Mozilla Will Support Firefox For XP and Vista Until At Least September 2017 (venturebeat.com)

Krystalo writes: Mozilla today announced that it will continue to support Firefox for Windows XP and Windows Vista until September 2017. In March 2017, XP and Vista users will automatically be moved to the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) and in mid-2017 the company will reassess user numbers to announce a final support end date for the two operating systems. Firefox ESR is a version designed for schools, universities, businesses, and others who need help with mass deployments. Firefox ESR releases are maintained for one year. This means Mozilla will provide regular Firefox security patches for XP and Vista users for nine more months. After that, it may continue for a few more months, but eventually the browser won't get new versions on those operating systems. Mozilla correctly notes that "unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and are dangerous for you to use." The company also tells enterprises that September 2017 should be considered the support end date for planning purposes and "strongly recommends" that all users "upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported by Microsoft."

Comments

XP FTW

[turkeydance]

long live the King

Re:XP FTW

[TWX]

The King?

Re: XP FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

But Slashdot told me for ages that Windows 2000 was king, and XP was just a fisher price toy OS. Make up your mind, Slashdot!

Re:XP FTW

[iggymanz]

No, The King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:XP FTW

[antdude]

In I finally retired my Windows XP Pro SP3 OS due to the HDD's death of clicks on 10/22/2016. I installed a brand new retail 64-bit W7 HPE SP1. :)

Re:XP FTW

[epyT-R]

The likelihood of future patches on their current operating systems suggest they're not secure either. SOP should be to assume your system is vulnerable at all times.

Re: XP FTW

[epyT-R]

It was.. it's basically win2k with that ugly ass luna skin which made it look like a tacky fisher price toy, hence the rep.

Re:XP FTW

[thegarbz]

You have to remember the quote:

The king is dead long live the king.

And it died in a cesspool of viruses, crapness, and insecurity disease.

Insecure King

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the meantime, we strongly encourage our users to upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported by Microsoft. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and are dangerous for you to use. " - Mozilla

Re: Insecure King

[infolation]

Unfortunately, firefox pulled support for older but still reletively recent and secure osx systems, for example Mountain Lion (10.8). So why the continued support for disasters like XP?

Re:Firefox ESR is very good

[TWX]

In the context of open-source software I always read ESR as Eric S. Raymond...

I just wish that FF would cut out the Chrome-style version numbering. They've screwed the pooch on major/minor/tweak versioning that I and a lot of other people were accustomed to, and it is annoying.

This is even more dangerous

[WaffleMonster]

Software vendors should act in their interests and not take illogical stands that smack of collusion.

You abandon a platform when either your customers abandon it or for some technical reason it becomes too cost prohibitive...NOT because a third party says so or pays you to do it.

Mozilla supports Linux with a pathetic 1/3rd of XPs market share.

They lump XP and Vista together rendering any technical justification unlikely.

Who honestly expects XP users who don't care/accept/understand security arguments to be convinced to upgrade to the current version of Microsoft's malware operating system because their browser is no longer updating? Find it impossible to understand how such policy can be spun to be in the users best interests when it is only guaranteed to make a bad situation much much worse.

If Mozilla wants to take the position they no longer care to support XP users this is a coherent argument. The PR statement on the other hand is pure bullshit.

I love how vendors are using "security" as a bludgeon to beat people into boarding upgrade trains as if it's somehow normal or acceptable for customers to accept software that is inherently dangerous to use without continuous patching. Such irresponsible behavior on the part of any vendor engaged in it should be illegal.

Re:This is even more dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just continue updating it, until it is sufficiently hardened against attack?

Bits don't rot.

Re:This is even more dangerous

[dbIII]

Who honestly expects XP users who don't care/accept/understand security arguments

All it takes on most MS Win10 installs to get a ransomware virus is to open the wrong email.
To be brutally frank, if you care about security then the MS products are not for you. If you don't have it as your first consideration and want a tradeoff to run certain software then MS Windows XP is just as valid a choice IMHO as any of their malware-prone range - sometimes even more valid if it's more compatible with something the user wants to run.

In security terms an XP install with Thunderbird is far more secure than a Win10 install with MS Outlook. I suppose that's relative because both are ridiculously fragile.

Re:This is even more dangerous

[donaldm]

Why not just continue updating it, until it is sufficiently hardened against attack?

Bits don't rot.

You are quite right about "bits" but updates usually have version numbers and version numbers have a tendency to increase.

Re: This is even more dangerous

[dbIII]

To be frank, built in security on MS is like a starlets underwear - either not there at all or if it is it doesn't actually cover anything properly.
You need to secure these things from the outside and then run third party software on them in case that doesn't work.
Whether it's Win2K, XP, Win7, Win8 or Win10 doesn't really matter since they are all incredibly malware prone. So if you have a good reason to run XP, then why not, it's the same third party and external solutions to keep it safe as Win10. Despite all the talk MS Win10 is still incredibly malware prone.

Re:Still using XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Although i haven't used XP for several years and think you're much better off using Windows 7, XP is perfectly fine for many people.

The bigger problem is that there's no legitimate technical reason for current versions of *any* browser to not work on XP. If your browser doesn't work with XP it's only because you're doing stupid shit, and you really need to stop that.

Firefox's idea of an "Extended Service Release" is one year. Ridiculous. People are getting sick and tired of being stuck on a non-stop upgrade treadmill. That's why there are so many people using older operating systems and browsers.

The web browser is a solved problem, and has been for quite some time. All you're doing now is adding more and more useless, pointless, bloated "features" that nobody wants.

