Mozilla is considering extending Firefox support on Win7 and 8.1.

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Wu Yanzu and Coje_He for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, November 2 (Xinhua) Microsoft plans to end its paid extension support for Windows 7 or free technical support for Win8.1 in the first half of 2023, which means it will be difficult for those who do not want to upgrade to the new version to receive free security updates.

At the same time, software companies will face a choice: whether they should maintain support for such obsolete operating systems for a long time, or give up support on the day that officials no longer maintain it.

The end of the Windows 7 life cycle also means the end of support for major browsers. For example, Google announced that it will end its support for Google Chrome on Windows 7 and Windows 8 in February 2023.

Chrome users on this operating system can continue to run Chrome 110, but browsers will not receive any updates, the company said.

In addition, Mozilla faces equally difficult decisions. The company says about 15 per cent of Firefox users currently use the browser on Windows 7 and 8.1 machines. Although this percentage has declined significantly over the past few years, it is almost as high as the percentage of Firefox on all other operating systems.

CTOnews.com has learned that Firefox on all Linux distributions, Mac, and all other Windows versions except Win10 (including Windows 8.1) also has a user base of about 15 per cent.

According to a post on Bugzilla, Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, is considering two options: end support in the first quarter of 2023, or continue to update Firefox for the older version of Windows until August 2023, until the next newer version of extension support (ESR 114) is released.

For now, users using Firefox browsers on Windows 7 or 8.1 devices have a variety of options:

Upgrade to Windows 10. Microsoft will provide support until 2025.

Continue to use unsupported Firefox on unsupported versions of Windows.

Switch to another supported browser and continue to use the unsupported version of Windows.

Migrate to Linux and run Firefox on Linux.

The development team said that abandoning the Windows 7 and 8.1 Firefox browsers in early 2023 would make their lives a little easier because they no longer need to prepare the Windows 7 test environment. At the same time, given that Firefox browsers still have "a lot of Windows 7 users", it's not the end of the world to let them run a little longer.