Firefox To Snub Some Older Windows Installs

Mozilla has been a brand to watch for many years now, as has their flagship product, Firefox. But there is always a sadness where there is talk of no longer supporting older OS releases. Today I learned that Mozilla is considering no longer supporting Windows 2000. Okay, this seems reasonable to forgo this. However hearing that along with this, we would also see support for un-updated XP installations suddenly makes me glad that I am a Linux user.

It seems that with the upcoming releases of Firefox, there will be a move to the later version of the Gecko engine. And this means that Mozilla feels this is a good time to upgrade their own support policies to match what is being seen by the operating systems they are supporting. This means XP SP3 and above users will be fine. Anything older than this, you will be out of luck.

Where Mozilla is seeing a lot of heat from this, is in the fact that so many people are not updating their old XP installs. Many of them are not even using SP1, much less version 3. So there is concern this will hinder Firefox upgrades because of this.

As far as I am concerned, I say too bad. If someone tries to upgrade their Firefox install, is (hopefully) told that they need to be running the latest Windows updates, then I fail to see a problem here? If anything, this could be the kick we need to get those Windows users to keep their machines up to date! But that is just my perspective.

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[Source: Linux Blogs2k - Posted by FreeAutoBlogger]