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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."
Ever try running Firefox 3 on a version of Linux from 2003 or 2004? Get ready to build Gnome from source, because the versions (of Gnome) that are compatible with distro's of that age don't support Firefox versions higher than 2.
XP is what, 4 years older than that?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
XP x64 is based on the Server 2003 code base, not the XP x86 code base. Despite it's age, SP2 is the most recent service pack for the Server 2003 line. As long as it supports Server 2003 SP2, it will support XP x64.
In a sense, RHEL4 is not old. Update 7 came out in July 2008 and includes Firefox 3. According to Red Hat's support schedule, RHEL4 left "Production 1" phase just two weeks ago, meaning it will no longer recieve "Software Enhancements".
Red Hat has the resources to make the latest things things work on their distribution without replacing everything. And Firefox 3 didn't work easily in RHEL 4 until Red Hat provided support...
1.) Service Packs are cumulative. You don't have to install all 3. You can just install SP3 and be done. 2.) SP3 can be slipstreamed directly into the install CD so that you don't have to install it after the fact. Google it.
Opera is willing to support you guys left out in the cold with a modern browser, going all the way back to Windows 95.
You realise right, Windows 2000 goes out of EXTENDED support next year (i.e. the same support status that XP has just entered into). This means no more updates (including security) for 2000 EVER from the middle of next year onwards.
Mozilla supporting it or in people fact using it from then on simply is not the best idea.
Oh, yeah. XP SP2 was brought up just because MS is going to drop support for it in a year. I don't think it's realistic to drop app support for it, and neither do a lot of other people.
> because XP is nearly the same core operating system.
It's the differences that make testing a huge hassle... And yes, there are XP APIs that Firefox uses that are not present on 2k, and yes we've had 2k-only bug reports that took up a lot of QA and developer time to deal with. So it's not silly at all to drop 2k support: it frees up people to work on other things.