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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.
Unicode support is completely broken on XP, and having to work around that to get decent text rendering must be a nightmare.
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.
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.
Even ff "the world that matters" was limited to the US, you would need Unicode to support Spanish.
And of course there are roughly 6 billion non-Americans out there who (baring some exceptions) use glyphs that are not representable in ASCII.
Unicode support is completely broken on XP
Citation needed. XP no doubt lacks the features of later OSs but saying it's 'completely broken' is overstating things. In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
For Windows XP. The remaining 5% of people still using XP are ones that can't upgrade due to legacy applications or too old hardware and can't afford new ones.
...and, by now, the #1 thing such systems should not be doing is connecting to the internet and risking instant pwnage, so if you need Firefox you're holding it wrong. If you do need a web browser, it will probably be IE5/6 because the "legacy application" is some old IE-only web application - and even (especially) then you need to make damn sure that's the only thing it can connect to (and that nothing can connect to it).
If COBOL Applications can run for 50 years, so should XP support.
COBOL is a programming language, not an operating system - pretty sure you can compile COBOL on Windows 10 or Linux. Also, your 50 year-old COBOL application probably doesn't rely on internet access or web-baed GUIs, doesn't have to download and render possibly suspect JPEGs etc. I never heard of any rare form of the millennium bug which replied to a date after 1999 with a memory dump containing passwords and personal data.
Windows XP really is the worst case scenario - it comes from a time when the internet was taking off and being naively integrated into everything without regard for security. Also "requires XP" often means "written for Win 3.1/MS-DOS on a kludgy 8/16/32 bit hybrid processor mode with all that near- and far- pointer malarkey, loads of hardware dependencies and the assumption that everybody was admin - good luck porting it without a total rewrite". Everything about it needs to be killed with fire - apart from the UI which was actually OK and has been the main downfall of its successors.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Let's flush another potential ~6% of our dwindling user base down the toilet!
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...