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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.

13 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 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.

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


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

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      #DeleteFacebook
    8. 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 .

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      #DeleteFacebook
    9. 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.

  2. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    #firstworldproblems

  3. 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.
  4. Mozilla says.... by thegreatbob · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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    There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...