5 ms·

Why Firefox 4 isn’t abandoning Windows XP

46 points by thankuz 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- sid0 16y ago
  Firefox uses NSS for SSL on all platforms, including Windows -- are you referring to something else? edit: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Support https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Server_Name_I... seems to indicate that Firefox supports it on all platforms.
  - magamiako 16y ago
    Actually, FF does not support SNI on Windows XP. The OP is correct, at least, last time I checked this out (I made an edit to the SNI page on Wikipedia years ago regarding this). FF however does NOT use the built-in Windows Certificate store, which makes it very painful to use in environments where trust relationships need to exist, but built automatically.
- dspillett 16y ago
  I'd be surprised if FF4 didn't support SNI under XP, as FF3.6.15 seems to on my home machine (tested by accessing https://sni.velox.ch/ https://sni.velox.ch/). I don't know if earlier versions supported SNI on XP or not - I might fire up the portable versions (available from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable under the heading "legacy versions") and try the test with them later. The current stable version of Chrome seems to support the feature under XP too (though earlier versions didn't, see http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0403a508a6ae954e&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0403... - and other relevant discussions & bug reports come up in a quick search too). IE8 on XP fails as expected (certificate error due to the name not being presented to the test site which means the wrong certificate is handed out). All three pass the test fine on my Vista machine here.
joelackner 16y ago
i think this is a smart move by mozilla. i hope they see a significant uptick in browser share on those platforms. i'm sure it wasn't easy to dedicate all the extra work up front and over the life of the project...
- zdw 16y ago
  Also will probably bleed into future platforms - people stick with what they're comfortable with, so once they switch to FF/Chrome/Safari they'll likely seek out that browser on whatever new machine they get after their hardware dies.
devtesla 16y ago
It's at a point where I don't see anything wrong with going either way. I don't think IE9's abandonment of XP is going to slow the adoption of new web technology all that much, something that Mozilla seems to suggest. There is a lot of momentum behind them with mobile devices supporting them so well. Still, 40% of web users, even if those are among the lowest value web users, is worth developing around. Mozilla isn't around to make a profit, so spending on XP users makes more sense. Abandoning them would have also made sense.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Mozilla wants its cake and to eat it too. They'll whine that IE9 doesn't support XP, and then whine that IE9 isn't modern. If it's not modern then it really doesn't matter if it supports XP or not. I personally can't stand XP as an OS. But I do understand Mozilla from a business perspective. Although I wish they weren't so sanctimonious about IE9 not supporting it since they really don't care and I think it just continues to make Mozilla look like whiners rather than doers, e.g., Google/Chrome.
  - grhino 16y ago
    Mozilla is trying to position FireFox a as superior alternative to IE9. Therefore, there's no cognitive dissonance at all with Mozilla saying that 1) IE 9 is worse than Firefox because it doesn't run on XP and 2) IE 9 isn't really modern while Firefox is. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to be modern, but more than that, it doesn't want users to think that IE 9 is modern. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to have any compelling features whatsoever. A negative marketing campaign will always backfire to some portion of your audience.
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
      Mozilla do want IE9 to be "modern", that's entirely in line with their mission as a non-profit that promotes the open web. It's ironically Microsoft that's scared most of a truly modern IE9. What Mozilla certainly don't want is marketing BS confusing users into thinking IE9 is modern, while it holds the web back and drags its feet about updates. Nor does it want any browser controlled by Microsoft to have dominant market share while Microsoft still sees the web as a threat that it can fight mostly by go-slow tactics like having IE6-8 hanging around preventing new web technologies hitting critical mass. They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel threatened.
pointillistic 16y ago
The elephant in the room is that Chrome is compatible with XP and this might the real FF competition. Heck, even Safari works on XP.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Why is it an elephant? Firefox 3.x works perfectly fine on WinXP too.
kprobst 16y ago
Hardly surprising, but it's an interesting situation. The only company in the world that wants and needs Windows XP to disappear is Microsoft; for everyone else XP is an enormously bountiful source of users and revenue. It would be suicidal for Mozilla or Google to say "we won't support XP", just as it's fatal for Microsoft to linger on an 11-year old platform that eats into their revenue stream. Interesting dilemma.
