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Mozilla To End All Firefox Support For XP, Vista In June 2018 (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cease-and-desist dept.

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.

69 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Firefox is a web browser. What features of Windows does it need that weren't already available in Windows XP?
    NX and ASLR are certainly beneficial, security-wise, but that's something the OS takes care of and not something Firefox actively uses. Other than that, displaying web pages has already been possible on XP...

    Oh yeah, I guess the API for putting tabs in the title bar has changed. That being said, maybe stop messing with window decorations and keep your stuff in the client area?

    1. Re:Why? Which features? by lokedhs · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unicode support is completely broken on XP, and having to work around that to get decent text rendering must be a nightmare.

    2. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Why? Which features? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

      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;
    5. Re:Why? Which features? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      Exactly. If you officially support a platform it means you need to run your tests on it. Which takes extra time. Presumably they'll go from supporting Windows 10,8,7 instead of 10,8,7,Vista,XP and retire their Vista and XP test systems. XP has about 5.69% market share right now, about the same as Windows 8.1.

      https://www.netmarketshare.com...

      On the other it's getting a bit hairy to run XP test systems because there are no security patches and no Microsoft Security Essentials. So you basically need to wall them off from the Internet. In which case how many people are really downloading new browsers for them...

      --
      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;
    6. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The world that matters certainly includes China.

    7. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Even ff "the world that matters" was limited to the US, you would need Unicode to support Spanish.

      That's not true. Latin-1 serves nicely for most of the "western" languages.

      Unicode only really promises to be the one easy silver bullet that programmers like so much, so they can just "unicode support" and all is well in the world. Except even full unicode support doesn't turn out to deliver that. But if we all shout UNICODE! UNICODE! UNICODE! loud enough, then we can ignore that inconvenient nagging little truth. Or at least pretend. Fake it 'till you make it, right?

      And of course there are roughly 6 billion non-Americans out there who (baring some exceptions) use glyphs that are not representable in ASCII.

      Those are rather less likely to have been able to afford migrating past vista.

      And unicode is still deeply broken. IMO it jumped the shark with the smileys (and then went down the drain with the "diversity smileys"), but even before that the thing was, is, and remains deeply confused on what to do and how to do it.

      This again isn't that apparent to native-and-only-language 'merkin programmers, but it gets rather glaring if you actually need those various code points to both do their thing and be honest about it.

      Anyway, it's the 'merkin kid programmers that make this sort of decision, and is a large part of why computing is shit. As a "user" you have not one, but a whole bunch of rat races that you have to at least not get left behind from to continue having some sort of semblance of functioning "web access".

      Well before this "end of support" I tried updating firefox on the only functional windows box I have here, which runs XP on something 32bit-only. That failed, and yet it's the most modern browser available to me. Yes, the display workhorse runs (tiny core) linux, that hasn't seen upgrades in ages. The replacement has a newer version but the browsers suck harder(!), and the freebsd box hasn't been updatable for even longer because those developers too are idiots. Yes, I could have "just" done a dozen things if only my situation was more like a silly valley programmer kid. I'm not, so I can't, so I get left behind. Bitter? Me? It comes with the job. But that isn't the point.

      The point is that this here announcement is the result of lots of self-serving assumptions that well may not hold for many users. Again, this is why computing is shit.

      This is also why tablets are so popular: Yes, they're handy, but moreover, they're appliances, and you never have to worry about upgrades. Either they happen, or they don't and then you're on the hook for badgering and spending on a new tablet. But you can more or less ignore the various little software update rat races, all different. This is the best computing has done so far. Don't you feel warm and fuzzy right now?

    8. Re:Why? Which features? by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Windows XP supports NX and Windows Vista supports ASLR

      It's probably because they haven't been testing against XP/Vista since 52ESR

      Maybe they didn't like being stuck with the DirectX 9c API, since that's the latest that XP supports.
      How are they supposed to compete with the performance of the other browsers if they're stuck on old API's for hardware accelerated rendering?

    9. Re:Why? Which features? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Perhaps more importantly, XP hasn't received security fixes for ages. It's irresponsible to be encouraging people to use an OS that's known to be insecure and will never be fixed to connect to the Internet.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Why? Which features? by Koutarou · · Score: 2

      Your arguments against Unicode are pretty weaksauce. If you want strong basis to criticize it, I suggest reading about Han unification and the clusterfuck it really is.

