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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."
Did Mozilla get taken over by Microsoft or something?
I disagree. Some people prefer Windows 2000. And if you have a server, you might not want to upgrade. Also, some legacy applications may not run on newer systems.
I'm not sure where you're getting the .NET from. TFS reads "Firefox.next" - not "Firefox.NET" or somesuch. TFAs certainly don't mention any .NET.
At least they give some manner of justification - Microsoft themselves dropping support for Windows XP SP2 and anything older than that. fair 'nuff, I suppose - it's not like Firefox will magically stop working once they drop support and if somebody really, really wants to contribute patches to deal with older OS's, there's nothing really stopping them from doing so (or forking if the Mozilla peeps would actively block such patches from being included ).
I don't get what feature is available in XP SP3 and above that would justify the change? Can anyone enlighten me?
And if you have a server, you might not want to upgrade.
If you have a server, don't use it to surf the web!
Why?
I mean, obviously if software vendors are going to discontinue support, that's a decent enough reason. But you understand it's kind of circular reasoning to argue that developers are right to drop support because people shouldn't be using it, because developers are dropping support?
In general, I don't buy new stuff just because it's newer than what I have. I'm not particularly outraged that Win2k support is being dropped, though. It is old, and if your old system is working fine with all the old software and drivers, then keep using it with Firefox v3 or v3.5. That's fine.
Still, if your computer is 6 years old and still working for you, I say stick with it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just try to keep it secure, since you won't be seeing new security patches.
...and stop supporting 2000/XP all together, we need to get rid of any MS destop OS that can run IE6.
If you have a server, you Should Not Be Browsing The Web (tm). And if you're using it as a desktop system...well, I hope god help you.
The response was to the outright dismissal of Windows 2000. Having a web browser installed on a server for convenient download and installation of patches, drivers, etc. seems prudent enough. The dismissal of Windows 2000 entirely is the real jackassery.
It used to be that one of the big selling points of Mozilla/Firefox was that it could run on almost any OS! Mac, Windows (95 and NT 3.51 and up), Linux, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, and more!
To me this meant I could go to just about any computer, use Firefox, and have every web page render the same regardless of the OS. And I didn't have to worry about purchasing or learning a new OS just to browse a web site.
What happened to all of that?
I would almost think that with the economy as it is, Mozilla would want to keep Firefox as popular as possible by keeping it running on all these older computers out there that will NOT be replaced any time in the near future.
And personally, I'm still disappointed there is no Windows 9x version any more. Thank goodness for SeaMonkey 1.1.x and Opera!
Isn't this the merit of OSS, in that someone who needs Firefox to run on older Windows clients can maintain a branch that implements 1.9.1? I'd need to know "why" Gecko 1.9.2 doesn't run on older versions of Windows to make a value judgement as to weather or not this is a bad idea.
Particularly when it comes to security, too much backward compatibility can be a really bad idea, and it is partially MS-fault that everyone expects all general-purpose consumer Windows software to run on older depreciated platforms adding code complexity, inefficiency and a greater risk for security issues.
Apple users have dealt with (for a long time) that certain updated software might require a newer OS release than they have and the vendor left it up to them to make the call if upgrading the OS+software or sticking with what they have is the right call.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
You know those of us that will never get a SP3 for XP64 per MS "making it so". I know there are so few of us these days, but that's kind of beside the point isn't it?
Om, nomnomnom...
So Moz is only going to support the current shipping service pack for XP and Vista. Why? Is Firefox doing anything (better question SHOULD it be) low level enough for the current version to matter?
The situation with FF on Linux it is bad enough, in that they don't do security fixes for older versions, and new versions generally won't run on old Linux distributions but we understand that Moz Corp doesn't really give a crap about Linux, they make their coin on Windows. But now they are slashing Windows support. Only supporting XP SP3 isn't terrible, but if it is a prelude to dropping XP when 7 ships it will be a terrible thing.
Democrat delenda est
Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 are due for retirement on 7/13/2010.
As long as Firefox waits until after that date to yank support from non-test code, I don't see a problem.
I disagree. It'd be a waste of resources for Mozilla to commit development and QA resources to supporting platforms that will be within scant months of their retirement date by the time "Firefox.next" is out.
