Mozilla Mulls Dropping Firefox For Win2K, Early XP 455
CWmike writes "Mozilla is pondering dropping support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP without Service Pack 3 when it ships the follow-up to Firefox 3.5 in 2010, show discussions on the mozilla.dev.planning forum by developers and Mozilla executives, including the company's chief engineer and its director of Firefox. 'Raise the minimum requirements on Gecko 1.9.2 (and any versions of Firefox built on 1.9.2) for Windows builds to require Windows XP Service Pack 3 or higher,' said Michael Conner, one of the company's software engineers, to start the discussion. Mozilla is currently working on Gecko 1.9.1, the engine that powers Firefox 3.5, the still-in-development browser the company hopes to release at some point in the second quarter. Gecko 1.9.2, and the successor to Firefox 3.5 built on it — dubbed 'Firefox.next' and code named 'Namoroka' — are slated to wrap up in 'early-to-mid 2010,' according to Mozilla."
Re:forcing users to upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
Ever try running Firefox 3 on a version of Linux from 2003 or 2004? Get ready to build Gnome from source, because the versions (of Gnome) that are compatible with distro's of that age don't support Firefox versions higher than 2.
XP is what, 4 years older than that?
Re:Sorry- but (Score:2, Informative)
If you have a server, you Should Not Be Browsing The Web (tm). And if you're using it as a desktop system...well, I hope god help you.
Re:forcing users to upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yea, if you're running a Mac, you need OS X 10.4 (Tiger, released in 2005) or better.
Why should windows get off so easy, eh?
(On reflection, I think it's GTK or GLib that you have to upgrade to make firefox 3 work on an older linux distro)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
From the proposal (actually, the first line of the damn thing):
Furthermore, I'd hate to see Mozilla get bogged down in the same must-maintain-backwards-compatibility-cruft that MS fell victim to. Firefox is already bloated enough.
XP x64 is a different code base (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm (Score:1, Informative)
Windows 2000 is probably the best Windows server platform. It's lean and mean and it doesn't get in your way like the newer versions. It's still supported by all the major database vendors.
It doesn't support IPv6 or LDAP, but that is not important for a lot of applications.
Most of these commercial databases use web interfaces for their configuration. For obvious reasons these interfaces should be firewalled for local access only. This means you have to run the web browser on the local machine to configure the database.
Some of these web interfaces use powerful new web features like AJAX and SVG, so a web browser from 2000 will not work.
Re:Dropping a big selling point! (Score:3, Informative)
It used to be that one of the big selling points of Mozilla/Firefox was that it could run on almost any OS! Mac, Windows (95 and NT 3.51 and up), Linux, BeOS, OS/2, Solaris, and more!
I guess Opera will be the last browser still supporting everything then.
Win2k support already gone (Score:1, Informative)
Search the bugzilla for "Quicktime" and "Windows 2000". FF3's new plugin security model makes the last QT plugin for Win2k unstable. And instead of looking for a workaround or allowing users to exercise discretion about the plugin, they simply put the plugin on a super-blacklist (you can't just whitelist it through the normal means, you have to tinker with the browser's xml configuration, etc.)
Basically, while the renderer may still work just fine in Win2k, the browser functionality in FF3 has taken a dive, and it's almost preposterous that they would even hint that the next version would continue to "support" it. Win2k support is gone, has been gone.
Re:Dropping a big selling point! (Score:3, Informative)
How can you reasonably expect any software developer to keep supporting Windows 9x in such conditions?
Nowadays? VirtualPC.
Re:forcing users to upgrade (Score:4, Informative)
In a sense, RHEL4 is not old. Update 7 came out in July 2008 [wikipedia.org] and includes Firefox 3 [redhat.com]. According to Red Hat's support schedule [redhat.com], RHEL4 left "Production 1" phase just two weeks ago, meaning it will no longer recieve "Software Enhancements".
Red Hat has the resources to make the latest things things work on their distribution without replacing everything. And Firefox 3 didn't work easily in RHEL 4 until Red Hat provided support... [mozillazine.org]
Re:Glad they didn't do it last week (Score:5, Informative)
Luckily, there's a closed source program for you (Score:5, Informative)
Opera is willing to support you guys left out in the cold with a modern browser, going all the way back to Windows 95 [opera.com].
Re:Dropping a big selling point! (Score:3, Informative)
>Windows (95 and NT 3.51 and up)
FF 3 does not run on those, and also requires Mac OS 10.4. And I believe it doesn't run with gtk more than a few years old (Linux and Solaris). I am not sure about its current status on BeOS/Haiku and OS/2
Re:Sorry- but (Score:5, Informative)
You realise right, Windows 2000 goes out of EXTENDED support next year (i.e. the same support status that XP has just entered into). This means no more updates (including security) for 2000 EVER from the middle of next year onwards.
Mozilla supporting it or in people fact using it from then on simply is not the best idea.
Re:Windows 2000 vs. Firefox 2010 (Score:3, Informative)
> 2000 and XP were released a year apart with next to 100% API compatibility with one
> another.
Compat in the sense that 2k APIs work in XP, yes. The other direction, no. For example, to take advantage of the theming stuff in XP requires writing code that will work on XP but not on Win2k, because XP added some APIs that don't exist on Win2k.
Re:What does XP SP3 provide that they want? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:forcing users to upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, yeah. XP SP2 was brought up just because MS is going to drop support for it in a year. I don't think it's realistic to drop app support for it, and neither do a lot of other people.
> because XP is nearly the same core operating system.
It's the differences that make testing a huge hassle... And yes, there are XP APIs that Firefox uses that are not present on 2k, and yes we've had 2k-only bug reports that took up a lot of QA and developer time to deal with. So it's not silly at all to drop 2k support: it frees up people to work on other things.
Re:gnome changes too often (Score:3, Informative)
Basically true, but the devil is in the details. Latest Firefox version does stuff such as display downloaded fonts on web pages without installing said fonts in the system (requires a new API), scan downloaded files for viruses (has 2 APIs, win2000 requires the old one, newer Windows versions require the newer API), allows theming the browser (could use native uxtheme library API if supported only winxp or newer), native UNICODE support is better with newer versions, too.
For combination of wget and cat the OS version does not change much, for OS supported rendering and integration features, the OS version is very important. The linux version of Firefox already requires pretty recent glibc and cairo libraries.
Re:gnome changes too often (Score:3, Informative)
"No. Fundamentally, what is a web browser? It's a program that sends out tcp/ip packets, waits for the response, and displays stuff on screen."
You'd be surprised how many things can go wrong, even if it's just "a program that sends out tcp/ip packets, waits for the response, and displays stuff on screen".
- What if you rely on the fact that you can draw a line in your window, from a positive coordinate to a negative coordinate? And what if older versions of Windows had a bug that causes the entire screen to become corrupted? Oops, should have tested that.
- What if you implemented code in the installer which registers Firefox in Windows Firewall, but forgot to write fallback code for when Windows Firewall is not available? Oops, should have tested that.
- You could say "just develop on older versions of Windows!" What if you develop for XP-SP0, and rely on the fact that Windows's Unicode engine converts invalid data into "?". What if this later turns out to be unspecified behavior, and they got rid of that in order to optimize some things in Windows, and now the invalid data makes the entire program crash? Oops, should have tested that on newer Windows versions!
All of these are made up scenarios, but they *could* be true. The biggest software that I'm developing right now is a web application deployment platform built on top of Apache, and you'd be surprised how many corner cases there are that I have to consider. Fixing something on one version of Apache can break older versions, and fixing something on older versions can break things on newer versions.
You are seriously underestimating how much effort it takes to test software and how easily things can break.