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Rohkem teavet

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Is it safe to say that by FY18 I will still be able to surf the web with Firefox on a windows XP SP3 machine in the same way I can today?

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I continue to work with Windows XP SP3 PCs and will do so for some time. Windows just recently announced End of Support (EOS) for Windows IE 8, 9 and 10 - all users must migrate to IE 11 or later if they still want reliable web browsing capability from Microsoft - which means from a Microsoft stand point I must move to Windows 7 or above. Google Chrome also has announced that it is ending support for XP later this month/year. Can I reasonable expect to still be surfing the web "successfully and reliably" with a Firefox browser on an XP SP3 machine still in FY18?

I continue to work with Windows XP SP3 PCs and will do so for some time. Windows just recently announced End of Support (EOS) for Windows IE 8, 9 and 10 - all users must migrate to IE 11 or later if they still want reliable web browsing capability from Microsoft - which means from a Microsoft stand point I must move to Windows 7 or above. Google Chrome also has announced that it is ending support for XP later this month/year. Can I reasonable expect to still be surfing the web "successfully and reliably" with a Firefox browser on an XP SP3 machine still in FY18?

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FY18 as in Fiscal Year 2018 ?

Well since WinXP doesn't receive security fixes Firefox is only as safe as WinXP is safe and a lot of other software on WinXP is no longer maintained with (security) updates.

About the only Windows requirements changes for Firefox I have seen for near future is that when Win64 for Release (as early as Fx 38.0) finally comes out it will need 64-bit Windows 7 and 8.x at minimum. The 64-bit XP, Vista and Servers are not supported.

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Note that some newer HTML5 media player features may not work in Windows XP like playing MP4 files (no Windows Media Foundation, not sure about Media Source Extensions support).

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My experience with Firefox is that Mozilla doesn't make arbitrary decisions about ending "support" for old operating systems - regardless whether those OS's are E-O-L and how long they are E-O-L. I don't recall the details when Mozilla support for Win95 or Win98 / ME ended, but when support for W2K was stopped it had to do with the "engine" (Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable) that was being used to build Firefox. Mozilla needed to use a newer version of "C++ Redistribute" for the newer versions of Windows; probably Win7. And Microsoft had removed code from the later version of Visual C++ which was particular to W2K or compatibility code in W2K was just missing.

There is a lengthy support thread over at MozillaZine about "updating" W2K to make Firefox 13+ and other programs compatible with the "SP5" a group of coder's came up with. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=2482475

IMO, "someone" is probably working on extending the life of WinXP far into the future, but right now guessing whether Firefox will be still be "compatible" with WinXP 3 years down the road is silly.

But James mention about "The 64-bit XP, Vista and Servers are not supported." sounds a bit ominous. Plus with all the HTML5 features Mozilla has added to Firefox lately, it may not be worth the effort / time to verify continuing compatibility checks for WinXP (to make sure a new feature works on WinXP). Mozilla has been "trimming the fat" as they are adding the new features.

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I still also use XP SP3 and Firefox. Because at my level of usage, security is seldom an issue, and because I am cheap and don't want to invest in a new computer and want to work XP to the bitter end. Anyway, here's a question along the same lines. Not about "security" but rather formatting of webpages. Recently, i have noticed that some pages on the web no longer load into a friendly format- that is to say, things like banner placement is odd, and other images either don't load or load in a strange place on or off the screen. (These same pages load fine and in what appears to be the proper format in Chrome, for example.)

Is this a Firefox thing or a Windows thing going forward? Is there a new set of formatting protocols or coding or something in the Windows 10 Internet world that Windows XP and/or Firefox just will no longer be compatible with?

Specifically, the new DRAFTKINGS.com Lobby.

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