The allegorical rat flees the ship while it is sinking, not afterwards.
Let's get this straight: "Raise the minimum requirements to require Windows XP Service Pack 3 or higher," with no benefit, and no rationale other than for breaking compatibility for its own sake? If that's the case, I venture to say that Mozilla has seriously lost its way.
So, Microsoft ditched support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP pre-SP2? So what; the APIs are just the same now as they always have been. If anything, Mozilla should focus more attention to catering to users of OS versions that Microsoft left behind, where they have less competition...and chances are, the users of Windows 2000 are still using the OS that they are because they're frustrated with Microsoft's "support" policies and the further regressions (performance and usability issues, product activation) posed by newer versions of its products.
I'm seriously still bitter about them breaking compatibility with Windows 95 and NT4 a few versions back: One consequence was that the current version of Firefox was no longer capable of running off a version of Windows not unremovably inundated with Internet Explorer and its ilk. Short of a miracle of penetration from the Linux camp, how are we going to wean people off of a steady consumption of upgraded Microsoft products when we get attitudes and potential decisions like this?
Not everyone works in a large corporation...sometimes the 2 servers company A owns needs updates, and they're not going to have a whole WSUS deployment set up for those 2 servers and 10 workstations they own. I've worked in many environments where it's necessary to have a working web browser on a server.
Depends. Using Firefox (or even IE) on a production server to hit support.microsoft.com, or an internal intranet site to get drivers and tools is fine. Using google to search down stuff and go get it is a different thing altogether. Logging in a root can be bad too. it's all in how you use the tools. The most important security tool is the gray stuff behind your eyes...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
SP3 has been a bit crash prone for me on several computers. It's flat out unusable on my laptop. I'd really like to see Mozilla reconsider this one.
My guess is that you've never seen a server application with a web interface for its configuration.
That means you've never installed a commercial database.
I don't take much stock in your sys admin knowledge.
From the proposal (actually, the first line of the damn thing):
Furthermore, I'd hate to see Mozilla get bogged down in the same must-maintain-backwards-compatibility-cruft that MS fell victim to. Firefox is already bloated enough.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
What's this web interface you're talking about? Real system admins don't even use the command line -- they go in there and start writing/manipulating machine code.
The troll with karma.
Sure, some people do... but how many people are actually in this category? And is it worth the Mozilla Foundation's time and money to provide official support for it?
It's a legitimate question, and I'm betting the answer is: "Not enough to worry about." If you don't want to upgrade to XP or Vista because of the typical reasons I hear (don't like activation, too bloated, whatever), then switch to Linux or something. Or just keep using Firefox 3.1. Or fork Firefox to support Win2K, since you've got a vested interest in it. Just because it's your problem doesn't make it Mozilla's problem.
What possible components can firefox need from SP3? WMP 11 ? Some obscure api somewhere? Or is it that not one can be bothered to keep a VMware XPsp2 system running to test with.
I bet there still will be more sp2 systems out there than PPC macs.
Or even PPC linux for that matter.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Remember, they're talking about a release of an app in the year 2010, and whether they'll support it on Windows 2000. Windows XP and Windows Vista have both been out for years already, and Windows 7 should be current by the time this move gets made.
So that's a 10-year-old operating system, four major releases behind, for which Microsoft won't even be providing security updates after July 2010 (unless they've changed their minds).
XP is another story, mainly due to the fact that Vista not only took forever, but has failed to catch on with the market. Fortunately they're only talking about dropping support for systems running on older XP service packs, not for a fully-updated system.
It's not about needing, it's about testing. By dropping support for XP-SP0, you declare that you've never tested your software on XP-SP0. It might work, or it might not. Some code might have recently been written which breaks on SP0 because of a bug that has been fixed since SP3. Or it might not.
Point is, dropping support for older Windows versions decreases the amount of testing needed. That is the biggest value, not about utilizing newer APIs.
No, it's very much not prudent on a production server. God help any company who hires you as a server admin.
I wonder. Does this apply to terminal servers too?
