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by tredre3 1072 days ago
I agree that the "BUT WHAT ABOUT UPDATES?!" hysteria is weird [1].

But realistically Windows 7 has a very small user base remaining, and an even smaller part of that uses Firefox. So what do you want Mozilla to do? Keep wasting resources on CI, testing, coding shims for missing OS features, and making releases for the benefit of the 12 people worldwide who depend on the W7+Firefox combination?

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2202720-coomer

2 comments

The hysteria is of course propagated by those who stand the most to benefit from it.

Keep wasting resources on CI, testing, coding shims for missing OS features, and making releases for the benefit of the 12 people worldwide who depend on the W7+Firefox combination?

There's no need to target specific OS versions. Yes, MS has added new APIs, but the old ones are still there and function perfectly fine; and chances are that the users on W7 are not going to care about any new features anyway, so if Firefox doesn't have the same features when running on W7 vs. a newer version, it doesn't matter.

I have written apps that will run on anything from Win95 to 11. A minimalist web browser happens to be something I've been working on too.

Microsoft's backwards compatibility its is greatest advantage, but only if you take advantage of it.

I'm to lazy to dig them up, but yes, if you look at the python change they applied to break win7, or the firefox change required to break winXP they both were like 20 lines of code that largely had sat untouched for years and provided some api shimming.

So it actually takes effort to remove support for these OSs, and generally its better to just let them decay if the project can't be bothered to keep a CI machine running than give your users the middle finger.

So, yah, they deserve the ire people direct at them.

Heh. My father is one of those 12. He called me yesterday and mentioned he was going to be trying out some Linux stuff.