TechSpot - By Alfonso Maruccia - March 29, 2023 Firefox will support Windows 7/8 until at least 2024 https://www.techspot.com/news/98122-firefox-support-windows-78-until-least-2024.html Read there more. See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1594270 Quote from Mike Kaply - 4 days ago:
This means that Mozilla has an open end for support for Windows 7/8.1. I read enough comments about the EOL but at least Mozilla is supporting a very special version of windows where EOL is 2024.
I fully concur- It won't be much longer since this isn't going to stop there, that i will have a single laptop of the latest Linux and just use my wonderfully secure, fast & efficient Windows 8.1 for browsing with a NON-DROPOUT browser since i have no intention to keep feeding the beasts as the masses will be forced to.
Latest Chromium versions to support Win 7(SP1) of ungoogled types are- Machrome - https://github.com/macchrome/winchrome/releases/tag/v109.5414.120-M109.0.5414.120-r1070088-Win64 ungoogled-chromium-109.0.5414.120-1_windows.7z (64-bit) https://github.com/macchrome/winchr.../ungoogled-chromium-109.0.5414.120-1_Win64.7z SHA1 4F0DB002F3AEF62D4137A85CD97C9B033B376245 01March2023 ungoogled-chromium-109.0.5414.131-1_windows.7z (64-bit) https://github.com/macchrome/winchr.../ungoogled-chromium-109.0.5414.131-1_Win64.7z SHA1 344D41B83F74472C10E00247B86CC7534E89A729 Cheers Ska
How long should someone put development effort into a free product for an unsupported OS? I know that sounds rhetorical but I am actually curious as to what would be expected by the end users. I have no issues with someone using whatever they want but how long should a developer support it? Here's your opportunity to set an expectation...
dont know for firefox but the code base is fixed to current status for at least another year while chrome is heading forward. the chromium based switched except the hibiki and marmaduke builds to avx/avx2 which is only usable on modern cpu. i think chrome will follow some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions
I'm afraid that I never heard of it. I had a quick look at their forum: https://www.catsxp.com/forum/ Way too much Chinese language for me which I don't understand (or is there an English forum?). Then I quickly looked at a recent thread (which is in English): https://www.catsxp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1602 Not exactly encouraging when I read there about version 3.3.4 and 3.3.5: No thanks!
I'm lucky that Vivaldi 5.7 still works on Win 8, probably because it still uses this version of Chromium, but newer versions can't be installed.
I would say it depends: First of all its a difference if we are talking about a well received OS XP/7 or a dumpster fire of an OS Vista/8, windows 7 with ESU and 8 have the same final EOL date. Generally speaking I would say that the goal should be to support a popular OS for about 3 years after ifs fully and utterly unsupported (i.e. no ESU nothing). Would be nice to see Mozilla support windows 7 long into 2026... Second calling chromium a "free product" is quite a stretch, you are paying with your data. Google is a big company everything they do is for the "greater good", that is to increase their stock value, not for the betterment of man kind... Just wait until you cant surf the web without chromium and you can no longer run an effective ad blocker (manifest v4) on it... eye cancer here they come. But rambling aside times change, things change, some adaptations is necessary... When windows 8 came out it was garbage and it remained garbage, when windows 10 came out it was pretty much slightly less garbage but with telemetry and cloud. That was almost 8 years ago, yea how the time flies by. And back then there was absolutely no good reason to use it, none whats o ever. Mostly everything you could buy still ran just perfectly fine with 7 and if you happen to need more than 192GB of RAM you surely had the money to also get a Server 2008R2 (i.e. the windows 7 server edition). So you got no benefits but were at risk of being spied on, a.k.a. telemetrized in and out from front to back. Today things changed, with the new AMD and Intel CPU's that finally are getting to the 2x performance boost in single threaded workloads over old 2013 CPU's (LOL yup that's how long it took: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7950X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-5800X) upgrading to a new platform finally is worth it. And these CPU's are not only faster but often have a heterogeneous architecture (Intel: P/E Cores, AMD: different CCX's; 3DVCache memory access, etc...) which is in no way whats o ever supported by windows 7, its not a matter of hacking a driver to work on 7, but without an updated scheduler like present in later windows 10 and 11 kernels there is a significant performance penalty period. And I haven't yet mentioned the biggest game changer of them all, CET (Control-flow Enforcement Technology) / shadow stack support this is security wise a massive improvement comparable only with the NX bit that was around windows XP SP2 for reference. With CET you can pretty much eliminate ROP based exploits, which just as a reminder were the big thing after the NX bit broke normal buffer overflows and alike. You really can not overstate how big of an improvement