It would be rather absurd at a lot of companies to log into the vpn, log into the terminal server, and then search in vain for the web browser, only to be told after calling the help desk they can't browse the company intranet, or use any of the internal web applications like the CRM, web based project tracking, web based defect tracking, web based groupware, web based order entry and inventory tracking systems, etc, etc, etc because the new idiot server admin has a strict policy of not installing browsers on production servers.
It's never necessary to have a GUI on a server.
THL phish sticks
"having web client software installed" != "plinking around randomly on youtube all day"
There are often very good reasons to have a usable and reasonably secure web browser installed on a server system.
Of all the comments so far, halfway down the page, this one makes the most sense.
A sincere thanks. The rest of them were starting to hurt my brain.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
The advantage? That's simple.
They get extra resources, which are man hours, which equates into money, with which they can invest into other projects, or on the same project in different ways to improve it for the platforms they do want to support.
the ones who would suffer most from such a move are those least able to afford new hardware -- kid you not -- i was at a school in march 2009 -- with old donated machines that were still running windows 98 (yes 98!!) and the 'new' machine was running windows 2000. i was trying to login to get my .mac webmail - which requires at least safari 3, mozilla 2, or ie7 - fat chance to get my webmail if i'm running on win2k - ugh. but i was able to DL & install (using win98) a copy of mozilla2 for win98 and get access to my webmail -- mozilla was the only link that made it possible to keep that old machine useful for a modern webmail app. cutting support kills old machines and puts them into dumpsters and landfills.
2cents from toronto
j
Many of the decisions being done at Mozilla headquarters seem to be done pursuant to an agenda which is at significant cross-purposes to the desires of the actual user. I'm a Firefox pusher, and install it on every machine I touch; but my enthusiasm has been greatly cooling off over the last year or so.
So you have never installed Oracle or Cache or DB2?
How do you configure these databases without their web interfaces?
vi and sqlplus
Same way you do when you disable enterprise manager because java is a memory hog.
Not every shop requires 24/7 99.99999% uptime. Not every shop can afford identical test hardware (or test hardware at all). My point is there are very different levels of "production" and pain tolerance (vs. spending more money and time).
Sometimes, in small companies, you just have to wing it and hope for the best (while having a fallback plan if everything goes to hell). A competent admin with an adequate sense of risk-vs-reward will do fine.
If your current browser does everything you want, don't upgrade!
They're not breaking compatibility, they're dropping it. That's a big distiction. There's likely very few places where this will result in concrete code changes. However, it will remove two substantial branches from thier test plan, which should free up resources for testing Firefox on Win7 and new Linux distros. If you must continue to use XP, then carry on using FF3.0 or FF3.5. If, after Moz has dropped security enhancements to the versions that they support on your system, you still have a compelling reason to continue using the old OS, you're so far in the minority that supporting you doesn't make sense for any company to pay attention to you. You'll just have to do your computing in a clean room...
No benefit? Do you have any idea how much effort is wasted testing these platforms? How many opportunity costs there are to supporting old stuff?
You can't say you "support" a platform these days unless your tests pass on it. That means you need it installed somewhere running test software, and someone familiar with the platform needs to be around to help you when things break, which they do. Supporting it also means crippling any software that wants to use APIs that later versions of the platform supports. You either need two versions of the code (one with the feature you want, one without, a serious nightmare) or you have to tell the users of Windows XP from *years* ago "so sorry, we can't use that important performance optimization. Some idiot somewhere is still running Win2k".
Platform support is a huge cost. Dropping it is an easy savings. Any organization that acts without regard to cost has never even seen the way, never mind "lost" it.
You'll still be able to download older versions of Firefox; they might even continue to provide security updates for them.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
How are you going to keep it secure without getting patches for newly discovered security flaws?
You might want to ask the same question about the (already long unsupported) OS first.
OK... agreed, but that's not what I was talking about. By "web client" I meant client-side web software, usually called "browser" but not necessarily used for "browsing". Useful for e.g. downloading system software updates, taking a peek at some HTML-format documentation while you're standing at the server rack, etc. I generally have at least one machine in each rack with a GUI on it and part of that GUI is a HTML-renderer / HTTP-client, i.e. a web browser. It's not strictly absolutely necessary but often pretty handy.
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.
