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Mozilla To End All Firefox Support For XP, Vista In June 2018 (bleepingcomputer.com) 131

Posted by BeauHD 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.
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Mozilla To End All Firefox Support For XP, Vista In June 2018 More

Mozilla To End All Firefox Support For XP, Vista In June 2018

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  • Why? Which features? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05, 2017 @02:14AM (#55313337)

    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?

    • Re:Why? Which features? (Score:5, Informative)

      by lokedhs ( 672255 ) on Thursday October 05, 2017 @02:18AM (#55313341)
      Unicode support is completely broken on XP, and having to work around that to get decent text rendering must be a nightmare.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Hal_Porter ( 817932 )

        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.

        • 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

          • 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.

            • 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/... [wikipedia.org]

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

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

              As the name suggests they use 1-2 bytes t

            • 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.

              • 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?

              • 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-... [microsoft.com]

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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          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 fairl

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

    • Re:Why? Which features? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05, 2017 @02:52AM (#55313391)

      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.

      • 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... [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 th

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by SeaFox ( 739806 )

          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... [netmarketshare.com]

          Using that logic and your source, Mozilla should also stop supporting Linux and OSX. :-P

        • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          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.

      • 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...

        • 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

          • 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 d

            • 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 mo

          • 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.

            • 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

    • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      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

  • So... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    #firstworldproblems

  • Not a problem (Score:1, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 )

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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • 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.

        • 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.

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

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

  • jumping the gun (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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).

  • And I'm looking for a good web browser. (Score:3)

    by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Thursday October 05, 2017 @07:25AM (#55314067) Homepage Journal

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

  • Mozilla says.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by thegreatbob ( 693104 ) on Thursday October 05, 2017 @09:04AM (#55314553) Journal
    Let's flush another potential ~6% of our dwindling user base down the toilet!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

  • XP is a security nightmare. It was a great OS in it's time but that was well almost 18 years ago.

    I just wish more websites would simply block old outof support OS's. It's not overly hard to block.

    Firefox is only enabling horrible security practice by doing this so late.

  • 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 w

  • 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)
  • If you're still on XP then you could probably just run whatever super-special-crufty-old-unsupported-program you're using under WINE on Linux.

    Try it and see. If all goes well then you gain a modern, supported, OS without paying the M$ tax, without vendor lock-in, and probably without even disturbing your workflow.

    Oh, and you'll gain lots of new and fully supported software... like newer versions of FF or Chrome or Vivaldi or whatever.
    • 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.)

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

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