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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP.
Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? ----- Firefox is ending support for Windows XP and Vista Firefox security updates for XP and Vista users will continue until September 2017, although new features will not be offered. In mid-2017, a final support end date will be announced based on the number of users still on Windows XP and Vista. Will switching to a different browser keep me protected? Unfortunately not. Most browsers (such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer) have already ended support for Windows XP and Windows Vista. If you want to keep your Firefox up to date, with all the latest features and updates, you'll need to upgrade your computer's operating system. Upgrade to a Windows version that Microsoft still supports, such as Windows 7, 8 or 10. Windows versions that are not supported by Microsoft are unreliable and unsafe to use, which also makes it difficult to maintain Firefox on those versions. For planning purposes, enterprises using Firefox should consider September 2017 as the support end date for Windows XP and Vista. |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 15:41:29 +0000 (UTC), Lionel Muller
wrote: I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP. Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? Just carry on using an older version, with plenty of about:config edits and a few selected privacy addons. Avoid anything Oracle, Adobe or M$ as extensions. Newer versions of Firefox leak as much personal info and are as vulnerable to hacks as Win 7 and up. All the most modern browsers are hacked in hours at the hackfests.(note - the browsers in the contests are standard issues and not "protected" by anything other than the OS and sometimes an AV) When the push comes to the shove, go Linux (but avoid systemd). []'s ----- Firefox is ending support for Windows XP and Vista Firefox security updates for XP and Vista users will continue until September 2017, although new features will not be offered. In mid-2017, a final support end date will be announced based on the number of users still on Windows XP and Vista. Will switching to a different browser keep me protected? Unfortunately not. Most browsers (such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer) have already ended support for Windows XP and Windows Vista. If you want to keep your Firefox up to date, with all the latest features and updates, you'll need to upgrade your computer's operating system. Upgrade to a Windows version that Microsoft still supports, such as Windows 7, 8 or 10. Windows versions that are not supported by Microsoft are unreliable and unsafe to use, which also makes it difficult to maintain Firefox on those versions. For planning purposes, enterprises using Firefox should consider September 2017 as the support end date for Windows XP and Vista. -- Don't be evil - Google 2004 We have a new policy - Google 2012 |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
Lionel Muller wrote:
I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP. Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? What's wrong with your current browser? My FF 27.0 works just fine on XP. |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 15:41:29 +0000 (UTC), Lionel Muller
wrote: it difficult to maintain Firefox on those versions. For planning purposes, enterprises using Firefox should consider September 2017 as the support end date for Windows XP and Vista. Since I have no intention to EVER use any version of Windows above XP, I guess September 2017 will be my last month for using the WWW. After that. I will just use newsgroups and email.... |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
Lionel Muller wrote:
I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP. Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? Just stick with the last version of Firefox that Mozilla delivers for Windows XP. Keep using it until you decide to try other web browsers. Maybe you'll find another you like better -- but they all have or will drop *support* for the 16-year old Windows XP. If Firefox does what you want, you'll waste your time on other web browsers. If dropping support was a critical reason to change to something else, why are you still using Windows XP? That OS still does what you want. So keep using Firefox if it still does what you want. I'm using an NNTP client that was abandoned 12 years ago. |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
wrote:
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 15:41:29 +0000 (UTC), Lionel Muller wrote: it difficult to maintain Firefox on those versions. For planning purposes, enterprises using Firefox should consider September 2017 as the support end date for Windows XP and Vista. Since I have no intention to EVER use any version of Windows above XP, I guess September 2017 will be my last month for using the WWW. After that. I will just use newsgroups and email.... The only thing that happens, when you use an older web browser, is web standards slowly migrate to new things. Maybe there will be a TLS 1.3 for example. But if there is, a couple of other versions of TLS will still work. Some level of backward compatibility, like continuing to serve SHA1 certificates when the latest is SHA2 (SHA256), is an example of web servers trying to support a broad swath of browsers. Just nothing ancient. Of more concern, is sites will put up a "your browser is too old" dialog. A possible way to solve that, is with User Agent spoofing. The version of Firefox you've got now, I would expect the version of Javascript and the half-finished HTML5, to last for a good long time. If the sites used actual capabilities tests, they would probably reach another conclusion (your browser is good enough). If you want a second browser, you can get SRWare Iron. The copy I have runs on 32-bit WinXP. When you visit this page with Iron, all the multimedia boxes are ticked. So it's a fully capable browser. I use it *only* for movies that won't play on any other browser. If you run your Firefox 47 against this, I would expect at least one red box. https://www.youtube.com/html5 Those six tick boxes, plus Flash, gets the job done. Iron uses PPAPI (Pepperflash, just like Chrome does). And the neat thing about the Pepperflash, is it doesn't try to self-update, and when other browsers claim "flash has a vulnerability, please update", Iron keeps running the old version of Flash as if nothing is wrong. (Well, at least this is amusing, but not exactly "best practice" on the WWW.) The modern web isn't a paragon of virtue, but you can kinda sorta get by. It takes a bit of work. You can also build Firefox from source, and it's just possible there isn't a hard block in there. You