Firefox To Snub Some Older Windows Installs
Mozilla has been a brand to watch for many years now, as has their flagship product, Firefox. But there is always a sadness where there is talk of no longer supporting older OS releases. Today I learned that Mozilla is considering no longer supporting Windows 2000. Okay, this seems reasonable to forgo this. However hearing that along with this, we would also see support for un-updated XP installations suddenly makes me glad that I am a Linux user.
It seems that with the upcoming releases of Firefox, there will be a move to the later version of the Gecko engine. And this means that Mozilla feels this is a good time to upgrade their own support policies to match what is being seen by the operating systems they are supporting. This means XP SP3 and above users will be fine. Anything older than this, you will be out of luck.
Where Mozilla is seeing a lot of heat from this, is in the fact that so many people are not updating their old XP installs. Many of them are not even using SP1, much less version 3. So there is concern this will hinder Firefox upgrades because of this.
As far as I am concerned, I say too bad. If someone tries to upgrade their Firefox install, is (hopefully) told that they need to be running the latest Windows updates, then I fail to see a problem here? If anything, this could be the kick we need to get those Windows users to keep their machines up to date! But that is just my perspective.
10 Comments
Matt Medina
April 20th, 2009
at 5:55pm
i dont blame them. if someone is on 2000 or XP w/out sp3, they dont deserve to have my favorite web browser.
Darren VanBuren
April 20th, 2009
at 5:58pm
Support of OSes doesn’t change just between branches (major.minor.branch.release like 1.9.0.8 in Firefox 3.0.8) of Gecko.. This won’t happen until Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4.0?) so you’ve at least got one more major version (the fastest yet) left for you Windows 2k users.
Frans
April 20th, 2009
at 6:14pm
I agree with you one 100 percent… time to at least update to sp3 in xp if not going to vista. Sure is good to be on linux also I have pc’s running windows and also linux and really linux is top (Ubuntu)
Here in Saint Lucia (caribbean) I encounter loads of un-updated pcs, so I think this might make users wake up and do the needed updates!
btw I enjoy your writings, excellent reports, are you on twitter?
mine is FransJr
Ruki
April 20th, 2009
at 7:23pm
This may be good news for Microsoft though: they may see their browser share increase, after a few months decreasing all by the hands of the all-mighty fox.
I kid, I kid.
But I totally agree on the upgrading statement you make – there is absolutely no reason to NOT keep your software up-to-date when there are so many methods in order to do so…I happen to know of a few for Mac OS X, and Windows has gotten more aggressive, dare I say, in their Windows Update application, and their Problem Center (I forget the name).
Is That a Unibrow - or are You Happy to See Me? | Chris Pirillo
April 21st, 2009
at 3:42am
[...] Firefox is going to snub some older versions of Windows. [...]
Sangueffusor
April 21st, 2009
at 4:36am
Firefox 3 already won’t work on Windows 98. If they stop supporting 2000 for the next major version, that’s OK — I switched back to Opera as my primary browser a while ago.
Danielle
April 21st, 2009
at 6:22pm
Granted I agree that you should always keep your software up to date, but I don’t totally agree here.
Loosing support for 98, me, and NT versions of windows I can totally understand and agree with.
But dropping support for 2000 is kinda crazy since XP was built upon 2000’s core or whatever they called it… sorry I forgot.
But a lot of people are still using sp2 and do not yet feel comfortable enough updating to sp3. So forcing people to update from sp2 to sp3 just to keep up with Firefox is a bad move imho.
SSD Unibrow ~ Windows Fanatics
April 21st, 2009
at 9:10pm
[...] Firefox is going to snub some older versions of Windows. [...]
bem
April 21st, 2009
at 11:41pm
I’ve been an avid user and ardent proselytizer of Firefox since the days of 98 and 512 max mem. It’s light footprint and intuitively simple interface turned my little machine into a surfing speedster compared to the bloated IE. Over the last several iterations Mozilla has seemed intent on overtaking M$’s title for most bloated browser. I especially dislike the inability to clear your browser history without a bazooka and the nanny knows best attitude that adds several clicks and strokes to nearly everything you do. They choose their users any way they want, I’m ready to choose a lighter browser.
heh heh
April 25th, 2009
at 9:42pm
Good thing there are other browsers out right now.
sp1, sp2, and sp3 xp’s are what i use, Happy with my
computers soon it will be bye Firefox.