- contextfree 16y ago
  How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there an opportunity here?
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    ReactOS is just WINE on top of a custom Windows-like kernel. All of the real action in reimplementing Windows occurs in WINE, afaik. It's pretty far from "full XP compatibility", but a lot of stuff works just fine. I'd love to see WINE considered a big investment center for people like Canonical. I think WINE and open graphics drivers are the two biggest parts holding back desktop Linux. Even if WINE could get .NET compatibility, that'd be a huge step forward (right now it has trouble running any of MS's .NET frameworks correctly). The reality is it's going to take a lot of money and especially time to cause the lock-in of Win-only apps to fully regress; it'd be a lot faster to work with it and cause almost everything to work perfectly on WINE. Office and .NET are the biggest hold-ups atm. The problem with major investment in WINE is that as soon as MS thinks that suing CodeWeavers/any other WINE investors or distributors would be less harmful than allowing the project to continue without the extra attention, they're going to drop some big patent litigation all over that. MS is not just going to sit back while WINE plays a fundamental role in killing Windows -- as soon as it becomes serious, look for a major, relentless attack by MS.
    - bad_user 16y ago
      AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers. And the best option you've got for .NET-compatibility is Mono. But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal problems.
ck2 16y ago
Neither Chrome nor Opera are abandoning XP either. All three will support hardware acceleration on XP. Only one that left tens of thousands (maybe millions?) of XP users out in the cold is Microsoft.
tomkarlo 16y ago
It's hard to make money selling stuff to cheap people, and it's hard to gain users by chasing people who are ok still using XP, for whatever reason. It's nice that Firefox is still supporting XP, but I don't think the decision should be based on the % of web users still on XP. It should be based on the % of them likely to be interested in downloading a new browser.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
So what's all this nonsense about XP being 10 years old and so customers who bought it not being worthy of a newer browser? Do you know when Microsoft actually stopped selling XP to customers? Trick question, they haven't. Despite several passed deadlines the latest plan, as of July 2010, is to continue selling downgrade licences to businesses up until two years after Windows 8 ships!
- BenSS 16y ago
  Right. Very large companies are still tied to XP, and therefore Microsoft is. IBM's standard load is still XP, and I haven't seen any Vista or 7 plans yet. I do suspect that they'll skip right to 7 when it's considered "mature" and they allocate the resources to clean up the enormous technical debt accumulated with the in-house applications.
trustfundbaby 16y ago
You can't always make decisions based on dollars and cents, sometimes its about just being good to your users and that is one thing that Microsoft has proved incapable of over the years. For them its always business ... which is why I hope they eventually lose the browser battle.. They act like people on Windows XP didn't also pay money for their copies of windows ... but all this will do is give people a solid excuse to use other browsers on Windows XP as IE 8 starts to age. Thanks for letting Chrome and Firefox an unencumbered run at your market share Guys!
- Splines 16y ago
  The problem is that Microsoft has too many stakeholders. The IE9 team would certainly love to have more people in the world use their product, but company-wide strategy leads to them dropping WinXP support. This is slowly going away (see the various MSFT iPhone applications), but this mentality will certainly remain with the company. Actually, I'd argue this is a strength under certain circumstances.
- CJefferson 16y ago
  Maybe they are having problems, like Apple, with spending money on old operating systems? Windows XP users would never pay for IE 9, and Apple claim they can't give XCode 4 away to users from an OS released 18 months ago.
- lurker17 16y ago
  If it is so much work for Microsoft to support IE9 on XP, they should make it and offer it for sale. Since XP is so important, and IE9 is so important, people will surely pay for a browser upgrade, right? What's the market price for a modern browser? $79? $29? $0?! How on earth did that happen?
ja27 16y ago
According to a friend that just got a new work laptop, Windows XP is still standard issue at IBM. I imagine plenty of other large companies are in the same position.
pnathan 16y ago
I sort of take the Apple philosophy: Thou Shalt Upgrade Thy Software. Keeping software modern is a good thing.
- russell 16y ago
  Not such a good thing, if it forces you to upgrade to Vist. It didnt and I didnt. To paraphrase Apple, "XP forever."
- rmc 16y ago
  Forcing an OS upgrade is in ms's interest since its likely people will likely stick with the built in one, which is Microsofts browser. Keeping backwards compatibility is in mozillas interest since people are likely to change their browser than their OS. This means xp users are likely to switch to mozilla than Microsoft.

