Mozilla has decided to stop all the software security updates and support of Firefox to personal computers powered by either Windows XP or Windows Vista.
“Today we are announcing June 2018 as the final end-of-life date for Firefox support on Windows XP and Vista,” Mozilla said in an unsigned post to a company blog.
Mozilla was one of the last browser makers to pull the support plug from Windows XP and Vista. Microsoft stopped patching Internet Explorer on XP when it retired the OS in 2014, and did the same with IE on Vista six months ago. Google scratched XP and Vista off Chrome’s support list in April 2016.
Windows XP and Vista have both been retired by Microsoft, XP in April 2014 and Vista in April 2017. Once dropped from support, an operating system stops receiving security updates from Microsoft. Third-party application developers, however, may continue to support their products on retired versions of Windows.
Late last year, Mozilla told Firefox users running Windows XP or Vista that they would be automatically migrated to Firefox’s Extended Support Release (ESR), a release track designed for enterprises and educational organizations. ESR builds are updated with security fixes every six weeks, but do not receive new features or enhancements. Instead, Firefox ESR remains feature-static for approximately a year, at which time a new ESR is issued.
Mozilla moved Windows XP and Vista users to Firefox ESR version 32 in March.
The June 2018 date Mozilla tagged as support “end-of-life” was linked to Firefox ERS 52, which is currently slated to receive its last security update on May 1, 2018. The next update is scheduled for June 26, 2018, which means that Firefox on XP and Vista PCs should be protected from attacks from May 1 to June 26, because the first time Mozilla patches Firefox ESRwithout servicing Windows XP or Vista will be the latter date.
Mozilla urged Firefox users still on XP or Vista to upgrade to a newer operating system. “We strongly encourage our users to upgrade to a version of Windows that is supported by Microsoft,” Mozilla said.