Because I have yet to see a single legitimate reason NOT to upgrade XP from SP2 to SP3? The real question is why bother supporting users who are too lazy/stubborn to help themselves. Besides, it's not like it will suddenly break Firefox on sp2. It just means if you have an issue, they can say "upgrade to sp3 and see if you have the same problem". If your company's apps are such piles of shit that installing what is basically a collection of the hotfixes and security patches that were available before (although in the cases of some hotfixes they were not released except by request) you have bigger problems then running the latest and greatest firefox version.
Excuse me, but real sysadmins (or programmers) use butterflies. (Obligatory)
30 characters are fine for a s
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.
I'm user #4, you insensitive clod!
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Make it stop bitching about msimg32.dll when it's running on a fully up to date version of Windows 95 and/or Windows 98 then.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I hate developing using old tools.
I hate developing for old fools.
Hey, I *AM* Still using Win2k, and you know what? It's *ON* A new computer. WITH Radeon HD3650, And a Logitech DFP, with a 500 gig SATA hard disk. And y'know what? It runs circles around both Vista and XP, has had no crashes (although it HAS had irrepairable registry corruption! Appears to be either app or driver related but it's hard to track down once the OS is hosed.) Best part is, with the except of games using Windows Live or Developer Studio 2k8 runtime libs I've had no problems installing/running games that are supposed to be XP only. Anyone else out there with me?
As long as they don't come out with detectives and try to take away my two W2K licenses, I could give a rip wether Microsoft 'supports' my W2K boxes. I refuse to upgrade past W2k. All the briteboys who aren't even old enough to have used W2K can say what they want. Microsoft hasn't done anything since the W2K release compelling enough for anybody with a clue to upgrade past it. That's the whole POINT in keeping Mozilla current on W2K.
In any event, I thumb my nose at Firefox anyway. Seamonkey rules my world.
SP3 can break things. Just one example: Latitude D600 hooked to external monitor that is rotated. Upgrade to SP3 and you can't rotate. I have about 3500 PCs out in the field in 800+ customer's offices that are not on 'managed networks'. I have 2 guys on the phones and 4 in the field to support all that. The possibility of breaking their core business software (that might not be current) is a very valid business reason not to jump off that cliff.
Should they update to SP3? Maybe but SP3 isn't a notable safeguard against malware. Updating Flash, Java, the browser, and a few individual security patches is a notable safeguard.
They can work today. Assuming their HD doesn't pack it in I can assure them that they can work tomorrow but I can't do that if they update to SP3.
SP3 has been very good at uninstalling without pooching the OS which is a major improvement from previous MS SPs. Probably by the end of the year or so we will be at the point where enough of the equipment and software will have been updated so we can make a blanket recommendation to update to SP3.
Sure, you're right, because making software that is visually appealing and leverages the underlying display technology for something as visually oriented and ubiquitous as web browsing on the most used lineage of OS is completely unimportant. Instead, they should rewrite the windows XUL backend in Tcl/Tk for kicks.
Hey! Don't make me get out my tiny platter-writing magnetic diddle sticks!
Ah, yes. That wonderful blog post by Ben. This is a guy who was no longer active in Firefox development at the time and hadn't been for a while (close to a year). Before that be wasn't exactly working on memory issues either. So yes, he was being precisely a fanboy in that blog post: commenting about things he knew nothing about (all the bfcache stuff postdated his involvement, for example) while being completely blind to the actual issues involved.
Again, I challenge you to point to anyone actively involved with the Mozilla project at the time who said anything other than "yes, there seems to be a problem; we're working on it".
> The problem was it took them a LONG time to react.
So your real issue is that the lag time from Gecko 1.8 to Gecko 1.9 was so long? That's a legitimate complaint, certainly. But note that during that entire cycle work to reduce memory usage was done on a large scale, ranging from fundamentally changing memory management for DOM-exposed objects to switching out the allocator used when it was determined that the system malloc sucks on some of the OSes in question.
The malloc work was the last piece of work on the "memory leak" issue, and was done over a year before Firefox 3 actually shipped. Most of the other work happened well before; some before Firefox 2 even shipped. But Firefox 2 was using the same underlying Gecko as Firefox 1.5, more or less, so didn't see the benefits of the memory improvements...
