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For those still clasping to Windows 7, one more nail in the coffin....
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Mozilla Firefox is ending support for Windows 7, this time for real
- Thread starter MrGuvernment
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Oh no...maybe those people who still hang onto Win7 will also just use older versions of FF?
Or switch to Linux.
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Zarathustra[H]
Extremely [H]
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This is why we can't have nice things.
Sadly I doubt it. Last job 99% of the "website is broken" user reports we got were from people using XP, Vista, or equally ancient versions of MacOS whose equally abandonware browsers didn't support any current web libraries.
DukenukemX
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Or use a Fork of Firefox that still supports Windows 7.
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If you have a specific need to use an EoL OS, it probably shouldn't involve using the internet often. At this point, these computers should be relegated to either offline single-purpose devices, or hobbyist retro-rigs. Anything with a CPU newer than a Core2Duo / Core2Quad, and you should just put Windows 11 on it...
But for what it's worth, just because this ESR branch isn't being updated anymore doesn't mean that the browser will stop working. You probably still have a few years left before things actually start to fail due to compatibility. The last Firefox ESR release for XP still worked reasonably well last time I checked, and that came out in 2018 I believe.
But for what it's worth, just because this ESR branch isn't being updated anymore doesn't mean that the browser will stop working. You probably still have a few years left before things actually start to fail due to compatibility. The last Firefox ESR release for XP still worked reasonably well last time I checked, and that came out in 2018 I believe.
Twisted Kidney
Supreme [H]ardness
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People that are still running Windows 7
A) I respect that kind of pig-headed attitude.
B) I suspect they probably don't care about running the latest version of Firefox.
A) I respect that kind of pig-headed attitude.
B) I suspect they probably don't care about running the latest version of Firefox.
sharknice
Supreme [H]ardness
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- Mozilla statistics from February 9, 2026 indicate 5.68 percent of Firefox users continue operating on Windows 7.
- ~150 million total firefox users
Wtf there are millions of people using firefox on windows 7.
I guess it's the most popular browser on windows 7 because it was the only one still supported.
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Dang it, back to Netscape.
DukenukemX
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These people refuse to "upgrade" to Windows 10 because they hate it, and they won't switch to Linux because they hate it. If it works for them I can't blame them.
sharknice
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I'm sure there are some people like that, but I imagine most of them are are from poor countries and it's all they have access to.
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More so willing to bet that many people are on Windows 7 because they just have older computers, do not know how to upgrade, missed the free Win 8/10 upgrade options and simply do not care or know their OS is no longer supported (OEM type buyers)
And, pirated copies of Windows 7 on systems around the world as well maybe too...
sharknice most "poorer" countries just pirate most things anyways, even 2nd world. Costa Rica when I lived there, buying an OS? unheard of, companies (and large ones at that) all ran pirated windows,office,adobe, you mention it, it was not paid for.
I sympathize with people who have no choice but to stick with an old OS. But for those simply using Windows 7 out of complacency or familiarity... they don't really have an excuse. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 7 six years ago, and using it right now represents a huge security risk — especially for businesses.
sharknice
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Yes, that doesn't mean they upgrade the OS though. If you get a windows 7 PC second hand as your first and only PC you aren't upgrading the OS, you just use it as is, and yes, probably pirate anything you need that isn't free.
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Just imagine how many windows 7 users since, not all Win7 users are using FF. In fact if you extrapolate that FF makes up 2 to 3% of web browsers that could mean up to 300M or so Win7 users. Granted those percentages are not across the board but yeah lot of old OSes out there actively being used.
sharknice
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I looked up the numbers though and it said FF is 54% or something for Windows 7.
DukenukemX
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Pretty sure Microsoft allowed Windows 7 users a free upgrade to Windows 10. Also, if you're poor then you know how to pirate Windows 10/11 copies. It's not hard to do. You don't even need to pirate it as Microsoft makes no effort to push people to pay for it. This is purely for familiarity. I can understand as I'm stuck using Photoshop and Fusion 360 because I spent too much time learning how to use these tools and now don't want to spend more time learning new tools. Especially Fusion 360 where I haven't ran it on Linux for over a year and have to reboot into Windows 10 to do anything with Fusion. This is why I can totally understand these people. It's not like Microsoft has done anything to improve Windows in terms of where to find settings. It's not like with Windows 7 where I can find it rather quickly where with Windows 11 I gotta Google to find out how to see the Ethernet connection speed. This didn't just happen with Windows 11, as this has been the case with Windows 8 and 10. Yea, it's a security nightmare but who's fault is that? The person unwilling to learn where sound settings are in Windows 11?