      Over 136,000 characters in Unicode and people still can't make their name display right without quirky variant selectors.

    11. Re:Why? Which features? by dwywit · · Score: 1

      Say what?

      https://www.computerworld.com/...

      https://www.computerworld.com/...

      That's not to defend XP as a choice, but let's not be misleading, here.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    12. Re:Why? Which features? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      As the other poster said, those were specific fixes that were made available in exceptional circumstances (large-scale malware infestations as a result of people still running XP). It hasn't received routine security patches since 2014 and there are a number of known vulnerabilities that will never be patched because XP is EOL.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    13. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      /. manages fine without Unicode support and limits itself to 7-bit ASCII.
      What's your point?

      CAP === 'exemplar'

    14. Re:Why? Which features? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      because U+1F4A9 is usefull.

    15. Re: Why? Which features? by Monster_user · · Score: 1

      I've had the opposite luck out of tablets and mobile devices. Because they cost as much as a PC anyway, but have a shorter lifespan.

      My iPod touch 2nd Gen was bought after my Vista PC, and has been out of service for at least four years now. Applications just quit working one by one, as the server side was updated and the world left it behind.

      My PC on the other hand recently received an OS upgrade to Windows 7, and can probably run Windows 10 with an upgrade to an SSD. Its still in active service.

    16. Re:Why? Which features? by Megane · · Score: 1

      I think the most important "feature" is tools. Microsoft is really good about deprecating old OS versions out of Visual Studio. If you want support for features of the newer OS, you can only build for what is supported by more recent versions of VS. Since the ESR isn't going to use new OS features, they don't need to use a newer version of VS, and can continue to use a legacy build machine during the ESR period.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    17. Re:Why? Which features? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2


      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    18. Re:Why? Which features? by DrXym · · Score: 1
      I bet the compositing code in Firefox on Windows is a mess of #ifdefs and different backends to cope with different versions of DirectX and rendering APIs. Also the same for theming support. And video / audio support. Also the same for font / canvas rendering. And for UAC / permissions work. And anything to do with the installer.

      That probably amounts to a lot of noise and different code paths that somebody has to maintain and impedes refactoring and modernisation. That's reason enough to consider dropping it.

    19. Re:Why? Which features? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      And by the same logic, I shouldn't be supporting Firefox at all vs Chrome and Safari .

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    20. Re: Why? Which features? by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

      All they need to do is not make any mistakes; that's easy.

      cant

      So what's your excuse?

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
    21. Re: Why? Which features? by Richjesusstallman · · Score: 1

      Right the fuck on brother. Richard Jesus Fucking Stallman stands with you. Unicode is the tool of the fucking snake. I wrote a little piece on diversity here: https://slashdot.org/submissio...

    22. Re:Why? Which features? by DarkOx · · Score: 1

      Just dealing with it at all is becoming a PITA. I installed XP the other day on VM to test something for a client.

      Guess what not TLS support OOB. I could not even use IE to go download Firefox/Chrome. As it was a VM it was not much of problem. I just went and grabbed the windows installer from the host machine, put it into a ISO image with mkisofs and than mounted it on the XP vm, than installed..but while not difficult. It was not simple either.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    23. Re:Why? Which features? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.

      You're showing your age. Not because of the version of windows you were using, but rather from your poor memory.

      Asian language support in XP was a disaster of glued together fixes which often left a system completely messed up if you had to support multiple languages at once. God forbid you actually change the primary language at some point rendering software non-functional and directories inaccessible. Unable to browse c:\????????? anyone? But I typed the right number of ?s in! Oh but they aren't ?s, they are just one of the symptoms of Unicode support being fundamentally broken.

    24. Re:Why? Which features? by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

      Not that big of a deal, just use a third party font rendering library.

    25. Re:Why? Which features? by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

      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.

      The problem with this argument is difference between Vista and W7 from a windows API perspective is irrelevant in terms of userland code. When you throw Vista into the mix reason can no longer be code maintenance.

      It's also worth remembering that these platforms are no longer suppored by Microsoft, so why should Mozilla do the same?

      The question at hand is why are they taking away support for an operating system. It isn't why shouldn't they.

      Why shouldn't they is obvious. More people are still using these operating systems then use Linux on desktop. People are not going to say...oh fuck I can't update my Firefox anymore... time to upgrade. They are going to keep using what "works" at unnecessarily increasing peril.

      If a vulnerablity is now found in those platforms which can hijack Firefox, Mozilla will want to stear clear of all blame.

