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

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

[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: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: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.)

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.