Re:Firefox ESR is very good

[Dutch Gun]

But... but... they couldn't let Chrome hit version 100 before Firefox, right? What would people think if Chrome was 90 versions ahead of them?

Re:Firefox ESR is very good

[Blaskowicz]

I don't mind it so much, it's more "stable" in the meaning of not crashing.
There hasn't been almost any new GUI feature since Australis in Firefox 29.
Also, when using linux, people were stuck with Firefox 3.0 when 3.6 was out.

Mozilla, Firefox, XP, Vista

[Clived]

Waste of resources, Mozilla! Does anyone still use these dinosaurs ?

Re:They lump XP and Vista together...

[Blaskowicz]

I doubt so, that would be going too far.

XP = Good Enough

[kackle]

The problem is, a lot of people only use their computer for email and web browsing - seniors come to mind.

My main machine at home runs XP because it does everything I want it to do, generally even faster than my much newer work machine (which runs 7). If I upgraded this machine to a newer OS, its mono-core, sub-3 GHz processor would cause things to crawl, and I'd have to buy new frickin' hardware; and for what? craigslist.com? Don't give me the security argument because that's mainly for marketing folks selling products as no one can prove that XP is less safe than the latest Windows OS with its yet unknown vulnerabilities, and the thousands of hackers (some state-sponsored) working daily to find more.

You have no proof? Then you have no case, only a guess.

Re:XP = Good Enough

[Blaskowicz]

A single core is enough to run a modern OS, it's the RAM and hard drive or SSD that count more.
Although yes, Windows 7 is a dog, and so are Gnome 3, Cinnamon, KDE.

Oh damn, you can easily use and install debian+lxde by getting the file named "debian-live-8.6.0-i386-lxde-desktop.iso" here : http://cdimage.debian.org/debi...
It won't win a beauty contest and you will lose the ability to play almost any video game, but everything will be up to date. The requirements are similar to Windows XP without malware, and lower than Windows XP with malware.

..as no one can prove that XP is less safe..

nor can I prove or disprove anything myself, but fuck you, you're unqualified. It's not so much your opinion is wrong, but that you're not entitled to waiving it around and ask for it to be taken seriously, because you know nothing about the subject matter.
How can you prove your machine is not infected? Likely, your PC is so much powerful (can do a billions shits per second) that you won't notice slow down from small enough, modern, mostly dormant malware.

Re:XP = Good Enough

[Blaskowicz]

Sorry for the.. bad wording in one of my sentences above. I don't know if it's from reading at -1, or if uncivil words have gotten widespread much, you had my blood boil a bit by suggesting a conspiracy from "marketing folks selling products" but otherwise I wish you the best.
I remember when Windows was somewhat polite and well meaning : "You can now safely turn your computer off".

Re:XP = Good Enough

[Blaskowicz]

PPS : that recent "Raspberry Pi desktop's x86 edition" in the news is pretty much debian and lxde, with a fun skin / icon theme. Might be a useful, hopefully good Windows XP replacement for those interested.

Re:Firefox ESR is very good

[donaldm]

I don't mind it so much, it's more "stable" in the meaning of not crashing. There hasn't been almost any new GUI feature since Australis in Firefox 29. Also, when using linux, people were stuck with Firefox 3.0 when 3.6 was out.

That's strange my Fedora 25 version of Firefox says its version 50.1.0. I suppose Gooogle Chrome is better since it is version 55.0.2883.87 which is a good five points in front. :-)

Great!

[raind]

I'm reading this on a Vista laptop- lol it's what's I have at the moment....!

Re:Great!

[donaldm]

I'm reading this on a Vista laptop- lol it's what's I have at the moment....!

I'm reading this on a Skylake Core i7 6700 desktop running the most up to date version of Fedora 25. I also have a 10-year-old HP dual core laptop which originally came with Vista that I overwrote with Fedora at the time of my purchase. Today that same laptop runs Fedora 25 surprisingly well although for the best performance I would suggest "Puppy Linux" however since I use that laptop for testing my major upgrades (one every six months) I will stick to Fedora. That laptop is great for when I am traveling.

Note: I always do a fresh install for major upgrades since I have found that is the fastest. Twenty minutes for the install, 20 ~ 25 minutes for customization and the machine is fully functional except for updates which don't interfere with anything I want to do.

Re:Still using XP

[tepples]

I imagine that part of the problem is that Windows Vista was the first to support hardware acceleration features that make rendering complex CSS layouts tolerably fast, such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. In addition, because of changes to the behavior of the NT kernel, sandboxing features may need special case behavior for Windows XP vs. later versions. (Windows 2000 and XP use NT 5, and Windows Vista, 7, and 8 use NT 6.)

Major version vs. patch level

[tepples]

updates usually have version numbers and version numbers have a tendency to increase.

Then why increase the major version number rather than the patch level? There's a difference.

upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported

[edtice1559]

Or better yet a version of Ubuntu that is supported!

Pity the poor Windows Server 2008 users

[Fencepost]

2008R2 is the equivalent of Windows 7 and has support for the more modern browsers, but Server 2008 is still supported until 2020 - but it's the server equivalent of Vista, so it runs IE9 and Chrome no longer gets updates, so Firefox is the only major browser still updated on it.

Re:Still using XP

[dryeo]

They're dropping support for Vista as well. Seems that they use Chromium code for sandboxing and Chromium dropped support for XP and Vista a while back. There's also the problems of the newest compilers not supporting Vista and earlier and the problems of testing, keeping old machines alive to test XP and Vista.

Consider this

[dbIII]

The security is third party and works on both.
Yes there is hype about the security software that comes with MS Windows 10 but I've seen a lot of infections it did not stop which could have been stopped by decent third party software.