      This does not justify preventing browser from running. You can simply state platforms you want to support and disavow others.

    26. Re:Why? Which features? by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

      It is to forestall and get rid of buggy proprietary binary blob add-ons like Unity3D plugin that only run on Windows. With images, video, CSS, Javascript, the browser is already a rich media platform as it is, so WebGL really doesnt do anything that the browser is not already doing, it does what the browser is already doing a little bit better. The HTML renderer and DOM already renders graphics, if we are in the business of rendering graphics, might as well make it flexible by supporting a more versatile API.

    27. Re:Why? Which features? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Dude it's about 17 years old which is a long long ancient time on a technology scale. It's time to move on. Do you get free car service too for 17 year old cars?

      What is reasonable? Most users are just waiting for their caps in their power supplies or motherboard to blow and they will be replaced. Some are old people afraid of change who go out of their way to use ancient software on new hardware. That is on them.

      Mozilla should display a friendly message claiming their PC will no longer be supported and it's time to upgrade

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    28. Re:Why? Which features? by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

      Asian language support in XP was a disaster of glued together fixes which often left a system completely messed up if you had to support multiple languages at once. God forbid you actually change the primary language at some point rendering software non-functional and directories inaccessible. Unable to browse c:\????????? anyone? But I typed the right number of ?s in! Oh but they aren't ?s, they are just one of the symptoms of Unicode support being fundamentally broken.

      Why are filesystem issues relevant? In what version of windows was the problem you describe this fixed? Hint: it was never fixed.

    29. Re:Why? Which features? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Now relatives with XP or Vista machines will have to use Internet Explorer, unless Santa drops by with a new computer with Windows 7.

      Wrong. Would you rather be running a browser that hasn't been updated since 2014 or one that hasn't been updated since 2018? It's not like the Firefox 52 ESR will completely disappear. It just won't get security updates. Much like Internet Explorer.

    30. Re:Why? Which features? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Even ff "the world that matters" was limited to the US, you would need Unicode to support Spanish.

      O Rly?

      Stop lying, and whoever modded you up should die in a fire.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    31. Re:Why? Which features? by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      Except even full unicode support doesn't turn out to deliver that.

      Yes, Unicode is pretty much a total nightmare to use properly (from a development point of view).

      But we have no other realistic option to it yet.

    32. Re:Why? Which features? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Chinese/Japanese/Korean support in Unicode is fundamentally broken and will never be fixed.

      Windows 2000 didn't ship with fonts that had even close to complete character sets for any of them. Most Japanese software still uses Shift-JIS even today, simply because Unicode support for Japanese is so broken. Customers tend not to be very understanding when you tell them that the ticket can't have their name printed on it because of flaws in the underlying encoding scheme.

      XP era specific problems included a fairly poor IME (back then third party IMEs were pretty much mandatory) and poor quality fonts for East Asian languages. Remember the old Ming family? Meiryo wasn't introduced until Windows 7 and I think Chinese fonts didn't get much love until 8, or at least without installing Office...

      The big issue though was that the OS provided services for converting between encodings was rubbish, and based on a very old version of Unicode without the later hacks that made CJK sort of usable.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    33. Re:Why? Which features? by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

      Dude it's about 17 years old which is a long long ancient time on a technology scale. It's time to move on.

      Age arguments in and of themselves are political opinions rather than technical justifications. I don't make decisions based on politics I make them based on specific articulable merit.

      More importantly I'm not the one you need to convince. I don't run XP... never even ran XP in my life.. tens of millions have made different value judgments assuming they have even bothered to give the issue any thought at all.

      Do you get free car service too for 17 year old cars?

      My car is older than 17 years and I expect the mechanic to still work on it and make repairs. I don't expect the mechanic to tell me tough shit it's too old go buy a new car. If I went to a dealer today and bought a new car I could afford it wouldn't meaningfully provide me with any more value than my current vehicle. So far it has just been regular maintenance required of any present day vehicle.

      Perhaps in the future when EV's get better and the battery situation is solved or class 5 autonomous driving becomes a reality my value proposition will change.

      What is reasonable? Most users are just waiting for their caps in their power supplies or motherboard to blow and they will be replaced.

      I don't know enough to answer the question of what is reasonable with respect to Firefox. Browsers are very complex and yet also abstracted out of necessity to support a wide range of platform targets. I don't pretend to know what the parameters and costs involved are.

