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Windows Chrome Firefox Security Software Upgrades IT

Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop 257

Posted by timothy from the dragged-into-the-same-grave dept.
Billly Gates writes "Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in 2014. Fortunately for its users who want to keep browsing the web, Google is continuing to support Chrome until at least 2015. Firefox has no current plans to end support for XP. Hopefully this will delay the dreaded XPopacalypse — the idea that a major virus/worm/trojan will take down millions of systems that haven't been issued security patches. When these browsers finally do end XP support, does it mean webmasters will need to write seperate versions of CSS and JavaScript for older versions if the user base refuses to leave Windows XP (as happened with IE6)?" Update: 10/29 17:31 GMT by S : Changed headline and summary to reflect that Mozilla doesn't have plans to drop XP support any time soon.
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Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop More

Chrome Will End XP Support in 2015; Firefox Has No Plans To Stop

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  • From my cold dead hands... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kell Bengal ( 711123 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:32AM (#45268293)
    They'll take my XP when they put me in the ground. Warning: this post may contain traces of levity.

    • Re:From my cold dead hands... (Score:5, Funny)

      by brain159 ( 113897 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:36AM (#45269015) Journal

      Will you drop some loot as well?

    • that frankly, who gives a rip. we are still stuck on XP at work until somebody finally gets off their wallet and completes the Win7 upgrade project.

      I finally did it at home, picked up a bargain laptop for the hamshack. 73 critical upgrades for Win8 later, all I have to do is fight the "Modern" interface. it's good exercise sliding to the bottom left all the time.

      the eMac is another issue, but that's my editing machine...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ron_ivi ( 607351 )
      If only it were open-sourced, then you (or your community) could pay third parties for support for as long as you wanted.

  • Article says the opposite? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:33AM (#45268305)

    The article says they have no plans to end support for XP, how in the world did the summary end up saying exactly the opposite?
    Or is now even blatant lying ok as long as it might work as clickbait?

    • I had to read it 3 times just to make sure I wasn't losing my mind...

    • Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:56AM (#45268617)

      Timothy is on duty.

    • The article says they have no plans to end support for XP, how in the world did the summary end up saying exactly the opposite? Or is now even blatant lying ok as long as it might work as clickbait?

      It happens all the time around here, unfortunately. Reading comprehension is rather poor for some of our article submitters.

    • Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:30AM (#45268951)

      The Chrome article states that support will end in 2015 - a year after Microsoft ends its support. The FireFox article states that their support will continue (indefinitely).

      More basic than the browsers - will the antivirus guys like Norton, Kaspersky, ESET, et al continue to support XP?

      • Re:Article says the opposite? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Derek Pomery ( 2028 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:53AM (#45269239)

        My initial guess was the article submitter was unclear on "continuing support indefinitely" but then I RTFA'd and I saw:
          "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."

        I mean. How much more clearer can you get? Yeesh.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jbo5112 ( 154963 )

        Reading the official Google Enterprise blog post linked to in the article that slashdot linked to "we’re extending support for Chrome on Windows XP, and will continue to provide regular updates and security patches until at least April 2015."

        The official announcement is a minimum date for support, not a date where they plan on killing updates. Google isn't stupid. They make most of their money off of searches, so keeping a healthy ecosystem of usable web pages for everybody is in their best interest

  • I know there are versions of Firefox for older systems maintained by other parties.

  • Linked article says exact opposite (Score:5, Informative)

    by arobatino ( 46791 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:33AM (#45268313)

    The linked article, posted 20 hours ago, actually says

    Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."

    and basically the same for Chrome.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      1. You're not supposed to read TFA, only TFS.

      2. There is such a blatant contradiction between the two that it's actually funny.

      3. But TFS has to be true... I just read it on Slashdot!

    • Well when the summary compared IE6 CSS situation to Firefox and Chrome, that might have been the first clue about the quality. Webmasters don't have to write separate versions for IE6 because it's no longer supported. They have to write them because IE6 didn't support standards like CSS when it was still maintained by MS. Firefox and Chrome have supported those standards.

    • Re:Linked article says exact opposite (Score:5, Funny)

      by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:00AM (#45268659)

      The funniest thing is that, because of the headline being in the address, you can put your mouse over
      "Firefox plans to end support for XP"
      and read
      "mozilla-to-support-firefox-on-windows-xp-after-microsoft-ends-support-for-the-os".

      We should have that feature on presidential speeches!

  • If they kept supporting it, I'd still use it. (Score:3)

    by Strawser ( 22927 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:35AM (#45268351) Homepage

    I only use Windows for dual booting when I need Windows for some reason, which is rare, but XP was a solid and decent version of the Windows family. I'd have kept it if it weren't being sunsetted. I now have Windows 8 on my other partition. I hate the interface, passionately, but luckily I don't have to use it often. I felt like I had to move to 8 just to have software support.

    Sad to see it go. It was the first decent OS Microsoft made.

  • Firefox is continuing support (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sockatume ( 732728 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:35AM (#45268353)

    From the fine article:

    Neowin asked Mozilla, the creator of Firefox, if it has any plans to end support for XP and Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."