46 points by thankuz 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sid0 16y ago
Firefox uses NSS for SSL on all platforms, including Windows -- are you referring to something else? edit: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Support https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Server_Name_I... seems to indicate that Firefox supports it on all platforms.
- magamiako 16y ago
  Actually, FF does not support SNI on Windows XP. The OP is correct, at least, last time I checked this out (I made an edit to the SNI page on Wikipedia years ago regarding this). FF however does NOT use the built-in Windows Certificate store, which makes it very painful to use in environments where trust relationships need to exist, but built automatically.
dspillett 16y ago
I'd be surprised if FF4 didn't support SNI under XP, as FF3.6.15 seems to on my home machine (tested by accessing https://sni.velox.ch/ https://sni.velox.ch/). I don't know if earlier versions supported SNI on XP or not - I might fire up the portable versions (available from http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable under the heading "legacy versions") and try the test with them later. The current stable version of Chrome seems to support the feature under XP too (though earlier versions didn't, see http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0403a508a6ae954e&hl=en http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=0403... - and other relevant discussions & bug reports come up in a quick search too). IE8 on XP fails as expected (certificate error due to the name not being presented to the test site which means the wrong certificate is handed out). All three pass the test fine on my Vista machine here.

joelackner 16y ago

i think this is a smart move by mozilla. i hope they see a significant uptick in browser share on those platforms. i'm sure it wasn't easy to dedicate all the extra work up front and over the life of the project...

zdw 16y ago
Also will probably bleed into future platforms - people stick with what they're comfortable with, so once they switch to FF/Chrome/Safari they'll likely seek out that browser on whatever new machine they get after their hardware dies.

devtesla 16y ago

It's at a point where I don't see anything wrong with going either way. I don't think IE9's abandonment of XP is going to slow the adoption of new web technology all that much, something that Mozilla seems to suggest. There is a lot of momentum behind them with mobile devices supporting them so well. Still, 40% of web users, even if those are among the lowest value web users, is worth developing around. Mozilla isn't around to make a profit, so spending on XP users makes more sense. Abandoning them would have also made sense.

kenjackson 16y ago
Mozilla wants its cake and to eat it too. They'll whine that IE9 doesn't support XP, and then whine that IE9 isn't modern. If it's not modern then it really doesn't matter if it supports XP or not. I personally can't stand XP as an OS. But I do understand Mozilla from a business perspective. Although I wish they weren't so sanctimonious about IE9 not supporting it since they really don't care and I think it just continues to make Mozilla look like whiners rather than doers, e.g., Google/Chrome.
- grhino 16y ago
  Mozilla is trying to position FireFox a as superior alternative to IE9. Therefore, there's no cognitive dissonance at all with Mozilla saying that 1) IE 9 is worse than Firefox because it doesn't run on XP and 2) IE 9 isn't really modern while Firefox is. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to be modern, but more than that, it doesn't want users to think that IE 9 is modern. Mozilla doesn't want IE 9 to have any compelling features whatsoever. A negative marketing campaign will always backfire to some portion of your audience.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Mozilla do want IE9 to be "modern", that's entirely in line with their mission as a non-profit that promotes the open web. It's ironically Microsoft that's scared most of a truly modern IE9. What Mozilla certainly don't want is marketing BS confusing users into thinking IE9 is modern, while it holds the web back and drags its feet about updates. Nor does it want any browser controlled by Microsoft to have dominant market share while Microsoft still sees the web as a threat that it can fight mostly by go-slow tactics like having IE6-8 hanging around preventing new web technologies hitting critical mass. They don't even have spellchecking in their browser because the Word guys feel threatened.

pointillistic 16y ago

The elephant in the room is that Chrome is compatible with XP and this might the real FF competition. Heck, even Safari works on XP.

bad_user 16y ago
Why is it an elephant? Firefox 3.x works perfectly fine on WinXP too.

kprobst 16y ago

Hardly surprising, but it's an interesting situation. The only company in the world that wants and needs Windows XP to disappear is Microsoft; for everyone else XP is an enormously bountiful source of users and revenue. It would be suicidal for Mozilla or Google to say "we won't support XP", just as it's fatal for Microsoft to linger on an 11-year old platform that eats into their revenue stream. Interesting dilemma.