      One thing I'm fairly certain of is maintaining support for XP is less labor intensive than supporting Linux platform yet more people run XP+Vista then use Firefox for Linux.

      I also know technically the userland difference between Vista and Windows 7 is tiny vs difference between XP and Vista. In the absence of specific articulable evidence I would naturally be highly suspect of hand waving that assumes tangible costs involved with maintaining platform differences between 7 and Vista.

      Some are old people afraid of change who go out of their way to use ancient software on new hardware. That is on them.

      I fundamentally disagree with this calculus. In a functioning competitive market software vendors would be spending their time meeting their customers needs where they are instead of judging, blaming the customer or making political calculations.

      Mozilla should display a friendly message claiming their PC will no longer be supported and it's time to upgrade

      Displaying messages or warnings is different from not working / demands.

    34. Re:Why? Which features? by Goetterdaemmerung · · Score: 1

      Dude it's about 17 years old which is a long long ancient time on a technology scale. It's time to move on. Do you get free car service too for 17 year old cars?

      What is reasonable? Most users are just waiting for their caps in their power supplies or motherboard to blow and they will be replaced. Some are old people afraid of change who go out of their way to use ancient software on new hardware. That is on them.

      Mozilla should display a friendly message claiming their PC will no longer be supported and it's time to upgrade

      There is a difference between not being supported and actively denying the installation. Like it or not, old systems will not go away because you wish it. Ask me about my legacy Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 systems.

    35. Re:Why? Which features? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      By "older versions" you mean "Windows 9x and Millennium". The NT line has supported Unicode from day one. Though it does also support MBCS, i.e. GB2312/Big5/SJIS/EUC-KR. 9x and Millennium only supported MBCS, not unicode.

      --
      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;
    36. Re:Why? Which features? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      It's not the filesystem per se. Both NTFS and FAT store long file names as UCS-2/UTF-16. However they also store a short filename in the OEM code page, because that's the way DOS used to do it.

      CMD.EXE by default only displays filenames that are representable in the OEM code page. On a US machines the OEM code page will be 437

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      On a Japanese, Chinese or Korean machine it will be one of the DBCS code pages

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      As the name suggests they use 1-2 bytes to encode a character.

      So if you have a Japanese machine then Japanese filenames will show up fine in CMD.exe, in fact they'll display the same as they did if you mounted the volume in a Japanese version of Dos. However in a US machine with code page 437 you'll get ?? or squares when you try to display them in CMD.exe. However in Explorer or a GUI application they'll show up OK.

      None of this is XP specific though, as you imply. I've got a US Windows 7 machine here and a directory of Traditional Chinese filenames. They show up fine in the GUI applications but as ??? in CMD.exe.

      If I set the locale to Taiwan or somewhere Traditional Chinese is used, it'd work fine though. Or I could just use a shell that is Unicode aware (Cygwin's Bash for example). Or use the GUI.

      Interestingly if I set the code page to Unicode with chcp 65001 and then do a DIR I get default glyph characters. Copy paste those into Notepad and I see Chinese. I think the problem is that CMD.exe doesn't let me pick a font where they are present.

      --
      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;
    37. Re:Why? Which features? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Why are filesystem issues relevant?

      Because it is an example of the care and thinking that went into the Unicode support of earlier OSes. You know, the comment that half the shit breaks, it was a bolted on after thought, and doesn't really work for more than one language set at a time?

      Kind of the point is: Unicode support in windows XP basically doesn't exist.

    38. Re:Why? Which features? by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

      Because it is an example of the care and thinking that went into the Unicode support of earlier OSes. You know, the comment that half the shit breaks, it was a bolted on after thought, and doesn't really work for more than one language set at a time?

      Kind of the point is: Unicode support in windows XP basically doesn't exist.

      Your not making any sense. This problem has NEVER been addressed even in CURRENT versions of windows.

      Should Firefox discontinue all support for ALL windows because irrelevant behavior of file system?

      If your going to cite an example why not cite a relevant one?

    39. Re:Why? Which features? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      More like Microsoft decided to preserve existing OEM code pages for CMD.exe even that meant that unicode characters outside those code pages won't display in a command prompt. It's a design decision.

      Note that's it's not like this for GUI applications - they all use UCS-2. Or UTF-16 for Windows 2000 or later.

      https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

      Which is means, given a suitable font, your steaming pile of poop emoji U+1F4A9 should display fine in a Win32 GUI app on Windows 2000 or later.