    • hats off to firefox then...

      b/c this, in TFA summary, was a really stupid question:

      Does this also mean webmasters will need to write seperate versions of CSS and javascript for older versions of Chrome and Firefox like they did with IE 6 if the user base refuses to leave Windows XP?"

      I LOL'ed

      i'm making an 'ecommerce' site *right now* and putting custom system shortcuts & stuff all over it...using CSS3 alot to make quasi-animated features but still be lean

      there's absolutely no way in hell I would do someth

  • Does this mean that Firefox will finally go 64 bit?

  • All right (Score:3, Insightful)

    by trifish ( 826353 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:36AM (#45268377)

    Only an idiot would run a browser on an OS with unpatched vulnerabilities. Windows XP will not get any security issues fixed after April 2014. If you ignore those simple facts, you deserve becoming a part of a botnet, sending your passwords and credit card numbers to the botmaster.

  • It will keep my computer from 2002 on the Inter-webs via dial-up...

  • And where does it say this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by R.Mo_Robert ( 737913 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:39AM (#45268413)

    The first link says that Mozilla plans to continue supporting Firefox on XP; it gives no end date, so they presumably mean indefinitely (though practically probably not much longer than a few years--for example, they supported Windows 2000 until Firefox 12 in April 2012, a bit over 2 years after its EOL; on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if they went a bit longer with XP given its larger user base). The second link says Google plans to continue Chrome support on XP into at least 2015. Neither one of these links talks about Firefox or Chrome ending support for Windows XP. In fact, both mention the exact opposite, at least for the foreseeable future, so I'm really wondering where the author of this summary got this information.

  • User experience will degrade for XP in normal desktop environments. In other use cases nothing will change much, as these systems do not use browsers. They control some weird machinery and the day the hardware fails, they have to be replaced. As long as the new hardware is able to run the old setup, these system will remain in that state. At the very day, the user/company is unable to acquire a replacement unit able to run the old stuff, they either migrate to a new OS or they collapse trying. As a company

  • End of Life for XP in General (Score:3)

    by ironicsky ( 569792 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:44AM (#45268483) Journal

    As of April 8th, 2014, Microsoft is ending all support for their 12 year old operating system. We can't continue to support legacy systems because people refuse to upgrade. There has been THREE full OS versions that have come out since XP. There are people still using Windows 98 and Windows ME, doesn't mean we still provide support for them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sfm ( 195458 )

      > There has been THREE full OS versions that have come out since XP

      Don't you mean 2.5 ? Remember, Vista was on that list.

      • More like 3.5. Remember - Windows 8.1 was recently released.

        Seriously, what if I came up and said "Dos works just fine for me, and I refuse to upgrade, therefore everyone must make products for DOS so that I can continue to use it"

        It's a stupid argument - if software doesn't support your operating system, than apparently your operating system is NOT working for you.

        What if someone was running a version 1.0 of Linux? It works. Wait, it doesn't support USB or UDF or 64 bit hardware and so forth and so on? No,

  • The motivation is to support Windows Server 2003 (Score:4, Informative)

    by BUL2294 ( 1081735 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:46AM (#45268513)
    The reason Firefox and Chrome will continue to support XP is because they want to support Windows Server 2003, which has an End-of-Life of 14-Jul-2015. Since Win2003 (and XP Pro x64) use the NT 5.2 kernel and they don't want to lose that marketshare, by default supporting it on the NT 5.1 kernel (e.g. XP 32-bit) would be a trivial affair. That's why they chose "at least 2015"...
    • Just goes to show that the Win32 API is stable compared to say, MacOS X. Even though Mozilla dropped support for 10.4 and 10.5 PowerPC, the TenFourFox [floodgap.com] project keeps up with Mozilla's changes. Whats missing from Win32 in XP/2K3 that would force Mozilla to drop support in the future? OS X had big changes to font handling in 10.5 and higher, plus that big architecture change.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        Of course it is stable compared to Apple. Apple's attitude is that all apps should patch annually to keep up with OS changes. That have no intention nor desire for stability, they like rapid progress and encourage this attitude in their developer base and user community. Apple brags about how quickly they retire old versions of their operating systems to investors.

  • No (Score:3)

    by Quick Reply ( 688867 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @08:50AM (#45268547) Journal

    Web Developers have learnt from the past, there will never be a supported code that will be dependant on a specific version again.

    Cross-compatibility and Browser Independence is a main focus that hasn't been in the past. Most websites are not locked into a particular browser, so there are more options if things go pear-shaped in a particular browser. If for example Firefox drops XP support and there is a bug with the old version, the customer can change to Chrome until another solution is put in place.

    IE6 was the exception, because it was too difficult in many codebases to update it for compatibility beyond IE6 in the short term, for time(=money) reasons. As soon as the codebases were updated (or the solution replaced) to work beyond IE6, IE6 was kicked right out the door. IE6 didn't stay king because so many people loved that browser so much that they didn't want to change, it was because they HAD to keep using it for some reason. It is not uncommon for companies still relying on IE6 to have Firefox installed for general web browsing and IE6 only for the specific app they need. You can bet your ass they have retirement plans on how to eventually get off IE6 (& now also XP) altogether.

