The popular web browser Firefox appears to finally be ending support for Windows XP and Vista based systems “sometime in 2017” based on this article from Computerworld. Firefox looks to be the last holdout on the major web browser side of things to still support the, in all honesty, ancient operating system. Microsoft ended support for Windows XP back in April of 2014, after many many years of extending support for the then 13 year old operating system. To put it in perspective, imagine using Windows 95 in 2007 and you somewhat have an idea on just how old, albeit constantly updated, Windows XP was at that time.
Don’t you miss this logo? I don’t.
Let’s not forget to mention Windows Vista, the much hated and much delayed successor to Windows XP, released in 2007, which is about to reach its end of support from Microsoft next year in 2017. With the small numbers of systems still on Vista, it only makes sense that Mozilla would look at the numbers over the course of 2017 and, more than likely, begin retiring the browser for those systems as well, apparently moving Firefox on Vista and XP alike to an Extended Support Release as the last build for those operating systems.
I’m honestly surprised, and somewhat glad, that in the past 2 years Windows XP usages has dropped as much as it has – the way people were talking about XP I expected them to use it forever. Probably the inevitable death of the average consumer machine after 5 years or so caught up to the market share XP had, and with the failure of those machines, people bought new ones, machines with Windows 7, 8, or 10 if they are recent purchasers.
The biggest group this affects, I would say, would be the hobbyist scene and business – those few business that still haven’t moved from Windows XP based systems, and need absolutely modern browsers, will seriously need to move on, although they are few and far between. Otherwise, those of us who still use Windows XP machines for the sake of it, as specialty machines (much like my Windows 2000 machine) will lose out on a current web browser for those machines, which in the end might be a good thing – keep your XP machines for gaming, not for normal web usage and the like. If you have to download and install something, a flash drive and download it on your machine machine.
Time to move forward people.