never know. Removing support for WinXP and Vista, on the same Firefox version, tells you Mozilla is "doing this for their own convenience", and it's passing strange that the new OS platform and the old, are being shelved at the same time. WinXP is reasonably feature complete, and I don't think Firefox uses .NET, so it's not like they're "addicted to versions of .NET that won't install on WinXP". To build Firefox, now requires a 64-bit OS, even if compiling the 32-bit version of the browser. I think XUL.dll has gone from around 30MB to around 60MB. To build the 30MB XUL.dll, takes just about exactly 3GB of RAM. You have to switch WinXP to the 3GB/1GB user/kernel split, in order for the compiler to be able to finish the job. Not that XUL.dll is even larger, and the RAM footprint of the compiler has gone above 3GB, you really need about 8GB of physical RAM and a 64-bit OS, to be able to compile either a 32-bit browser, or a 64-bit browser. That's just to give you some idea of what kind of hardware is required. It takes around two days of work, to get an environment set up and ready for your first compile. They don't use or need an entire IDE (software development environment), and the compiler they have you download, they just run it at script level, and make compile and link calls to it. It's a challenge, but you can do it. And at least experiment (when Firefox hits 53 say), to see whether they really did place sticks of dynamite in the source, to prevent us from using it :-) There are at least 150,000 files in the source, so it's all too easy for them to sabotage it if they want. You're not going to let a little ole OS get in your way, are you ? :-) You can install any Windows you want for 30 days, unactivated, and do software builds in it. For Windows 8 or 8.1, there are install-only keys, which will give you the 30-day period. A couple of my Firefox and Thunderbird build environments, were throwaway, and when the OS expired, I just tossed the whole works. Paul |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
For microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Paul wrote:
If you want a second browser, you can get SRWare Iron. The copy I have runs on 32-bit WinXP. That's the kind of advice I was seeking! https://www.srware.net/en/software_s...n_download.php All I want is two things, which is the closest thing to Firefox, but supported. |
#9
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
On 26/04/2017 16:41, Lionel Muller wrote:
I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP. Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? If you still like FF and XP then continue using it. Both of them will continue running on your machine until 2032 by which time you might be dead or your machine will be dead. Lack of support is not something that can stop you from using a software as they are not technically time limited. Subscription hasn't been implemented in OSs. -- With over 500 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows. |
#10
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
For microsoft.public.windowsxp.general Lionel Muller wrote:
That's the kind of advice I was seeking! https://www.srware.net/en/software_s...n_download.php All I want is two things, which is the closest thing to Firefox, but supported. I'm used to Firefox, but since it's suggested, I installed Iron on WinXP: It automatically went to "http://iron-start.com" when I ran the installer, and the installer failed on installing flash, for some reason. Going to the unfamiliar settings, a bunch of noob questions instantly arise: chrome://settings/ 1. Why does it have a "sign in". Sign in to what? And what the heck is "Enable Guest browsing"? And "Let anyone add a person to Chrome"? 2. While the startup pages can be changed, e.g., to: Startup1: chrome://settings/clearBrowserData Startup2: chrome://plugins/ Going incognito wipes all that out so that startup pages no longer work! C:\program files\browsers\iron\chrome.exe --incognito 3. You can't set the startup page to what you really want it to be: Settings Show advanced settings Content settings (x) Keep local data only until you quit your browser [All cookies and site data] The worst thing of all is that it doesn't work with Gmail. When I go to mail.google.com it only lets me enter my login. It never gets to the password, no matter how long I wait. |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
Lionel Muller wrote:
The worst thing of all is that it doesn't work with Gmail. When I go to mail.google.com it only lets me enter my login. It never gets to the password, no matter how long I wait. I only use it for video. It's the browser of last resort. I don't propose using it as your only browser. Or a daily browser. I use browsers in a preferred order, using one browser most of the time, a second browser for Javascript and https SSL/TLS compatibility, and the third browser is to handle video failures in the others. I had to laugh - I was running Ubuntu (from a USB key), and using it to erase some hard drives, and I decided to try a video on the Linux browser there (which is Firefox), and videos wouldn't play there either. I don't understand what these companies are driving at, when so few browsers work with their "movie wrapper". ******* I only surf, using OSes I trust. But this has the side effect, that I also don't have much choice in browsers while I'm there. The same goes for browsers. The least-capable browser does the most surfing, because it doesn't have DOM storage. More modern browsers are a mine field. Paul |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 16:25:23 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:
Lionel Muller wrote: I was never unhappy with Firefox, nor with WinXP. Just got the notice below that Firefox is not to be supported on XP. What's the best alternative browser (I'm keeping XP)? Just stick with the last version of Firefox that Mozilla delivers for Windows XP. Keep using it until you decide to try other web browsers. Maybe you'll find another you like better -- but they all have or will drop *support* for the 16-year old Windows XP. If Firefox does what you want, you'll waste your time on other web browsers. If dropping support was a critical reason to change to something else, why are you still using Windows XP? That OS still does what you want. So keep using Firefox if it still does what you want. I'm using an NNTP client that was abandoned 12 years ago. Hi, I have been using FF37 for the past couple months or more. I think this was the last version for WinXP. I have WinXP Home Edition SP2. John |
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
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Firefox ending support on WinXP - What browser to move to?
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