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Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop
Billly Gates writes "Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in 2014. Fortunately for its users who want to keep browsing the web, Google is continuing to support Chrome until at least 2015. Firefox has no current plans to end support for XP. Hopefully this will delay the dreaded XPopacalypse — the idea that a major virus/worm/trojan will take down millions of systems that haven't been issued security patches. When these browsers finally do end XP support, does it mean webmasters will need to write seperate versions of CSS and JavaScript for older versions if the user base refuses to leave Windows XP (as happened with IE6)?"
Update: 10/29 17:31 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that Mozilla doesn't have plans to drop XP support any time soon.
The article says they have no plans to end support for XP, how in the world did the summary end up saying exactly the opposite?
Or is now even blatant lying ok as long as it might work as clickbait?
The linked article, posted 20 hours ago, actually says
Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."
and basically the same for Chrome.
From the fine article:
Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The first link says that Mozilla plans to continue supporting Firefox on XP; it gives no end date, so they presumably mean indefinitely (though practically probably not much longer than a few years--for example, they supported Windows 2000 until Firefox 12 in April 2012, a bit over 2 years after its EOL; on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they went a bit longer with XP given its larger user base). The second link says Google plans to continue Chrome support on XP into at least 2015. Neither one of these links talks about Firefox or Chrome ending support for Windows XP. In fact, both mention the exact opposite, at least for the foreseeable future, so I'm really wondering where the author of this summary got this information.
R.Mo
No need, the linked article says they're going to keep on supporting it.
(In a huge headline font...)
No sig today...
The reason Firefox and Chrome will continue to support XP is because they want to support Windows Server 2003, which has an End-of-Life of 14-Jul-2015. Since Win2003 (and XP Pro x64) use the NT 5.2 kernel and they don't want to lose that marketshare, by default supporting it on the NT 5.1 kernel (e.g. XP 32-bit) would be a trivial affair. That's why they chose "at least 2015"...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
It will adversely affect the virtual machine I use to watch Netflix. That's about it... I have a legal license for XP and run it in a VM. I no longer have a valid license for 7, and would not touch 8 with a 10-foot pole, even if you paid me to do it. But I still need something modern to support Windows XP, because that's how I access Netflix from my desktop PC.
Admittedly, with the number of devices I have with native Netflix clients (tablet, phone, smart TV, game consoles, etc.), that will become less of a problem, but I do still find time/reason to watch it on the desktop, and the Linux-native attempts do not work very well in my experience.
I now have Windows 8 on my other partition. I hate the interface, passionately
You'll probably hate Classic Shell less. It adds a proper Start Menu to Windows 8, which you can configure to look like Windows 9x, Windows XP, or Windows 7.
does this mean will not have to worry about upgrading to a new version of Firefox every other fortnight and having it break all the add-ons
sounds good to me
btw I just upgraded to FF 25 on my Win7 box and had to fiddle with Foxtab a lot to get it going again
there was no mention during the upgrade process that Foxtab was incompatible
Was published early August, so there may have been some changes and press releases and announcements since then, no? I would imagine AV companies will support whoever pays, especially the annual plans.
On other platforms, this is solved by nspluginwrapper, which runs the plugin as a separate process and just sends events and screen contents between them. Given that most web browsers now do something similar for security and stability (so a plugin can't crash the browser and a security problem in the plugin is isolated), it's not likely to be a significant issue.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Most manufacturers would give their eye teeth to have a product that their customers love as much as our users love Wincows XP. It does everything that our people need done, it is stable and secure and simple and they know it well. As tech support I know it well, too; on XP I don't have to search for "Where did Microsoft put the device drivers THIS TIME!"
But the problem that Microsoft faces is that they hire programmers, and programmers are change agents. If the program really does the job well, nobody will ever buy a new version. So they have to artificially destroy Windows XP in order to sell newer versions. Trojans, viruses, malware are all allies of Microsoft.
Sort of like getting a new wife every eight years, whether you want one or not.