      --
      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;
    40. Re:Why? Which features? by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      You can fully represent Spanish in ISO/IEC 8859-15. But then you break some documents that are written for ISO-8859-1, the standard English encoding, because eight character values are now associated with a different character. Given that a typical Spanish speaker on the internet lives in a bilingual world - a lot of the online world is English-only - switching to that encoding is not a solution.

    41. Re:Why? Which features? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      We have Virtual Machines for that. No one is breaking into your MDF and taking your servers away. But hardware and software won't get support anymore which I think is reasonable. Slashdot LOVES Google but hates Microsoft.

      I don't see any bitching about their 2007 era phones getting the latest Android or have a tablet more than 3 years old not getting Android updates, but it is the devil when Microsoft only supports their OS for 10 years. Even Ubuntu only has 5 years LTS.

      Technical debt is bad and it's time to move forward. Vms are good for this purpose.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    42. Re:Why? Which features? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      I disagree. Microsoft provides a courtesy with patches for free. XP is HELL of alot of horrible nasty work due to the bugs and layers and complexities no one understands as the world has moved on. Linux is less complex with just the kernel but more due to the million apps on it and the dependencies to get them to work.

      An operating system is the second most if not the most complex pieces of software ever written. It ties the cloud as a platform. I think a poorly written XP is worse to maintain than a more modular Linux as the later might be easier to read and debug but I dunno as I do not write kernels and C libraries all day.

      Regardless, your 3 year old Android tablet is out of support. Why is it so hard to expect vendors to support 17 year old platforms with dwindling users and denying new features for the vast majority today?

      The good news is if you have ancient crud you can use a VM today as multicore cpus, ssds, and large amounts of ram are cheap and in quantity today at even a consumer level.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  2. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    #firstworldproblems

    1. Re:So... by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      My CNC software runs on MS-DOS you insensitive clod!

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  3. Not a problem by quonset · · Score: 1, Insightful

    At the rate Mozilla is screwing up Firefox, by that time people won't be supporting them anyway.

    1. Re:Not a problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think Mozilla is turning their back on a large niche market: users who are running older OS versions. Nobody wants to serve these users! So they'll probably stay on their older browser and older OS until their computer dies. Why can't we at least give them a secure and up-to-date browser? Plus it would give Moz some much needed marketshare.

    2. Re:Not a problem by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Mozilla is already barely a large niche themselves these days. A niche of a niche is nice, but too small to bother with.

    3. Re: Not a problem by Flymo2 · · Score: 1

      Troll much? Firefox 57 (beta) is better than Chrome or Safari on Mac or Android

  4. Re:We need a browser of last resort. by itsdapead · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.
  5. jumping the gun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    should be extended through at least april 2019, since some forms of xp are *still supported* until that time. (never mind the fact you can flip a bit in the registry and receive the important updates on ordinary 32 bit xp as well).

  6. And I'm looking for a good web browser. by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

    A good web browser that works on a Mac Quadra with a 68040 and MacOS 8.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  7. Re:About time by JackieBrown · · Score: 1

    I actually thought they dropped support for it a few years ago and that there were people complaining back then - maybe I'm thinking of Windows 95/98, though.

    I'm surprised that people even think that Firefox should be building for Windows XP. Chrome and IE are able to build much more optimized browsers partly due to dropping the old.

  8. Defenestrate it by tepples · · Score: 1

    So they'll probably stay on their older browser and older OS until their computer dies. Why can't we at least give them a secure and up-to-date browser?

    Of course we can. It's called "Lubuntu", and it replaces both the older browser and the unsupported operating system.

    1. Re:Defenestrate it by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

      With the way Linuxland keeps on turning its back on old computer users as well, think again. Like how they fucked over people using old video cards by deleting XAA driver support from X.org, Ubuntu dropping 32 bit images, etc. Its at the point you pretty much have to have narrow range of recent hardware to use Linux. They drop support for old hardware left and right.

  9. Fx 57 ^Q data loss bug marked WONTFIX by tepples · · Score: 1

    But seriously- give it a shot again with FF57.

    I gave Firefox 57 a shot. An accidental press of Ctrl+Q while reaching for Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab closed the whole thing, causing me to lose data in unsubmitted forms. The extensions I had been using to disable the Ctrl+Q shortcut no longer work on Firefox 57, and the new Ctrl+Q-blocking WebExtensions don't work on my operating system because of bug 1325692, which won't be fixed in time for Firefox 57.

