While Microsoft had dropped support for Windows XP since April 2014 and Windows Vista in 2017, Windows XP and Windows Vista were still supported by some major browsers such as Firefox and Opera, with security updates coming to the outdated operating systems.
Mozilla has now shut down Firefox support for Windows XP and Windows Vista, meaning that users running the aged operating system will be in danger of malware and virus attacks, since no security updates will be made available for the operating systems.
According to the company, supporting XP well after Microsoft had stopped doing so, required devoting more resources and effort, which makes it difficult to focus on other things.
Also, the Extended Support Release channel will stop supporting Firefox ESR 52: the final version of Firefox with Windows XP support; while recommending that users should upgrade to Firefox ESR 60.2.
As part of the Public Data Report, Mozilla Release channel claims that before the switch of XP users to the ESR channel, which as at February 2016, Windows XP users made up about 12% of release Firefox; and by February 2017, XP users made up only 8% of release Firefox.
If this trend continued without much change after the switch of XP users to ESR, XP Firefox users should presently amount to about 2% of release users, according to Mozilla.
Mozilla Firefox extended support kept millions of users safe on the Internet despite running an outdated operating system with last patch over 4 years ago. Now, the company recommends that users should upgrade to newer OS, like Windows 7, 8 or Windows 10 so that they can go on been protected into the future.
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