this is, and this is only supported by later windows 10 and 11 versions. And there are those many large and small improvements that made their way into windows over the years, WSL/WSA, the improved task manager, multi clipboard Win+V, the action center, etc... So that's the up sides now to the down sides they just got worse since 2015 especially in windows 11. Telemetry is still there... Windows is more obnoxious then ever trying to convince people to use a MSFT account or at least MSEdge... Ads in the start menu are spreading... But nothing of that is really new, or inevitable, and after so many years the means of thoroughly neutering those unacceptable atrocities are pretty well developed and those mechanisms understood. Its easier then ever to cut a windows 10/11 installation off from its corporate overlord and use it completely cloud free, MSFT even fell on their noses with the updates so often that now they are going back to a more reasonable 3 year release cycle, so the rumors go... Its really a very different situation from 2015: "Install that windows, don't know what it will send to M$, get a clean install of all MSFT spyware every 6 months forced on you" now compare that to the situation in 2023: "Install that windows 11, have the installer already prepped to not ask for a online account, know which services you need to disable to make it shut up and have to deal with a major update that may break your customizations only every 3 years or more" Its a different situation the down sides are understood and well mitigated (running a well configured windows 10/11 is not more of a privacy issue then 7) while over the years some really major upsides have materialized. Admittedly properly configuring windows 10 is some work, but there are tools for that, and what also helps a great lot is to use a LTSC edition, also education editions are quite fine and as far as I can tell ad free. Mostly whats to consider is how many users there are: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide And as it seams after ESU ended there is a steep drop in users to the benefit of windows 10, probably most are corporate users, anyhow a drop of 2/3 of the user bases over only 3 months is very significant. As it stands there are still 10 times more windows 7 users then XP users but with a total of only 3.7% there are quite few overall. To bring this into perspective there are now as many windows 7 users as there were windows 8.1 users just 1 year ago. Also the trend is still pointing downwards so in a few months windows 7 may fall below the 1% mark, at which point, despite all the sympathy for windows 7, one can really ask the question if its a relevant user basis. Last but not least (from a developer's perspective) there is the aspect of 3rd party dependencies: Qt 6.x does not support window 7, Visual Studio 2022 is unable to compile drivers for windows 7, that's just two of the top of my head, surely there are more... Last but not least (from a users's perspective) there is the aspect of compatible software: As long as there are any compatible up to date web browsers, IMHO an old OS even one without the latest and greatest security fixes remains, until an actually problematic exploit appears in the wild, a viable option. Hence for however long Mozilla decides to support windows 7 it will remain a usable OS I think in the end the thing is that at some point moving on from windows 7 is inevitable, and why not 2024, you can still get 5 years on a LTSC 2019, plenty time to consider once options what to do in 2029, certainly more than what you get on the 2021 LTSC unless its the IOT edition and it stands to argue that later LTSC versions will also have only 5 year support. Getting a properly licensed LTSC is hard enough a LTSC IOT is probably quite an endeavor. One could of cause wait for a windows 11 based LTSC, going by the expected release schedule probably late 2023 or early 2024, hopefully by then with a taskbar which is actually usable again. That said a hypothetical LTSC 2024 would give you just as much support as the old LTSC 2019, so it depends on your personal preference I guess. Except the absolutely unacceptable taskbar (and startmenu) I like the changes in windows 11, never liked dark UI's anyways, and tabs in explorer are really nice. So its probably time to move on...
for now its "only" the end of Firefox 115 ESR about end of 2024. but not limited. as i wrote: if mozilla considers to extend this to the next ESR mozilla would stand still to this status of its software, from my current view to the things. keeping it with windows 7 until 2026 for no reason makes no sense for me. there exists only one windows 7 build which get official updates until 2024 - and thats the ultimative end of windows 7 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-embedded-posready-7 and currently there exist no posready patch for the rest of win7 like for xp. 8.1 embedded ends some earlier (jul'23) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-embedded-81-industry sorry, but is neither nor resposible for a develepoer keeping an eye on security for his product. wasnt it you who recommended to use newer builds of sandboxie as 5.33 because of security issues? why another standing for windows 7? although sb 5.33 is usable like windows 7 both have enough issues to avoid them.
