Upcoming Firefox Support Changes (dropping Win2K, XP RTM, XP SP1)

https://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2012/03/23/upcoming-firefox-support-changes/

by jhack • 14 years ago

28 11 14 years ago

blog.mozilla.com

vgnet• 14 years ago

kijin2• 14 years ago

> In the years since Firefox 3.6, we've make incredible improvements to Firefox, including . . . Firefox Sync

This is off-topic, but Firefox Sync screwed up my bookmarks on more than one occasion. Nowadays, most of my 5K+ bookmarks have taken refuge in Pinboard, but Firefox 11 with Sync enabled still occasionally loses, duplicates, or randomly reorders the handful of local bookmarks that remain. People used to complain about this when Sync was first released as an add-on to Firefox 3.6. They still haven't fixed it!

Overall speed and reliability, on the other hand, has improved beyond recognition. Maybe I should thank Chrome for nudging Firefox to improve.

martey2• 14 years ago

People used to complain about this when Sync was first released as an add-on to Firefox 3.6. They still haven't fixed it!

I did a cursory search on Mozilla's Bugzilla and did not find any bugs with this issue involving a recent version of Firefox. Have you filed a bug (or voted on an existing bug) about your issue?

kijin2• 14 years ago

Similar issues with bookmark synchronization have been raised over and over by many people, on various versions of FF ranging from 3.6 to 9.x, on various platforms (including mobile), all with inconclusive results: see bugs 721635, 718154, 627830, 622588, etc.

I wish I could contribute some definitive bug report, but it's really difficult to reproduce the strange behavior and I often don't find out until several days or even weeks later, by which time the logs are gone.

Unfortunately, the addons.mozilla.org thread where a lot of people reported the same behavior seems to have been deleted when the Sync add-on for FF3.6 was removed.

mcot22• 14 years ago

... but this support change allows us to significantly improve Firefox performance on Windows by using a more modern build system.

Does anyone have any info on the new build system? Last I checked they still used make which is installed via the mozilla tools.

jbrackett• 14 years ago

Apparently the big change is to use Visual Studio 2010 for the Windows builds.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/01/end-of-f...

yuhong• 14 years ago

Which means Server 2003 RTM is also dropped, BTW.

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

In particular, the current version of Firefox kept struggling to link within a 4GB address space. Hence the comments about "having had to back out and ultimately delay some important new features like SPDY": nothing about SPDY itself, but it happened to push the link above 4GB and cause builds to fail, so it got temporarily dropped.

mcot22• 14 years ago

Thanks for the link. It appears the actual build system will still be based on make but just requiring the toolchain inside vs2010 (currently you can use vs2005-2010). Am I correct here?

atesti• 14 years ago

I wonder why they don't apply http://tedwvc.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/how-to-get-visual-c-2... to fix it and keep it runable on Windows 2000, even though Uniscribe might still show some bugs with Arabic text, etc.

Upcoming Firefox Support Changes (dropping Win2K, XP RTM, XP SP1)

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