Future Of Firefox Quantum On Windows 7

[legacyfan]

with google announcing the end of support for chrome a month ago and other browsers following suite what will happen with firefox? there has not been an official announcement yet from them about the end of support so is there even a future for firefox or is it the end of the road for firefox on windows 7?

 

 

Edited March 29, 2023 by legacyfan

[D.Draker]

Yes, Firefox will go the same road.

Edited February 3, 2023 by D.Draker

[yoltboy01]

My guess: Firefox 115 will be the last major update. From then on 7/8.1 users will only receive Security Updates till August/October 2024.

[Jody Thornton]

Well yoltboy01 gets the prize!

After months of radio silence on the issue, Mozilla finally wrote back to my question on Bugzilla, that they WILL allow Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to run Firefox ESR 115. This was up in the air as to when support was going to get yanked. For awhile, it seemed that maybe ESR 102 spelled the end of the line for these versions of Windows.

I cannot speak for "release" versions of Firefox though.  Anyway, here's our correspondence (at the bottom of the page)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1594270

[yoltboy01]

But he added 

"I can't speak to when we will remove support for Windows 7/Windows 8."

Maybe 115 won't be the last, but I doubt that they will continue after that. They will surely loose some users after that. That's why they take so long to consider

[Jody Thornton]

On 2/3/2023 at 7:55 AM, yoltboy01 said:

My guess: Firefox 115 will be the last major update. From then on 7/8.1 users will only receive Security Updates till August/October 2024.

But at least they made a decision.  I had to ask to even get that.

As for release versions though, who really knows.  I suppose this is also good news for Vista Extended Kernel users.

[mina7601]

1 hour ago, Jody Thornton said:

I cannot speak for "release" versions of Firefox though.

49 minutes ago, Jody Thornton said:

As for release versions though, who really knows.

If the ESR version of Firefox 115 will run on 7 and 8.1, then the release version of Firefox 115 will run on 7 and 8.1, too.

Edited March 28, 2023 by mina7601

[Sampei.Nihira]

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/28/firefox-to-support-windows-7-and-8-systems-well-into-2024-at-least/

[legacyfan]

good so firefox should run fine on windows 7/8 for a while now (plus on the extended kernel for at least until next year)

[Jody Thornton]

2 hours ago, mina7601 said:

If the ESR version of Firefox 115 will run on 7 and 8.1, then the release version of Firefox 115 will run on 7 and 8.1, too.

Not so fast - ESR 52 ran on XP and Vista - but NOT the release version.

[Jody Thornton]

1 hour ago, Sampei.Nihira said:

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/28/firefox-to-support-windows-7-and-8-systems-well-into-2024-at-least/

And all in an answer to my question.  So think about it, if I never pestered, we'd still be waiting for this news.

[yoltboy01]

Lets just hope that 115 won't be the last for 7/8.1 (or that newer versions won't require a lot of patching)

Edited March 28, 2023 by yoltboy01

[mina7601]

2 hours ago, Jody Thornton said:

Not so fast - ESR 52 ran on XP and Vista - but NOT the release version.

You know that 52 ESR is based on 52 release, right? 52 (up to 52.0.2) release runs too on XP and Vista, but it will auto-update to 52.9.0 ESR. 

Edited March 28, 2023 by mina7601

[Jody Thornton]

But back then on XP/Vista, when you upgraded from Release 51.x, you were forced to upgrade to ESR 52.0.  You could NOT install Release 52.0  (even though they were the same initial base release)

[mina7601]

4 minutes ago, Jody Thornton said:

But back then on XP/Vista, when you upgraded from Release 51.x, you were forced to upgrade to ESR 52.0.  You could NOT install Release 52.0  (even though they were the same initial base release)

Oh, you are talking about upgrading from an old version, I read it mistakenly as clean installing. Sorry about that, Jody, my mistake. 😅