  10. Mozilla says.... by thegreatbob · · Score: 2, Informative

    Let's flush another potential ~6% of our dwindling user base down the toilet!

    --
    There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
    1. Re:Mozilla says.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Let's flush another potential ~6% of our dwindling user base down the toilet!

      They can't win, can they? If they announced that they were definitely going to extend support to Windows XP for another X years, then we'd have a group of people lamenting that Mozilla would be squandering resources by supporting an OS that is VERY much out-of-support now. (And yes - that takes actual resources and expertise.)

      Of course, the difference in that situation is that those complaints would be justified.

  11. Air-gapped DOS by tepples · · Score: 1

    And I run 8-bit home computers for video gaming. But like my 8-bit computers, the MS-DOS PC controlling your CNC mill is probably air-gapped, which means threats won't propagate through it unless they're of nation-state sophistication like Stuxnet. (Air-gapped means no need for anything like Firefox.) Besides, your CNC driver will probably run just as well under FreeDOS, which is still maintained.

    1. Re:Air-gapped DOS by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      There's no such thing as a "CNC driver" under DOS, the software is bit-banging the LPT port data lines in real time.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
  12. Sure, just provide FirefoxOS by iamacat · · Score: 1

    Windows is not for running applications anymore. It's for selling Office, Skype and OneDrive. If I open a laptop at random time, I am likely to find it has rebooted because of an update and needs to install updates for another 20 minutes after I relogin, just when I need to urgently e-sign a PDF document or whatever else can not be conveniently done on a phone. Windows XP used to be a regular operating system for doing work, maybe that's why people keep using it? So for Chrome, there is ChromeOS that just works, and these days runs apps besides Chrome as well. If Firefox is killing off support for normal operating systems, maybe they can provide their own like that?

  13. But what about the poor Server 2008 users? by Fencepost · · Score: 1

    That's going to leave me with one customer running a box where the only supported (kinda) browser will then be IE9.

    Ah well, at least it's not used for anything except file storage.

    (Windows Server 2008 is based on Vista, 2008R2 is based on 7)

    --
    fencepost
    just a little off
  14. Re:About time by Stephen+Battleware · · Score: 1

    Windows XP is not receiving general no-charge support, no, but paid support is still available, and the Point-of-Sale iteration is still supported until 2019.

  15. Re:About time by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    I can't believe anyone would even support XP? There has to be only about a dozen users running Vista. I think any software should just stop support when the OS is not receiving any kind of extended support. When that ends, everything should end. Enabling people to use a OS that old is not benefiting anyone.

    XP is very popular and has die hard users even on slashdot with titles like "YOU CAN TAKE XP AWAY FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!" Etc. Windows 10 == spyware comments make some want to stick with XP longer too.

    It's also very popular in India and China thanks to encryption export laws forcing banks and e-commerce websites to use ActiveX controls tied to IE 6 to 8. Also simple economics too in these countries makes them stick to XP. Not everyone is a software engineer in America making $100K a year and many blue collar baby boomers are retired too and have little cash in the western world too.

    It's frustrating. I am in the upgrade camp. Perhaps Mozilla could recommend and link a Linux distro for those wanting to still run Firefox on their hardware

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  16. Re:They gave $100,000 to what appears to be "AntiF by omnichad · · Score: 1

    "Anti-Fascist" is a deceptive way of saying "Communist".

    Sorry, no. Both are extremist POV's and both led to some of the worst leaders of the 20th century. The opposite of extremism is not more extremism.

  17. Download Links? by hduff · · Score: 1

    Any download links in case I need a browser in an XP Virtual Machine for some reason?

    --
    "I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
  18. Re:We need a browser of last resort. by vux984 · · Score: 1

    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

    That was really well said.

    It's really too bad XP doesn't seem to be serving as an object lesson for the IoT... you know the fad taking off right now of naively integrating the internet into everything without regard for security.

  19. Re:Jack Benny by Albert71292 · · Score: 1

    A lot of the youngsters here probably won't understand that reference.

    --
    "A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
  20. Re:XP = Linux by Jetstream · · Score: 1

    So, when running XP as the o/s, is it any safer to run a web browser under a Linux Virtual Machine, or are you still at risk, since XP still handles the basic behind-the-scenes networking? (I asked this question in the VirtualBox forum a while back and don't believe I ever did get a solid answer.)