I share general attitude, but I think you are missing one thing: games. Some games just work better with DirectX 12 on Windows 10/11 or provide better graphics. It wasn't the case on day 1 and it wasn't until somebody upgraded graphics card to a generation that supports DirectX 12, but most people gaming on PC probably upgraded GPU or whole PC in a years following Windows 10 release. Games are probably the single reason why a lot of people stay on Windows instead of switching to Gnu/Linux, so it is pretty important one apparently.
Well to be exact I wrote The bold part is the important one, until recently all relevant security issues in windows 7 were still patched, and its not like the day the support ends someone will find some critical exploit, realistically this may take a while months up to years so as long as there is no known critical un patched exploit in windows 7 its in no way less safe then the day before ESU ran out. With sandboxie it was different as multiple security critical exploits have been found and patched so the old versions were known to be insecure and the knowledge how to exploit them was public.
Thanks for the reply. A lot of good points made. As for the "free product" part, paid products steal your data too so I didn't consider it part of the equation.
there are exploits on the run for windows 7, but not only windows 7 to admit this. the major issue that windows 7 has urgent security issues which got not fixed, while supported windows builds get updates. you cant deny the following issues, facts: https://vulmon.com/searchpage?page=1&q=Microsoft Windows 7 Sp1&sortby=byactivity&scoretype=cvssv3 and the list gets longer towards 2020 (i wrote ago: longer than my arms). using ESU may fix a lot of those, but not the current. some known CVE for sandboxie https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-16800/Sandboxie.html still saying that 5.33 is a good choice? like windows 7 SP1 without ESU? asking you: which version of sandboxie do you recommend, and why? which version of windows do you recommend, and why?
I would recommend the newest sandboxie and for windows 2019 LTSC or 2021 LTSC IOT That said I would not force/urge anyone to update from windows 7 SP1 with ESU, if a person stayed at that OS I would assume for a reason. How secure your OS needs to be depends on your use case, most exploits first need an attacker to gain some sort of code execution on the target machine, unless the user runs random executables on their system without first vetting them somehow, this means some other internet facing software has already failed, most often then not the web browser. So most local privilege escalation exploits are not something I would be primary worried about, what is a real issue are remote code execution exploits and exploits which result in non executable files being able to gain code execution (like for example a bug in an image parsing routine which results in code from an infected image being executed in the explorer process as soon as it attempts to display a preview). Such exploits are quite rare and network based exploits don't mostly affect private users behind a Hardware Firewall or NAT Router, for larger networks this is ofcasue different. So really as long as one can keep unknown code from executing on your windows 7 PC one can be safe enough. Which brings us back to the need of using up to date internet facing software, you can get an up to date browser that's the key, or don't surf the web from that machine LOL. For all other software, it depands,... Are you opening office documents of the web, keep it updated, are you exclusive only opening your own documents and have the discipline to not make exceptions, than it does not mater... So as said its up to the use case and the user. Windows is before everything a OS it has to run your apps, that's its primary role, security is optional. Other software has other purposes... A software must before everything full fill its primary purpose, as long as it does it is good to use. Sandboxie's primary purpose is to isolate things which run within it from the rest of the system, hence an old version with a unfixed exploit is not suitable to fulfill its primary role. A windows 7 installation still can fulfill its primary role even without ESU, its much less safe so the user must care for the security himself, but its not unusable. What ultimately makes windows 7 unusable is modern software no longer running on it. Or one of these rate exploits that would make it impossible even for a careful user to avoid execution of untrusted code. Perhaps my point of view is tainted by the fact that I know exactly wat to do and what not to do to be safe in any scenario, people that want to outsource their security to a company though should ofcause stay on supported builds.
Looks like the 4th ESU year for windows 7 was not a rumor but is real: https://borncity.com/win/2023/04/13/windows-7-server-2008-r2-server-2012-r2-updates-april-11-2023/ https://borncity.com/win/2021/11/10/windows-server-2008-r2-bekommt-esu-support-bis-9-januar-2024/ So whomever wants/needs to, can continue using windows 7 with some level of security for one more year, its not fully abandoned yet. And lets don't take this news as an excuse to continue quarreling about if one should use windows 7 lets just assume those that do have a good reason to throw perfectly good money at MS for that privilege I just posted this here as it sheds some light on mozillas decision.
