Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 and 8 in January this year; Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome no longer support the above platforms since Chromium 110 released in February; two days ago, the gaming platform Steam also announced Windows 7/8 will no longer be supported from January 1, 2024. It can be seen that major software is abandoning these old operating systems.

Mozilla recently revealed some plans to support Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems. Unlike the above vendors, Firefox will continue to continue these operating systems until at least the third quarter of 2024.

The news was revealed by Mozilla software engineer Mike Kaply on Bugzilla:

We will not stop supporting Windows 7/Windows 8 until Firefox 115 ESR is released, so Firefox 115 ESR will support Windows 7/Windows 8 at least until Q3 2024. I can’t tell when we stop supporting Windows 7/Windows 8.

Firefox ESR is a version different from regular Firefox. The former releases a major version every 48 weeks, during which there will be a minor version every 4 weeks to fix crashes, security risks and policy updates, and each ESR is new There will also be a three-cycle (at least 12-week) overlap between the release of a version and the end of support for the previous version, meaning that each ESR version will actually be supported for 60 weeks. Currently the latest ESR version is 102, and the next ESR version is Firefox 115 ESR.

According to the plan, the first version of Firefox 115 ESR will be released on July 4, 2023, calculated in 60 weeks, and the time will come to August 2024.

Software engineer Mike Kaply only expressed uncertainty about when to stop supporting Windows 7/8, which means that Mozilla may continue to extend support for these systems. Of course, the premise is that the number of users and organizations using Firefox on these systems is large enough to hope. If the number of users is too low, or even negligible, then I believe that Mozilla has no reason to continue to provide support.

According to Mozilla’s own hardware survey, 13.44% of Firefox users are currently using Windows 7 (the green line in the graph), 2.38% are using Windows 8.1, and 71% are using Windows 10 (the top line in the graph). ). And Mac and Linux users combined are not as good as Windows 7.

Continuing to support the old system also ensures that these Firefox users will not switch to other browsers. To a certain extent, it can even encourage users of Chromium browsers such as Chrome to switch to Firefox, which in turn increases market share.