ozilla has diverted Firefox users on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 to Firefox ESR.
As I pointed out the other day, Firefox Extended Support Release is the least shitty way to deal with Firefox.
It gets rid of all of the constant new buggy code that almost always implements something hideous that they’ve copied from GULAG CRASH.
Eventually, you’ll still get bumped to a new ESR that rolls the last 12 or 13 “Rapid Release” versions worth of feature changes, at once, but overall, there’s going to be a lot less drama in your life because ESR just gets backported security and crash fixes and otherwise doesn’t “roll”.
Modern software sort of implies that there will be some crappy always-broken rolling release that always causes some problem you hadn’t planned on.
So while this change will be new for some Windows users, nobody should wait until their OS is out of support. They should just grab ESR. (And switch to Linux. But that’s not the main focus here.)
Most Linux distributions where they value security, stability, and predictable software behavior, want nothing to do with Firefox’s Rapid Release channel, and it’s clear why.
Mozilla posted an FAQ about Firefox and Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, so I thought I’d take it and add MY answers.
“Why has Firefox ended support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users?“
Firefox ended support because they’re stack full of Microsoft toadies. Supporting these versions of Windows would be trivial, they just don’t want to do it. Hardly anything of value has changed since these operating systems had their last feature packs added.
There are still some people making variants of Firefox and Pale Moon (a Firefox fork) for Windows XP for crying out loud, and that was released 22 years ago this month.
Granted that much has changed since XP and these browsers are not very stable due to the fact that the XP kernel is EXTREMELY old and things like multi-process programs were barely even something Windows was capable of then, but the fact is that people still make browsers for it and it’s 22 years old and hasn’t been touched by Microsoft, even for a security update, since 2014 (or 2019 if you used the WEPOS hack).
Will switching to a different browser keep me protected?
That depends on what you mean by “protected”.
If you’re on an unsupported version of Windows, you’re in even more danger than a supported version of Windows, which itself is still quite susceptible to malware infestations.
However, if you mean is there a supported browser you can switch to, then there are several still out there. When Firefox ESR support ends, it’s quite possible you could get away with browsing on Pale Moon or a fork of it for a while longer.
Can I still browse safely with Firefox Windows 7, 8 and 8.1?
Absolutely not. It’s Windows, it’s worse than Windows. It’s unsupported Windows. Anti-virus software is a big fat joke.
Switch to Linux and keep using a supported operating system and new versions of Firefox (or Chrome, or anything else for that matter). Don’t wait to get cut off entirely.
How can I get the newest features of Firefox?
Mozilla says you can “upgrade” to Windows 10 or later, but honestly, every computer that came with a version of Windows doesn’t run the next version very well. This is because Windows is hideously bloated and inefficient, and that gets worse with time. When your computer is getting up there with age, it makes how terrible the latest version of Windows is painfully obvious because you have not thrown a computer that’s ten times faster than your last one at it lately.
It’s very sad that Mozilla doesn’t even mention Linux, which will almost certainly be acceptably fast, maybe even faster than your unsupported version of Windows.
But Mozilla takes Microsoft influence-peddling money and wouldn’t dare say “Boo!’ to them at this point.
They also claim to be opposed to Google’s new Total Web DRM (“Web Environment Integrity”), but they went ahead and implemented the last DRM, Widevine, which was not even arguably open, and put it on people’s computers without asking.
Fundamentally all of the same arguments applied to Widevine and Mozilla caved after token opposition. Like appeasing Hitler and expecting that he will stop at Austria and Poland.
It’s very clear why Mozilla (thoroughly corrupted) is not telling people to switch to a secure Linux OS that is receiving new browser and OS updates.
Mozilla points out that if you put Windows 10 on your computer, you can keep your Firefox settings and stuff, but that’s also true if you change the OS to Linux and sign back into Sync. Your bookmarks, passwords, extensions, and most of your settings will just be there too.
It’s clear that Mozilla is giving people bad advice. Windows “upgrades” just take the same fundamentally broken, ill-designed, inefficient, security disaster, and push the Doomsday Clock back another couple years. In only 1.5 years, you’ll lose support for Windows 10 again, so it’s like a Snooz-Alarm with a lot of work and risk of data loss for such a brief respite.
Many computers can run for more than a decade and a half with Linux and still browse the Web with the latest software.
Maybe not so pleasant at the end, but it can be done. With Windows and Mac, you maybe get 5 if you’re lucky.
It’s hilarious when you’re a Linux user and see Apple customers throwing all their expensive shit out every 2-3 years. That seems like an awful lot of work and shuffling things around and money just to see all of the newest desktop icons.
What could you be doing with all of that money besides getting another gussied up Chromebook? ⬆