If you're still using Windows 7 or 8, Firefox has good news for you.
This month, Firefox was set to stop working on Windows 7 and Windows 8. But Mozilla thought better of it, because it looks like it's extending the deadline until at least March 2025.
Windows 7 was released on October 22, 2009, almost 15 years ago. Microsoft stopped updating it on January 14, 2020. Windows 8 was released in 2012, but it was so bad that Microsoft had to retire Windows 7 long before it did, in 2016.
They are old operating systems, with security holes, which pose a great risk, but despite this, 3.03% of Windows users continue to use Windows 7, and 0.41% use Windows 8. These are residual numbers in percentage terms, but they represent tens of millions of users, which Mozilla does not want to lose.
As TechSpot points out, Firefox 131 was going to remove support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 this month. However, if we take a look at Firefox’s update schedule, we see that support has been extended at least until Firefox 136, which will be released on March 4, 2025.
For browsers like Chrome or Edge, which are owned by companies that don't leave you much to make a living from the browser, Windows 7 and 8 users are irrelevant, which is why they stopped working on these operating systems in 2023.
However, for Mozilla, Firefox is its flagship product, support has been extended for another six months, but it can't go any further.
The truth is that there is no good reason to continue using such old systems. It is understandable that many users do not want to switch to Windows 11, among other reasons because Firefox does not allow them to do so, due to the requirements of the TPM 2.0 chip. But at least Windows 10 is still more private and less intrusive than Windows 11, and just as effective as Windows 7, and its reliability is “less”.