on how to Run Firefox on Windows 95 on my website for just this reason. It gets a couple thousand page views a month. And I still get emails from people thanking me for compiling it.
Windows 98, on the other hand, has been officially supported this entire time. And lots of people are running it. While we may not have a solid source for stats (and, no, W3 Schools is not a solid source for stats... it's geek-centric and not reflective of the overall web), something like TheCounter.com provides some global OS stats that are a bit more indicative of the net at large... at least in terms of those visiting smaller sites.
So, basically, dropping Windows 9x support would be a disservice to lots of folks around the world. Now, if Firefox 2.0 is going to keep support for it AND have security patches issues for quite a while after FF3 is released, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. But having an actively-maintained, secure browser for these older Windows users is important.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
If you want to use an eight year old OS, that's fine, but you are pretty much running in legacy mode. You can keep what you've got until your computer breaks, including the current version of FireFox, but any new capabilities that get added to your computer at this point should be regarded as a bit of good fortune. In order to expect to get new free features, you should have a platform based not in the past but in the present with everybody else. It's a simple economy of scale thing for the friendly hackers who give us all such nice presents.
Firefox 2 which will be out in the third quarter of 2006 is the last version of Firefox to support Windows 9x. Mozilla has a policy of supporting a milestone release till two add ional milestone releases are made. This means that Mozilla will be supporting Firefox 2 with security patches until Firefox 4 is out or whatever the milestone release after Firefox 3 is named. An educated guess would be that Mozilla support of Firefox 2 will end some time around the middle of 2008.
mozilla.org bug - Don't kill Win98 If a strong community can form to write a wrapper around Firefox 3 as described in bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330276#c36 Firefox 3 could work in Windows 9x.These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
I have a bunch of friends who bought their first computer around 98-99 when everyone and their grandma were getting computers. Most of them have gotten hooked and jumped on the upgrade bandwagon. They all have new hardware now and xp except 3 of them.
These 3 found it nice to have a computer but didn't feel the need to get a new machine. Nothing's broke and everything works, well except, strangely to them, their computer keeps getting slower and slower, and crashes more. They don't want something new, they just want it in the state that they originally got it.
I have reinstalled for them a few times but sooner or later it gets back in the 'bad' state. I'd recommend xp but these machines are pII 450's,- pIII 600's and I think only one has 128 megs of ram.
So in the end I made a ghost image of their drive and even showed them how to restore it.
Now, every so often they restore their image, and everything back the way it was and they love it. Cause this way, it's not just a fresh install, it's got all their drivers, programs installed, email configured, shortcuts they like etc all ready to go. I just tell them back up my docs (and save everything there) and copy that back once the restore is complete.
Yes, pretty trivial stuff to the average geek, but my friends feel impowered now that they can always get their machine back into a perfect state if it every starts acting up.
And, to put off restoring, my main piece of advice was never ever launch ie and always stick to firefox.
Ya, I guess these machines are getting really long in the tooth now, but it still does what they want, surf the web, check email, listen to tunes, burn a cd. Thats all they want and these machines and 98 still fit the bill. And sadly, linux isn't an option here. Kde or gnome are pigs on machines like these and believe me they'll want kde or gnome, anything less will seem too barebones to them. Xfce is close, but not yet.
If I were you, I'd buy a cheap second hard drive for your machine. Something around 30GB's will be more than enough. Then install Linux on that hardrive, makeing your machine a dual boot. This way, you're father will have an inexpensive way to test out linux. If he doesn't like it, he can still use 98 and you can use linux. If for some reason, you decide that linux is not for you too, then you can always change the extra HD over to an extra drive for Win98.
There's no place like ~/
I don't see the big deal here. Firefox -- today -- runs fine ( I suppose, I use OS X ) on win98. When Firefox 3 or whatever comes out and drops support, so be it. But 1.5 and 2.0 ( I suppose ) will continue to work, right?
So what's the big deal? The people *still* running win98 are clearly not bleeding-edge upgrade-or-die types, so what's the commotion? It's not like they're being forced to upgrade to a new, incompatible firefox.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
It's on the same LAN as my wife's relatively new iMac, a FreeBSD server, a Linux laptop, and an OpenBSD firewall. It's not that we're technically illiterate or poor, but that there's no legitimate need for us to upgrade the little gaming machine to something newer.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why? Because I own it. So for me its free. And Windows XP is absurdly expensive.
Unlike XP which "phones home" with each install, Win 98 can be installed, and re-installed on successive machines.
Its stable. And perfectly fast enough for coding, web design, etc. I have resisted purchasing
XP almost out of pride: I *like* '98. It does what any good operating system *should* do: it works.
And it runs all the software I want it to run: OpenOffice, Flash, Firefox, Outlook, etc.
Saying "Microsoft stopped supporting '98, so why should Firefox?" is an absurd question.
Microsoft stopped supporting '98 because they'll do anything in their power to get users to
purchase the next version of Windows, (even if that new version does virtually nothing to enhance
the experience of most users).
Why the Firefox team is asking users to purchase a new version of windows makes little sense to me.
Microsoft hasn't even come close to convincing me that Windows XP is worth the upgrade cost. So
why should I?
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