View: https://youtu.be/6Ec4PIJPK1A?si=V7qgKSvB67MNeIV1
sharknice
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You're thinking from the perspective of a first worlder. Imagine your only PC is a second hand 15 year old PC that came with Windows 7. It barely works and you can't possibly afford anything else. You aren't even attempting to upgrade the OS.
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Oh wow, I knew those percentages wouldn't be exact across all OSes today, but didn't realize there would be that much of a swing.
Guess it's a bit more comforting know only millions are still using Win7 instead of hundreds of millions... I guess
Himmelskibet
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My main OS is still 8.1, 115 should still be fine for now , but once it breaks there are tons of other forks
And no my PC is not ancient and no I will not go to Linux
And no my PC is not ancient and no I will not go to Linux
Within the scope of first world perspective only, here: Before this round of memory/storage price insanity, I was buying off-lease 8th gen i5 and i7 machines with 16gb/256gb at $30-65 each, shipped. Having tried just to see how it acted, a first gen i5 with Win10 on a healthy SSD and 8gb ram..... I just couldn't see sticking with it for anything but a kiosk or other single task function. Somewhere around 6th gen the performance got "decent" but as cheap as the 8th gens are...man... this stuff is ancient.
(While a 11 year old version of Quickbooks /Winxp is still on one of those first gen i5's running a handful of businesses for a friend of mine...)
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Continuing the wander down the "must run the ancient".... while some time ago, like 15+ years ago, I worked for a company where they still were maintaining a DOS version of their software for one client. I hear that in industrial applications, because of the uniqueness of some machinery, this is often the case.
I mean there's some of that but more of it is just people being dumbasses. They decide that the version of Windows (or Linux, I see it there too) that they are on is the One True OS(tm) and they will never upgrade. They have all kinds of reasons, usually made up or overblown, as to why and they get mad at the world for not giving in and supporting them.
I mean shit, we see that with Windows 11 all the time, including on Hardforum. People act like it is totally unusable or crap. Nah man, as someone who not just uses it but does IT support professionally, it is fine. It is 10 with a new coat of paint. It is not hard to learn, it runs well, it is fine. Yes Copilot is stupid, no you don't have to use it at all if you don't want to, you don't even need to remove it to not use it.
Now I get it if you have a system that didn't make the, rather arbitrary, cut. If you have an i7-7700k I can see how you still could be using that, and MS won't let you upgrade. Fair.
But there's lots of people who that's not the case for, they have a supported system, they just refuse to go. It is always either overblowing issues, like Copilot, or bitching about stability, which is a you problem not an 11 problem, or just making shit up. One I've see in the "making shit up" category is that "10 is so much faster at games!" Hardware Unboxed tested that... and no, it isn't. 10 and 11 were about the same, with 11 having a slight edge (though what I'd consider within the margin of error).
Hell there was a guy on VI-Control bitching about issues with a brand new 285k laptop and audio problems... he'd installed 10 on it. Not supported on that platform, and 10 doesn't have a scheduler to deal with that CPU, but no he had to use 10 for.... reasons.
Himmelskibet
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So this person installs a garbage OS on a CPU with ewaste cores
That statement makes as much sense as your choice in OSes.
Hah! Partially true - Windows 10+ is a privacy nightmare. So are Chromium browsers.
There may be security issues in older OSes, but there are security issues in newer OS's - which has more? I value privacy more than the very remote chance of being hacked.
I don't hate Linux, but it is a bit of a PITA. Had a bad experience with Linux Mint crashing/corrupting the OS. Tried switching to Ubuntu 24 - lacked support for certain software. Plan to switch to Ubuntu 22, when my dwindling free time allows.
