Luckily, that was just a rumor as I suspected, and they still had a few copies left. When I arrived, I took my place at the end of the queue where rumors were swirling around about the store having sold out of single copies of Snow Leopard in its first hour. Not the kind of line up you’d encounter with the launch of a new iPhone, but it was fairly busy for a Friday morning. There was a decent line up, as I expected. Even with an up-to-date browser, using Windows XP and Vista is simply a poor security choice.Earlier today I headed over to the local Apple Store to purchase a copy of Snow Leopard, the newest version of Apple’s operating system. There are hundreds of millions using the browser on the ancient operating systems, and Mozilla would rather have those users than lose them.īut like Google before it, Mozilla is not helping these users by not encouraging them to upgrade.

So if you’re wondering why exactly Mozilla keeps supporting Firefox on Windows XP and Vista, the numbers tell the real story. Vista had 1.41 percent market share, and the three old OS X versions had a combined 0.83 percent. Last month, XP still had about 11 percent market share, according to Net Applications. With Chrome no longer an option, many are likely going with Firefox. Many XP users thus choose to use third-party browsers.

IE9 is only available for Windows Vista and Windows 7, while IE10 and IE11 are only for Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows XP users cannot upgrade to newer versions of Microsoft’s browser: IE8 is the latest version they can install.

Mozilla is thus going out of its way to support XP for additional years, even longer than Microsoft. Keep in mind that Microsoft retired Mainstream Support for Windows XP on Apand then pulled Extended Support for the operating system on April 8, 2014. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla is not doing the same with old Windows versions. Mozilla correctly notes that “all three of these versions are no longer supported by Apple” and that “unsupported operating systems receive no security updates, have known exploits, and are dangerous for you to use.” If you want to continue getting Firefox updates, the company thus recommends upgrading your Mac. Firefox ESR releases are maintained for one year, and so Mozilla will continue to support it on OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 “until mid-2017.” Firefox ESR 45 will be the last version that supports these old OS X versions. Mozilla also offers a Firefox version called Extended Support Release ( ESR) for schools, universities, businesses, and others who need help with mass deployments.

Firefox for mac os x snow leopard