Full Story It's rather interesting that I feel sympathy for Mozilla that they have to confine their resources to supporting only what they can afford to do, and then I feel a little nonplussed that MS would stop supporting operating systems that people bought on good faith and are still using. I favor underdogs it seems, but who doesn't?
Why should they (Microsoft or Mozilla) support people running XP SP2? It's not like upgrading to SP3 is hard, and MS did a pretty good job of not breaking things in the transition, as far as I can remember... Plus, anyone who is backward enough to stick to SP2 probably uses IE anyway.
Win 2000? There are enough people who can neither afford to upgrade or don't have the hardware to do it that it seems like leaving out their customer support. That is particularly true if you consider the burden on organizations and what it will cost businesses who are cutting costs at every other turn. It has somewhat of a global impact in some aspects.
But what does 'support' even mean? How often do they issue bug-fixes for win2k at the moment? If they're only releasing bug-fixes once every few months anyway, what difference does ending support make?
It's pretty ridiculous how they just drop support for OS's they don't want to test on. I once asked on IRC if Firefox supports NT4 and the response was negative for FF3. Then I asked why is that and why does Opera still support NT4. I got an aswer in style like "We don't have time to support such old POS legacy OS's" and was nearly kicked from the channel for some reason! Opera it is for me in the future aswell.
To be fair, they're working for free. If you want to test on NT4, why don't you do it and contribute your findings?
If I go say there "I want to be the NT4 tester for Firefox" they will not let me. But if they really work for fee, I'm really surprised they started making Firefox in the first place. What makes them keep developing it? Oh, and I also have an alternative, Opera.
