Mozilla Mulls Dropping Firefox For Win2K, Early XP

CWmike writes "Mozilla is pondering dropping support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP without Service Pack 3 when it ships the follow-up to Firefox 3.5 in 2010, show discussions on the mozilla.dev.planning forum by developers and Mozilla executives, including the company's chief engineer and its director of Firefox. 'Raise the minimum requirements on Gecko 1.9.2 (and any versions of Firefox built on 1.9.2) for Windows builds to require Windows XP Service Pack 3 or higher,' said Michael Conner, one of the company's software engineers, to start the discussion. Mozilla is currently working on Gecko 1.9.1, the engine that powers Firefox 3.5, the still-in-development browser the company hopes to release at some point in the second quarter. Gecko 1.9.2, and the successor to Firefox 3.5 built on it — dubbed 'Firefox.next' and code named 'Namoroka' — are slated to wrap up in 'early-to-mid 2010,' according to Mozilla."

Comments

Re:Sorry- but

[GNUbuntu]

You would be wrong on all counts. Way to fail.

Re:Trying to see the reason for this

[Hurricane78]

What a huge load of crap in one single article.

You start of good, by mentioning, that the service pack does not matter. But do you know, if MS introduced some new important program API function in XP SP3, that just makes no sense to emulate? Nope. But I still give you credit, because this is fairly unlikely.

Then the mindless ranting starts.
First you act, as if the situation on Linux was bad, which it is NOT. Then you try to give that argument a basis by saying how there are no fixes for old versions. Well, guess what. There are fixes. They are called the new versions.
When a program grows, it often outgrows its original main design. Then, more and more unfixable problems start to pop up, and the code gets closer and closer to resembling Windows ME.
So you start over, change basic and major things, go over everything in the old version, and port it to the new one. Often you do mild cases of this.
The very point for the new version was that you could not fix the old one as long as you kept holding on to the old architecture. Or at least, it would have been a major pain in the ass.
Now if you, one of maybe 3 users, care for keeping an outdated and known-bad version, well, that's your problem. If you must have the patch, do it yourself, if you can. And see that is just is not worth it.
I don't say that this is exactly how it is with Firefox. But I am pretty sure that it's not far away.

Next, you state that because of this (wrong assumption, that you really know nothing about), Mozilla does not give a crap about whole Linux, while in reality, they just does not give a crap about the ultraconservative 0.001% of its users, who still hang on to their completely outdated versions.
And on top of it all, you think that they would make money off of Windows installations.
Care to explain how exactly? Because I don't see anybody paying for it, getting shown ads, or anything that even remotely resembles them making money from it. And I don't even start thinking about Windows-centered cash making.

Finally, you are rounding off this turd-sandwich, by again over-generalizing by a-dime-a-dozen, when making thinking about slashing support for old Windows versions into "slashing Windows support". Let me guess. You also want to hold on to your outdated, and totally bug- and security-hole ridden SP2 version of XP, because... because... Argh! I can't even begin, to describe the stupidity of your argumentations!

And: No, it will not be a prelude to dropping XP anytime soon. Not as long as most of their users still let their friends wipe their preinstalled Vista and Win7 off their disks because they hate it so much. And even if: How about running Linux? Or MacOS X? Because somewhere in the future, you will have to give up XP too, because it can't use your shiny new hardware.

Please, please get a book about basic logic and one about the benefits of progress.