contextfree 16y ago
How close are projects like Wine or ReactOS to full XP compatibility? Is there an opportunity here?
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  ReactOS is just WINE on top of a custom Windows-like kernel. All of the real action in reimplementing Windows occurs in WINE, afaik. It's pretty far from "full XP compatibility", but a lot of stuff works just fine. I'd love to see WINE considered a big investment center for people like Canonical. I think WINE and open graphics drivers are the two biggest parts holding back desktop Linux. Even if WINE could get .NET compatibility, that'd be a huge step forward (right now it has trouble running any of MS's .NET frameworks correctly). The reality is it's going to take a lot of money and especially time to cause the lock-in of Win-only apps to fully regress; it'd be a lot faster to work with it and cause almost everything to work perfectly on WINE. Office and .NET are the biggest hold-ups atm. The problem with major investment in WINE is that as soon as MS thinks that suing CodeWeavers/any other WINE investors or distributors would be less harmful than allowing the project to continue without the extra attention, they're going to drop some big patent litigation all over that. MS is not just going to sit back while WINE plays a fundamental role in killing Windows -- as soon as it becomes serious, look for a major, relentless attack by MS.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    AFAIK, ReactOS is also able to use Windows drivers. And the best option you've got for .NET-compatibility is Mono. But yes, it will never be Windows and will always have technical and legal problems.

ck2 16y ago

Neither Chrome nor Opera are abandoning XP either. All three will support hardware acceleration on XP. Only one that left tens of thousands (maybe millions?) of XP users out in the cold is Microsoft.

tomkarlo 16y ago

It's hard to make money selling stuff to cheap people, and it's hard to gain users by chasing people who are ok still using XP, for whatever reason. It's nice that Firefox is still supporting XP, but I don't think the decision should be based on the % of web users still on XP. It should be based on the % of them likely to be interested in downloading a new browser.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

So what's all this nonsense about XP being 10 years old and so customers who bought it not being worthy of a newer browser? Do you know when Microsoft actually stopped selling XP to customers? Trick question, they haven't. Despite several passed deadlines the latest plan, as of July 2010, is to continue selling downgrade licences to businesses up until two years after Windows 8 ships!

BenSS 16y ago
Right. Very large companies are still tied to XP, and therefore Microsoft is. IBM's standard load is still XP, and I haven't seen any Vista or 7 plans yet. I do suspect that they'll skip right to 7 when it's considered "mature" and they allocate the resources to clean up the enormous technical debt accumulated with the in-house applications.

trustfundbaby 16y ago

You can't always make decisions based on dollars and cents, sometimes its about just being good to your users and that is one thing that Microsoft has proved incapable of over the years. For them its always business ... which is why I hope they eventually lose the browser battle.. They act like people on Windows XP didn't also pay money for their copies of windows ... but all this will do is give people a solid excuse to use other browsers on Windows XP as IE 8 starts to age. Thanks for letting Chrome and Firefox an unencumbered run at your market share Guys!

Splines 16y ago
The problem is that Microsoft has too many stakeholders. The IE9 team would certainly love to have more people in the world use their product, but company-wide strategy leads to them dropping WinXP support. This is slowly going away (see the various MSFT iPhone applications), but this mentality will certainly remain with the company. Actually, I'd argue this is a strength under certain circumstances.
CJefferson 16y ago
Maybe they are having problems, like Apple, with spending money on old operating systems? Windows XP users would never pay for IE 9, and Apple claim they can't give XCode 4 away to users from an OS released 18 months ago.
lurker17 16y ago
If it is so much work for Microsoft to support IE9 on XP, they should make it and offer it for sale. Since XP is so important, and IE9 is so important, people will surely pay for a browser upgrade, right? What's the market price for a modern browser? $79? $29? $0?! How on earth did that happen?

ja27 16y ago

According to a friend that just got a new work laptop, Windows XP is still standard issue at IBM. I imagine plenty of other large companies are in the same position.

pnathan 16y ago

I sort of take the Apple philosophy: Thou Shalt Upgrade Thy Software. Keeping software modern is a good thing.

russell 16y ago
Not such a good thing, if it forces you to upgrade to Vist. It didnt and I didnt. To paraphrase Apple, "XP forever."
rmc 16y ago
Forcing an OS upgrade is in ms's interest since its likely people will likely stick with the built in one, which is Microsofts browser. Keeping backwards compatibility is in mozillas interest since people are likely to change their browser than their OS. This means xp users are likely to switch to mozilla than Microsoft.