You seem mad at the world for people not using the latest version of Windows, which checks out, because you are in IT support.
Show me the stats that prove the percentage of users in the last year or two being hacked is higher in Windows 7 than Windows 11? I would argue that the number of security issues in a newer platform are likely greater than an older one. Also with a larger user base, hackers are more likely to go after the newer OS.
You are free to use whatever OS you want. I use an older OS for reasons stated above. I don't expect people to care much about privacy nowadays, but I certainly encourage it.
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The key part you are missing though, security holes in newer, supported OSes, get patched.... EoL ones they do not...they just keep piling on...
I'm annoyed when people use old shit, have issues, and then whine about them. I'm also annoyed when they lie about new shit and act like it has issues it doesn't.
I also don't like people running insecure OSes because when they get owned, they are then used to attack others. It makes everything worse. Any time something gets taken out by a DDoS that was made possible by a bunch of computers that have been owned all over the world.
You would be wrong. For one, older OSes aren't patched so when a new security vulnerability is discovered, it is not fixed. An example would be CVE-2022-26809, an RPC vulnerability that requires no permissions to exploit remotely. However also new OSes are designed more securely as computer security advances. Though many people are loathe to admit it, Windows 11 is an extremely securely designed OS, particularly if you let it use all its security features (like VBS).
If these are the numbers, I'm kind of surprised they're doing it. ~ 8 million users is a lot of users to drop just because their OS is ancient. If I were King of Mozilla, I'd at least see what it takes to do a constrained build for Win7. When I was working at a popular app company, that's what we'd do for like ancient phones when there were still too many people on Android 1.6 (or whatever) to ignore, but we couldn't ship them the whole experience. Maybe win7 users don't get Ai or what have you, but most of the other stuff should still work, win32 is eternal.
Saying I am wrong, doesn't make it so. I am aware there may be unpatched vulnerabilities in older OSes. There are also unpatched vulnerabilities in newer OSes.
Again, show me the stats that prove the percentage of users in the last year or two being hacked is higher in Windows 7 than Windows 11?
People are subjective - data is objective.
That_Sound_Guy
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You're both in arguments not winnable IMO. I have a few Windows 7 systems going for various reasons. Mostly its not worth my time or argument to get people to update them. Haven't had an issue for over a decade. "being hacked" is an impossible measurement as almost all home hacks are social engineering or data theft at corp level. Click bad link, give out info, easy guessed security questions, no 2FA, etc. Has no bearing on Win 11 vs 7 really.
Old OS's where yes are unpatched, are also left alone. New OS's have constant bloatware added which introduces new security attack vectors. They also constantly badger you to login a cloud account so your vulnerability footprint increases further.
Nothing beats good firewalls and educated users. All OS's will fail with data leakers.
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Official support being dropped isn't the end of the world when there are a lot of retro enthusiasts now. Here's a relevant example that released a month ago: https://github.com/Jazzzny/powerfox-browser That's a PowerPC mac browser built around modern Firefox... you cannot make this shit up, look at the recent changelog for it:
In a world where (crazy) people are actively maintaining browsers for 25 year old macs and writing patches for hardware like Geforce FX, early Radeons, and Geforce 4 (!?), rest assured you will still have options for a browser on Windows 7.
sharknice
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My guess is the bulk of the users are in third world countries where ad revenue is very low and is eclipsed by the upkeep and opportunity costs of continuing support.
What base browser capability level does it have though? A half dozenish years ago when I looked to see if there were any alternatives for people on legacymac/xp/vista systems none of the FireFork browsers were baselined on versions of FF significantly newer than official EOL. Eventually the flow of functionality addition patches and refactors needed to support them grew too complex for a few hobbyists to keep up with and ever larger parts of the JS and rendering engines became effectively frozen in time despite nominal updates still occurring. As a result the PC ones weren't able to address the libraries-we-used-not-working-on-a-15-year-old-system that started cropping up when our scope expanded from school computers new enough to be running the current version of chrome to WTF teachers were trying to use at home. We didn't have any legacy macs, but it didn't look any better for them. If our client support person passed the possibilities we found on to users we never got any worked or not feedback from them.
Maybe they wanted to play Simcity 3000?
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