Mozilla Will Support Firefox For XP and Vista Until At Least September 2017 (venturebeat.com) 73
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."
XP FTW (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, The King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The likelihood of future patches on their current operating systems suggest they're not secure either. SOP should be to assume your system is vulnerable at all times.
Insecure King (Score:1)
"In the meantime, we strongly encourage our users to upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported by Microsoft. Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and are dangerous for you to use. " - Mozilla
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Re: XP FTW (Score:1)
But Slashdot told me for ages that Windows 2000 was king, and XP was just a fisher price toy OS. Make up your mind, Slashdot!
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It was.. it's basically win2k with that ugly ass luna skin which made it look like a tacky fisher price toy, hence the rep.
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In I finally retired my Windows XP Pro SP3 OS due to the HDD's death of clicks on 10/22/2016. I installed a brand new retail 64-bit W7 HPE SP1. :)
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You have to remember the quote:
The king is dead long live the king.
And it died in a cesspool of viruses, crapness, and insecurity disease.
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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 upg
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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.)
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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.
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I just wish that FF would cut out the Chrome-style version numbering. They've screwed the pooch on major/minor/tweak versioning that I and a lot of other people were accustomed to, and it is annoying.
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But... but... they couldn't let Chrome hit version 100 before Firefox, right? What would people think if Chrome was 90 versions ahead of them?
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I don't mind it so much, it's more "stable" in the meaning of not crashing.
There hasn't been almost any new GUI feature since Australis in Firefox 29.
Also, when using linux, people were stuck with Firefox 3.0 when 3.6 was out.
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I don't mind it so much, it's more "stable" in the meaning of not crashing. There hasn't been almost any new GUI feature since Australis in Firefox 29. Also, when using linux, people were stuck with Firefox 3.0 when 3.6 was out.
That's strange my Fedora 25 version of Firefox says its version 50.1.0. I suppose Gooogle Chrome is better since it is version 55.0.2883.87 which is a good five points in front. :-)
This is even more dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Why not just continue updating it, until it is sufficiently hardened against attack?
Bits don't rot.
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Why not just continue updating it, until it is sufficiently hardened against attack?
Bits don't rot.
You are quite right about "bits" but updates usually have version numbers and version numbers have a tendency to increase.
Major version vs. patch level (Score:2)
updates usually have version numbers and version numbers have a tendency to increase.
Then why increase the major version number rather than the patch level? There's a difference [semver.org].
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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 u
Consider this (Score:2)
Yes there is hype about the security software that comes with MS Windows 10 but I've seen a lot of infections it did not stop which could have been stopped by decent third party software.
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You need to secure these things from the outside and then run third party software on them in case that doesn't work.
Whether it's Win2K, XP, Win7, Win8 or Win10 doesn't really matter since they are all incredibly malware prone. So if you have a good reason to run XP, then why not, it's the same third party and external solutions to keep it safe as Win10. Despi
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They lump XP and Vista together rendering any technical justification unlikely.
As if there aren't any API's in Win7+ that might be useful to Firefox?
Re: This is even more dangerous (Score:1, Troll)
Mozilla supports Linux with a pathetic 1/3rd of XPs market share.
This has nothing to do with Market Share and everything to do with a platform that's up to date and current.
Microsoft abandoned XP and Vista a long time ago. There is a point where supporting old, outdated, unsupported platforms simply causes code bloat and makes it harder to maintain without breaking the older platforms.
I surely would not expect Firefox 50 to run on Ubuntu 4.10... would you?
In many cases the distro package maintainers will backport a little bit, but not for releases from 12+ years ago.
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I doubt so, that would be going too far.
Mozilla, Firefox, XP, Vista (Score:2)
Waste of resources, Mozilla! Does anyone still use these dinosaurs ?
XP = Good Enough (Score:2)
My main machine at home runs XP because it does everything I want it to do, generally even faster than my much newer work machine (which runs 7). If I upgraded this machine to a newer OS, its mono-core, sub-3 GHz processor would cause things to crawl, and I'd have to buy new frickin' hardware; and for what? craigslist.com? Don't give me the security argument because that's mainly for marketing fol
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A single core is enough to run a modern OS, it's the RAM and hard drive or SSD that count more.
Although yes, Windows 7 is a dog, and so are Gnome 3, Cinnamon, KDE.
Oh damn, you can easily use and install debian+lxde by getting the file named "debian-live-8.6.0-i386-lxde-desktop.iso" here : http://cdimage.debian.org/debi... [debian.org]
It won't win a beauty contest and you will lose the ability to play almost any video game, but everything will be up to date. The requirements are similar to Windows XP without malware, and
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Sorry for the.. bad wording in one of my sentences above. I don't know if it's from reading at -1, or if uncivil words have gotten widespread much, you had my blood boil a bit by suggesting a conspiracy from "marketing folks selling products" but otherwise I wish you the best.
I remember when Windows was somewhat polite and well meaning : "You can now safely turn your computer off".
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PPS : that recent "Raspberry Pi desktop's x86 edition" in the news is pretty much debian and lxde, with a fun skin / icon theme. Might be a useful, hopefully good Windows XP replacement for those interested.
Great! (Score:2)
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I'm reading this on a Vista laptop- lol it's what's I have at the moment....!
I'm reading this on a Skylake Core i7 6700 desktop running the most up to date version of Fedora 25. I also have a 10-year-old HP dual core laptop which originally came with Vista that I overwrote with Fedora at the time of my purchase. Today that same laptop runs Fedora 25 surprisingly well although for the best performance I would suggest "Puppy Linux" however since I use that laptop for testing my major upgrades (one every six months) I will stick to Fedora. That laptop is great for when I am traveling.
upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported (Score:2)
Pity the poor Windows Server 2008 users (Score:2)