Newer web technologies won't be supported, but the browser will keep receiving security updates for another year.
I wonder how the analytics of Firefox forks are tracked. If they can even be tracked.
Tor Browser, LibreWolf et al privacy friendly forks, block Mozilla's data collection on startup and they spoof the user agent to Windows NT 10.0 regardless of if you run them on Windown 7, 8, 10 or 11.
Similarly, Windows 2000 and XP identify as NT5.0 and 5.1 respectively, and Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 identify as NT6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 respectively.
Incidentally, this is also why drivers often are cross-compatible along certain Windows versions.
I'm not convinced that later versions of Windows have some incredibly useful APIs that cannot be called dynamically and need to be used unconditionally.
This chase after new APIs also makes the program harder to support in ReactOS and Wine.
If you don't like newer Windows, that's fine, don't use Windows. But operating systems that old should be relegated to airgapped machines for historical purposes.
Forcing an upgrade treadmill on your users just to shake them down for a few extra advertising dollars in the world we live in today is dangerous and stupid.
> If you don't like newer Windows, that's fine, don't use Windows.
I don't believe that Windows 11 was at all necessary to achieve this security nirvana.
Took me hours to get Firefox because everything else refuses to work. That was because I remembered the Mozilla download site directly.
Then, programs screaming end of support and security and vulnerability and what not.
WHAT IS THE THREAT MODEL HERE?
I come from a place which got high speed internet only 2 years ago. Until then, EVRRYONE USED TO DISABlE WINDOWS UPDATE, because data was precious and guess what happened, nothing.
You actually believe if I use Firefox with ubo on windows 7 that suddenly malware would jump on my machine, turn it into a bot and destroy data?
What about using office tools like excel or say libreoffice.
If a windows 7 or xp is connected to internet and you don't use a browser, will it still get infected?
New! = better
My practical threat model (and presumably most peoples') does not involve any of the threats that updates and patches guard against.
Makes me wonder what kind of profile is the common Firefox user. A corporate shop where the IT head insists on Firefox? The browser you install for your parents and tell them to only use this icon? I have seen FF and Chrome on the free computers at my local library.
In my relatively short experience developing an open source browser extension, Firefox users are far more active than Chrome users, which makes sense given that for most users, Chrome is a default, while Firefox is a choice. They're much harder to please, but the analogy that comes to mind is that in terms of submitting tickets and issues, they're like the linux of browsers.
Intel MBPs battery just goes from 100 to 0 when you stream a video call. Honestly even on an M1 Firefox uses a lot more battery than Chrome or Safari.
Makes it hard to recommend Firefox to people.
Now... as for people still running an OS from 2009... I don't have any comments on that, other than to say it's really hard to care about what people running a 14 year-old OS want. Imagine all the hardware is pretty much just running on luck at that point.
Remember how shitty it was to have to support IE6? And that was only really for like 10 years.
Mozilla doesn’t support old Linux or macOS either.
I have statically compiled binary here running from RHEL AS 2.1 (2005) running on el7, it would probably run on newer releases I just haven't tried it.
I get -all- kinds of bullshit even trying to get a same-age winamp (5.666) working on a modern windows.
This may or may not be relevant with Windows 7, but I think the size of the user base is only loosely linked to the official software EOL. I still use an older MacOS release because software and hardware I depend on don't support newer revisions. Coincidentally Mozilla also just announced ending support for older MacOS versions. It almost seems like they're trying to divert eng resources from browsers to their other projects. Mozilla's strategy is super perplexing to me.
I agree that Windows 7 should be dropped, but only because its quite old, not because Microsoft has dropped support for it. Frankly Windows 7 is better than Windows 11, I think many would agree with that.
Which is why most places are dropping W7 this year. Microsoft's last extended security update was this year. The age is kind of irrelevant, if Microsoft wanted to support it for another 5 years, then places like Mozilla would continue as long as people used it.
I would not. Windows 10 has improvements to the compositor, scheduler, settings and seemingly other things that make it faster in many applications, even on low resource systems. It has other features (like HDR, DirectML) that make it far better for some more cutting edge apps.
One could argue the "stock" config of Windows 10 and 11 is really trashy... Which is true. But its not really a fair argument, as OEMs loaded Windows 7 systems with bloatware (where Microsoft is doing more of that these days).
I see that the paranoia-FUD pushed by the forced-obsolescence corporate-authoritarianism crowd has infected them too.
Looking at how many new vulnerabilities are being found in newer and increasingly complex (often for zero benefit), while at the same time also more user-hostile software, should make you see what they're really trying to do. Software that has been around for a long time has gotten far more bugs beaten out of it than the new stuff, and due to the way the industry is going, it will only get worse.
Fortunately there's a huge and growing community which has forked Firefox and continued making functionally-equivalent versions for older OSs.
As the old saying goes: "There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns."
Look at the truth yourself if you don't (or don't want to) believe:
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/112/Microsoft-Windows-95....
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/343/Microsoft-Windows-98....
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/462/Microsoft-Windows-98s...
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/107/Microsoft-Windows-200...
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/739/Microsoft-Windows-Xp....
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/9591/Microsoft-Windows-Vi...
You can find the stats for (all the different versions of) Windows 10 and 11, and combine the yourself.
Also, a reason why there are fewer CVEs for older OSes is that we've gotten better at finding exploits and we care more about security because basically every system is networked now. In addition, people are still hacking older versions of Windows [1], they're just not filing CVEs.
In conclusion, even with the smaller attack surface, it seems silly to claim that a system written without any modern security mitigations (such as ASLR or W^X, which try to make stack overflows not trivially exploitable), suffering under the weight of years of unpatched vulnerabilities, is more secure than a modern system.
[1]: https://jumpespjump.blogspot.com/2014/05/hacking-windows-95-...
So, yes its planned obsolescence particular when random buffer overflow/etc kinds of bugs get found in these older OSs fixing them isn't some huge lift for ms/whoever since most of the time its just a one line fix. And in the cases where the bug exists across multiple versions, its likely because its old untouched code so fixing it in the newer OS also fixes it in the older ones if someone figures out how to `git cherry-pick` or equivilant.
I've said it before and I will say it again, the major OS providers should be on the hook for security fixes for the lifetime of the product its been licensed to run on. That means if I want to play games on a 25 year old computer, i shouldn't have to worry about whether some 10 year old bug means I'm going to be exploited the second someone passes an image over that exploits a bug in the jpg decoder.
That's because there's little value in doing so, and as that article shows, it's also very difficult to, due to the tiny attack surface. The exploit shown there requires things that people wouldn't normally do (or even find it easy to, due to NATs) even with a newer version --- like exposing a share over the Internet --- and there have already been plenty more exploits found in the file sharing code of newer Windows too.
But realistically Windows 7 has a very small user base remaining, and an even smaller part of that uses Firefox. So what do you want Mozilla to do? Keep wasting resources on CI, testing, coding shims for missing OS features, and making releases for the benefit of the 12 people worldwide who depend on the W7+Firefox combination?
Keep wasting resources on CI, testing, coding shims for missing OS features, and making releases for the benefit of the 12 people worldwide who depend on the W7+Firefox combination?
There's no need to target specific OS versions. Yes, MS has added new APIs, but the old ones are still there and function perfectly fine; and chances are that the users on W7 are not going to care about any new features anyway, so if Firefox doesn't have the same features when running on W7 vs. a newer version, it doesn't matter.
I have written apps that will run on anything from Win95 to 11. A minimalist web browser happens to be something I've been working on too.
Microsoft's backwards compatibility its is greatest advantage, but only if you take advantage of it.
