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:Firefox.net? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure where you're getting the .NET from. TFS reads "Firefox.next" - not "Firefox.NET" or somesuch. TFAs certainly don't mention any .NET.
At least they give some manner of justification - Microsoft themselves dropping support for Windows XP SP2 and anything older than that. fair 'nuff, I suppose - it's not like Firefox will magically stop working once they drop support and if somebody really, really wants to contribute patches to deal with older OS's, there's nothing really stopping them from doing so (or forking if the Mozilla peeps would actively block such patches from being included ).
As long as they don't jump the gun on MS (Score:1, Interesting)
Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 are due for retirement on 7/13/2010.
As long as Firefox waits until after that date to yank support from non-test code, I don't see a problem.
It would be interesting if 3.5 were ready by June or earlier, and they had to decide whether to ship it before MS pulled the plug, or wait until July 13. The "workaround" would be to have a "final release candidate" shipping instead of a "released version," then "release" the very same code on 7/13.
Re:Win2K and XP SP3 -- similar status from MS (Score:1, Interesting)
Lots of Microsoft games also don't install on Win2k.
But if you figure out how to install them, they usually run fine.
I've seen warning messages for a lot of games, like Battlefield 2142 and a bunch of others from that time period, but they all run fine on Win2k.
I prefer Win2k to WinXP because Explorer has smarter folder resizing behaviour. Also, it's faster. In my tests between Win2k and WinXP on the same computer, Win2k is about 15% faster for most CPU-limited games. (Warcraft III, Left4Dead (when on single-core), etc.)
Dropping a big selling point! (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
To me this meant I could go to just about any computer, use Firefox, and have every web page render the same regardless of the OS. And I didn't have to worry about purchasing or learning a new OS just to browse a web site.
What happened to all of that?
I would almost think that with the economy as it is, Mozilla would want to keep Firefox as popular as possible by keeping it running on all these older computers out there that will NOT be replaced any time in the near future.
And personally, I'm still disappointed there is no Windows 9x version any more. Thank goodness for SeaMonkey 1.1.x and Opera!
Re:As long as they don't jump the gun on MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 are due for retirement on 7/13/2010.
As long as Firefox waits until after that date to yank support from non-test code, I don't see a problem.
I disagree. It'd be a waste of resources for Mozilla to commit development and QA resources to supporting platforms that will be within scant months of their retirement date by the time "Firefox.next" is out.
The allegorical rat flees the ship while it is sinking, not afterwards.
its hard to write code that cant work in xp (Score:2, Interesting)
What possible components can firefox need from SP3? WMP 11 ? Some obscure api somewhere? Or is it that not one can be bothered to keep a VMware XPsp2 system running to test with.
I bet there still will be more sp2 systems out there than PPC macs.
Or even PPC linux for that matter.
Re:forcing users to upgrade (Score:2, Interesting)
To my understanding, the point of limiting SUPPORT for a release to a specific set of OS versions is that it makes it easier and cheaper to help users who have problems.
The Mac OS X argument is simple: it wasn't until 10.4 that Apple publicly stated they would freeze the API. Up until 10.4 Apple could change the standard API's and programs that operated a standard way could be broken. IIRC MS has not CHANGED the Win-32 API since 95. They have added to it, naturally, just like Apple.
Re:OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when Mozilla dropped MacOS 9 after Mozilla 1.2.1, some other folks rolled their own 1.3.x versions. And there is even a version of Firefox 3 for OS/2! I was even kind of hoping someone would have hacked together a version of FF 3 for Windows 9x even if it was minus some features, but I guess nobody was up to that challenge. It certainly could happen with 2000/XP if Mozilla.org drops it and there is still enough demand. Perhaps this is really just a call to let the world know that the Firefox project needs some community help!
Re:Trying to see the reason for this (Score:3, Interesting)
"So Moz is only going to support the current shipping service pack for XP and Vista. Why? Is Firefox doing anything (better question SHOULD it be) low level enough for the current version to matter?"
Yes, bug fixes in the operating system. If you write code then you'd have to test your code on all supported versions of Windows to make sure that there's no weird Windows bug which breaks your code. The more OS versions you support, the more testing you have to do. All the effort spent on testing $ANCIENT_VERSION_OF_WINDOWS could have been spent on fixing bugs in the application or optimizing things. Furthermore, older OS versions typically have less users. It doesn't take a genius to see that at some point you'd reach the point of diminishing returns.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sorry- but (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:From a Web Developer Standpoint (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, yes. That wonderful blog post by Ben. This is a guy who was no longer active in Firefox development at the time and hadn't been for a while (close to a year). Before that be wasn't exactly working on memory issues either. So yes, he was being precisely a fanboy in that blog post: commenting about things he knew nothing about (all the bfcache stuff postdated his involvement, for example) while being completely blind to the actual issues involved.
Again, I challenge you to point to anyone actively involved with the Mozilla project at the time who said anything other than "yes, there seems to be a problem; we're working on it".
> The problem was it took them a LONG time to react.
So your real issue is that the lag time from Gecko 1.8 to Gecko 1.9 was so long? That's a legitimate complaint, certainly. But note that during that entire cycle work to reduce memory usage was done on a large scale, ranging from fundamentally changing memory management for DOM-exposed objects to switching out the allocator used when it was determined that the system malloc sucks on some of the OSes in question.
The malloc work was the last piece of work on the "memory leak" issue, and was done over a year before Firefox 3 actually shipped. Most of the other work happened well before; some before Firefox 2 even shipped. But Firefox 2 was using the same underlying Gecko as Firefox 1.5, more or less, so didn't see the benefits of the memory improvements...
I guess I'm not terribly interested in your replies either, if you're one of the people trotting out Ben's blog post, to be honest.
Re:Exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
Server Browser (Score:3, Interesting)
There are often very good reasons to have a usable and reasonably secure web browser installed on a server system.
And without Firefox 4.0 support on Windows 2000, we shall undoubtedly in short time see droves of Win2k sysadmins jumping ship for Internet Explorer 8. Oh wait...
Seriously though, my soon to be previous employer uses IE6 because "IE7 doesn't run on Windows 2000". I don't think we're talking about the security-paranoid here.
Re:gnome changes too often (Score:3, Interesting)
"It also decreases the compatibility with the systems your userbase use. Smart move!"
If dropping support for 0.5% of by user base decreases 30% of my testing effort, which I then can allocate into fixing bugs and making things better for the other 99.5% of the user base, then yes it actually is a smart move.
"I really wonder how many of the legal and illegal XP users combined actually have SP3. Yes the illegal XP users are a legitimate userbase, because they are a big part of the reason that the OS got adopted so successfully."
There's no obligation to support people who break the law.