I was in Vietnam, and they moved on to pirate Windows 10, and Windows 7 was still quite popular and largely replaced Windows XP a while ago.ĭon’t be surprised when the same thing happens to Windows 8, I wouldn’t be surprised if all the major browsers ends its support early. The only reason why it was supported until now b/c XP remains popular, but even that is shrinking quite dramatically even in developing nations.
There is/was a lot of XP specific code written and maintained. So I can understand why they would want to cut support for that OS, it isn’t officially supported for consumers anymore anyways and it requires a lot of resources to troubleshoot and holds back Mozilla technically in many ways. XP is also a quite a different beast than later Windows versions so it is even more technical drain. Vista has less than 1 percent market share, and Vista Firefox users are probably even smaller percentage and number, so I am not surprised they cut support for it.Īs for XP, if you take a cursory glance at Bugzilla there are a lot of OS version specific bugs. Google for example already cut support for many still officially supported LTS linux distributions, even though they are still technically modern b/c their market share is minuscule. This is all speculation on my part, but it is probably a question about quality control and resources.
Because it is a lot of work to configure any Windows newer than XP, because since Vista, Windows systems come with A LOT of bloatware, unnecessary services, bad system and UI changes, …
Maybe I will install Windows 7 or 8.1 with ClassicShell if I will want to play Dirt Rally (it requires at least Win7) and if I will have time.
They do this because they want to force people to upgrade to Windows 10.īut Windows XP still works perfectly. For example they purposely didn’t make DicrectX 12 compatible with Windows versions earlier than 10. Therefore they purposely don’t develop any tech for older Windows than 10.
They recognized that selling OSes every few years won’t work on the long run, so they took the business concept of mobile platform (especially Android) and created Windows 10 and they offer it as a service instead of a product so they have constant income. In the past era (XP – Win 8.1), they did this to sell new OSes every few years. Even the latest games and programs could work perfectly on Windows XP if Microsoft updated it with the new features. It’s planned obsolescence from Microsoft that they purposely make older Windows incompatible with new games / programs. Otherwise the older system still works perfectly. There are no reasons to upgrade to newer Windows, except if one wants the latest games / programs. That’s the problem with people, they can be deceived by the media hype to update. The OS will have been abandoned by Microsoft for 4 years by the time Firefox drops it. How much longer should XP browser support last, in your opinion ? But there are other concerns such as security, for instance SHA-1 being insecure and no alternative being available to XP: Purely strategically speaking, I’m not going to take a stance since I don’t have a clear view of the Windows XP Firefox user base.
I don’t know what Mozilla will do about e10s in Firefox 52 ESR, but the architecture will be more mature and tested than in 45 by then, so perhaps there will not be a hard block ? I guess we’ll see. Google is right because they’re strong, and Mozilla is wrong.īut if you reason ethically, who is more respectable now ? That reasoning essentially amounts to say that strength makes right.