Mozilla ending support for Windows 7

For those just reading the headline: Windows 7 users will be able to run Firefox until at least September 2024 through the the Extended Support Release all existing Firefox users on Windows 7&#x2F;8 will be migrated to.<p>Newer web technologies won&#x27;t be supported, but the browser will keep receiving security updates for another year.

Windows 7 is 12.9% of Firefox installs and the second most used OS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.firefox.com&#x2F;dashboard&#x2F;hardware" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.firefox.com&#x2F;dashboard&#x2F;hardware</a>

That&#x27;s a shame. Windows 7 is the last good Windows.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced that later versions of Windows have some incredibly useful APIs that cannot be called dynamically and need to be used unconditionally.<p>This chase after new APIs also makes the program harder to support in ReactOS and Wine.

The Firefox data is interesting. It has been years since I daily drove a machine with 8 gigs of RAM which is 33% of their current users. Been even longer since it was a 32 bit machine, which is 15% of their current users. Win7 is the second most OS, followed by MacOS other as third. Linux is one of many at the bottom in the chart despite it being the default in (almost?) every distro.<p>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.

This allows Mozilla to trim away some of the cruft and have more time available to focus on actually improving Firefox for people living in this day and age. There will always be someone who feels left behind but to me this decision is a no-brainer.

Windows 7, what a cozy time to be a developer. The runway is long and your code will run forever...

If this means they&#x27;ll have more resources to fix the horrible video streaming battery usage from Firefox running on MacOS... great.<p>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.<p>Makes it hard to recommend Firefox to people.<p>Now... as for people still running an OS from 2009... I don&#x27;t have any comments on that, other than to say it&#x27;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.<p>Remember how shitty it was to have to support IE6? And that was only really for like 10 years.

Why should these projects support things after the companies that make them do?<p>Mozilla doesn’t support old Linux or macOS either.

It’s FOSS. I’d this affects you, you can always fork it and maintain support yourself.

That’s a shame, better give Mitchel Baker a pay rise.

<i>Unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and can be dangerous for you to use.</i><p>I see that the paranoia-FUD pushed by the forced-obsolescence corporate-authoritarianism crowd has infected them too.<p>Looking at how many <i>new</i> 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&#x27;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.<p>Fortunately there&#x27;s a huge and growing community which has forked Firefox and continued making functionally-equivalent versions for older OSs.<p>As the old saying goes: &quot;There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.&quot;<p>Look at the truth yourself if you don&#x27;t (or don&#x27;t want to) believe:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;112&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-95.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;112&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-95....</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;343&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-98.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;343&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-98....</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;462&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-98se.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;462&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-98s...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;107&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-2000.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;107&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-200...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;739&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-Xp.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;739&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-Xp....</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;9591&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-Vista.html?vendor_id=26" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cvedetails.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;9591&#x2F;Microsoft-Windows-Vi...</a><p>You can find the stats for (all the different versions of) Windows 10 and 11, and combine the yourself.