Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla To End All Firefox Support For XP, Vista In June 2018 (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Mozilla announced today plans to stop all support for the Firefox browser on Windows XP and Vista in June 2018. Earlier this year, Mozilla already moved Firefox users on XP and Vista machines to the Firefox 52 ESR (Extended Support Release). The move of XP and Vista users to Firefox ESR was previously announced in December 2016, when Mozilla also said it would provide a final answer on Firefox support for XP and Vista in September 2017. Well, that date has arrived (and passed), and after an internal review, Mozilla announced it would sunset all support for Firefox on the two Windows platforms. Mozilla joins Google, who dropped support for XP and Vista back at version 50, released in April 2016. Microsoft has stopped XP and Vista support in April 2014 and April 2017, respectively.
XP has about 5.69% market share
They can stop all Firefox development soon if a market share around 5% is low enough to give up on a product.
It's not all about what works/doesn't work, it's also about effort to support the platforms considering their dwindling usage numbers. They will probably be able to remove chunks of code dedicated to XP and Vista, and not have to worry about testing them, for such a small number of users.
Again, why are those chunks in there in the first place?
What makes this "display things on the screen" application so special that it needs custom chunks of code to do that, custom chunks that differ with each windows version? So many other programs have none of those problems it's really hard to see what makes firefox so damn special.
I have a different hypothesis: Mozilla is staffed with special snowflakes that "just can't even" bother to leave working code well alone because it's supposed to run on a system that's not their own desktop. Their snowflake nature is supported by their "invention" of rust and its community codes.
It's also worth remembering that these platforms are no longer suppored by Microsoft, so why should Mozilla do the same? If a vulnerablity is now found in those platforms which can hijack Firefox, Mozilla will want to stear clear of all blame.
It's arguable that redmond is shirking its duty here, and we all know they have a habit of fscking you over with glee if they remotely think they might get away with it.
But anyway, that's as may be, it doesn't explain a thing of why firefox has such a problem with retaining working code. If redmond is no longer meddling with the xp and vista system APIs, they're not going to change, are they?
It's also worth remembering that these platforms are no longer supported by Microsoft, so why should Mozilla do the same?
Because those two things are not the same.
Microsoft no longer supports XP, not because it is inferior, but simply because they want to force you to pay for a new version of Windows. However, a web browser shouldn't care what version of Windows you are running. Saying that [this application] no longer supports [this operating system] is completely backward. Operating systems support applications, not the other way around.
I'm not defending XP -- there are newer versions of Windows that are much better and I haven't used XP for many years. But, I have a couple of programs that were written 15 years ago, back in the early days of Windows XP, and they run perfectly fine on all the newer versions of Windows. Which is exactly how things are supposed to work.
If current versions of Firefox run on XP then future versions should also run on XP unless you deliberately do something to cause incompatibility, for no reason other than fuck you.