    Unsupported code (eg: unmaintained websites) that won't work with new versions - Yes that is inevitable.

    Supported code - No.
    If it is a supported codebase - The web developer's solution would be to update it to work with the new version, not make it work with the old. If that means that it will break compatibility with the old version, then so be it, it is industry practice not to support unsupported software.

    It's worth pointing out that Mozilla & Google are not supporting XP - They are supporting their browsers. If there is a problem in XP, they are not going to help you with it.

  • For those of you wondering how this happened, I told my bosses about it about 2 years ago. I made a schedule of replacing 2.5 computers every 100 days and that would bring us right up there. Every single time it came up, they delayed it. We actually added about 4 more XP workstations so the number of replaced PCs went negative. Now we need to replace about 24 in the next 6 months and we don't have the money for that so we're screwed. I plan on finding a different job prior to April 8th.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Your bosses probably figured out that, when there are tens or hundreds of millions of XP machines in businesses around the world exposed to newly found security holes, the bad press will force Microsoft to keep supporting them or offer cheap upgrades to Windows 7.

    • Just upgrade to Linux Mint or some other Linux distribution. It should world on old hardware.

  • Paul Thurrot. OK, guess I'll ignore that drivel.

    • Paul Thurrot. OK, guess I'll ignore that drivel.

      Not only that, but I think MIcrosoft would go back and patch a huge issue in XP if it was causing bad press. If there is an XPopacalypse then they would have to be crazy not to address it.

  • How hard would it be to create a runtime environment for XP similar to WINE on Linux and MacOS that provides missing APIs and such so that things written to require newer versions of Windows could continue running on it?

    Related point: is enough known about the OS that third parties could realistically provide their own security updates to it?

  • does this mean (Score:4, Informative)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:24AM (#45268895)

    does this mean will not have to worry about upgrading to a new version of Firefox every other fortnight and having it break all the add-ons
    sounds good to me
    btw I just upgraded to FF 25 on my Win7 box and had to fiddle with Foxtab a lot to get it going again
    there was no mention during the upgrade process that Foxtab was incompatible

  • The Article (Score:3, Informative)

    by JTD121 ( 950855 ) * on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @09:36AM (#45269019) Homepage
    Was published early August, so there may have been some changes and press releases and announcements since then, no? I would imagine AV companies will support whoever pays, especially the annual plans.

  • We Love XP (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndyCanfield ( 700565 ) <andycanfield&yandex,com> on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @10:18AM (#45269507) Homepage
    Most manufacturers would give their eye teeth to have a product that their customers love as much as our users love Wincows XP. It does everything that our people need done, it is stable and secure and simple and they know it well. As tech support I know it well, too; on XP I don't have to search for "Where did Microsoft put the device drivers THIS TIME!"

    But the problem that Microsoft faces is that they hire programmers, and programmers are change agents. If the program really does the job well, nobody will ever buy a new version. So they have to artificially destroy Windows XP in order to sell newer versions. Trojans, viruses, malware are all allies of Microsoft.

    Sort of like getting a new wife every eight years, whether you want one or not.

    • Most manufacturers would give their eye teeth to have a product that their customers love as much as our users love Wincows XP. It does everything that our people need done, it is stable and secure and simple and they know it well

      Something like.... Windows 7?

  • Why are his summaries so despised for being inaccurate?

    • You've got all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order.

      His summaries are so despised. Why? For being inaccurate.

  • The headline:

    Firefox ... Will Soon EOL On XP

    From the article

    Johnathan Nightingale, VP of Firefox at Mozilla stated, "We have no plans to discontinue support for our XP users."

    You're a freakin' genius, y'idiot.

  • patches aren't everything (Score:4, Insightful)

    by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @11:01AM (#45270057)

    Everyone talks like the patch treadmill is absolutely necessary. It's not. The only reason this treadmill is marched by IT depts is to protect their jobs from the logical fallacies of management. The proof is the false assumption that the system's secure once the latest patches are installed, coupled with the rash of new patches the following week. Windows is fundamentally insecure. Hell, just about every OS is insecure if setup incorrectly no matter how many vendor patches are applied. If you're going to use an OS in a networked environment, just accept that, and when planned for accordingly, it's not the biggest issue in the world. Everyone posting here should know how to mitigate risks like this by now, patches or no patches.

  • Not Acceptable (Score:3)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Tuesday October 29, 2013 @11:07AM (#45270109) Homepage Journal

    Since when does an OSS community abandon an entire segment of the population just because Microsoft makes a commercial decision? I hope there's a fork and some group continues to support XP.

  • Either Firefox forks, or I'll quit using it. I have no plans to change from XP. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me subsequent versions of Windows have made it more and more difficult to work "under the hood", and spend more and more time trying to turn every scrap of information they can gather over to Microsoft.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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