I guess I'm not terribly interested in your replies either, if you're one of the people trotting out Ben's blog post, to be honest.
* You lose the address/command line bar (in the taskbar - you might not even know it's available in XP because it isn't on by default)
* Some software won't install on SP3
* It runs slightly slower
* It breaks some drivers (I ran into the same problem someone else did on my Latitude - well, before the latitude finally croaked)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
With 3500 users how do you manage firefox through active directory? I looked into it for a little while but couldn't get the control we needed so we stay with IE and it just drives me nuts.
It is never necessary to have Windows on a server. Of course, it seems to be on a few...
There are often very good reasons to have a usable and reasonably secure web browser installed on a server system.
And without Firefox 4.0 support on Windows 2000, we shall undoubtedly in short time see droves of Win2k sysadmins jumping ship for Internet Explorer 8. Oh wait...
Seriously though, my soon to be previous employer uses IE6 because "IE7 doesn't run on Windows 2000". I don't think we're talking about the security-paranoid here.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Basically true, but the devil is in the details. Latest Firefox version does stuff such as display downloaded fonts on web pages without installing said fonts in the system (requires a new API), scan downloaded files for viruses (has 2 APIs, win2000 requires the old one, newer Windows versions require the newer API), allows theming the browser (could use native uxtheme library API if supported only winxp or newer), native UNICODE support is better with newer versions, too.
For combination of wget and cat the OS version does not change much, for OS supported rendering and integration features, the OS version is very important. The linux version of Firefox already requires pretty recent glibc and cairo libraries.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
"It also decreases the compatibility with the systems your userbase use. Smart move!"
If dropping support for 0.5% of by user base decreases 30% of my testing effort, which I then can allocate into fixing bugs and making things better for the other 99.5% of the user base, then yes it actually is a smart move.
"I really wonder how many of the legal and illegal XP users combined actually have SP3. Yes the illegal XP users are a legitimate userbase, because they are a big part of the reason that the OS got adopted so successfully."
There's no obligation to support people who break the law.
"No. Fundamentally, what is a web browser? It's a program that sends out tcp/ip packets, waits for the response, and displays stuff on screen."
You'd be surprised how many things can go wrong, even if it's just "a program that sends out tcp/ip packets, waits for the response, and displays stuff on screen".
- What if you rely on the fact that you can draw a line in your window, from a positive coordinate to a negative coordinate? And what if older versions of Windows had a bug that causes the entire screen to become corrupted? Oops, should have tested that.
- What if you implemented code in the installer which registers Firefox in Windows Firewall, but forgot to write fallback code for when Windows Firewall is not available? Oops, should have tested that.
- You could say "just develop on older versions of Windows!" What if you develop for XP-SP0, and rely on the fact that Windows's Unicode engine converts invalid data into "?". What if this later turns out to be unspecified behavior, and they got rid of that in order to optimize some things in Windows, and now the invalid data makes the entire program crash? Oops, should have tested that on newer Windows versions!
All of these are made up scenarios, but they *could* be true. The biggest software that I'm developing right now is a web application deployment platform built on top of Apache, and you'd be surprised how many corner cases there are that I have to consider. Fixing something on one version of Apache can break older versions, and fixing something on older versions can break things on newer versions.
You are seriously underestimating how much effort it takes to test software and how easily things can break.
No, that really isn't a good reason. It means something is severely broken with either the install or the upgrade, and most likely the problem is with the current install. If it had been a problem with the upgrade, it would have been reproducible and fixed. If your system is so broken it is impossible to install an upgrade, the best solution is not to refrain from upgrading it, but rather to find out what the heck is wrong and fix it. If you don't know what is causing the problem, how would you know what else it would break? If you can't figure out what is wrong, a reinstall is the way to go (even if it seems inconvenient).
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
The real question is: Why would you need Firefox 3.5 in order to perform these tasks? FF 3.1 or Chrome or Opera or IE should be sufficient.
And if you're using it as a desktop system...well, I hope god help you.
Er - why?
(Honestly, I find the Windows 2000 hate funny. I remember when XP first came out, people here hated it. In a few years' time, I bet Vista will be praised as the best OS ever, and anyone on XP will be mocked!)