Mozilla advised Firefox users still running Windows XP RTM or XP SP1 to migrate to a newer operating system - Windows XP SP3 is a free upgrade - and urged Windows 2000 customers to do the same.ĭotzler also steered Windows 2000 users toward a rival. The only version of Windows XP still backed by Microsoft with security updates - including patches for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the browser that shipped with the OS - is SP3, which released in 2008 and has two years of support life left. Microsoft doesn't even support Windows XP SP2. Windows 2000 fell off Microsoft's support list in mid-2010, and XP and XP SP1 were dumped in 20, respectively. Microsoft retired all three editions years ago. But it's not as if Mozilla has jumped the gun. Mozilla added support for SPDY in Firefox 11, the March 13 release.īy switching to Visual Studio 2010, Mozilla will not be able to build Firefox for the older operating systems, said Dotzler. Mozilla's browser may be first, but it won't be alone for long Chrome 57, currently in beta, is also due to include Wasm support, and Microsoft says that Edge support for Wasm is currently in development.SPDY, for "speedy," is a Google-crafted protocol that promises faster and more secure page loading. C and C++ programs can be compiled to Wasm using Emscripten, the same tool that is used for asm.js, and those programs can then be run in the browser.
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Wasm's binary, bytecode format should make it faster to download and execute than predecessor technologies like asm.js.įirefox 52 includes support for the first iteration of Wasm. WebAssembly avoids this problem entirely. Many of the security flaws that those platforms suffered were due to their sandboxing being weaker than the one the browser provided. Java, Flash, and Silverlight all provided virtual machines of their own, but they did so outside of the browser's standard sandbox. WebAssembly is intended to be an efficient bytecode that can be run effectively by JavaScript virtual machines. In 2015, development of WebAssembly ("Wasm" for short) was started by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
Update: The ESR builds of Firefox 52 (though not the main version) will also have NPAPI enabled, offering another option that will soon have legacy status.īut just as one era of Web extensibility ends, another begins. Internet Explorer 10 is supported on Windows Server 2012 until October 2023. Internet Explorer 9 is supported in Windows Vista until April and on Windows Server 2008 until January 2020. Internet Explorer 11, running on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10, continues to support the ActiveX versions of Java and Silverlight, but this browser is now in strict maintenance mode, with Microsoft only providing essential security fixes. AdvertisementĪll that are left are legacy browsers. This change means that there is now no actively maintained, supported, modern browser that supports the use of the Java or Silverlight plugins. Chrome removed NPAPI support in September 2015, and Internet Explorer dropped it years ago Microsoft's Edge browser includes neither NPAPI nor ActiveX plugin support.
Other plugins, including Java, Silverlight, and Acrobat, are no longer supported. Google dropped Windows XP and Windows Vista support in Chrome in April 2016.Īs such, users of those operating systems will still have an actively patched browser for a little while longer, but their days are numbered.įirefox 52 also gets rid of another bit of legacy: plugins using the old NPAPI plugin model, first introduced by Netscape back in the 1990s, are no longer supported, with just one exception: Flash.
Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP at all, and Windows Vista drops out of extended support on April 11, 2017. New features, however, will be restricted to the mainline version of Firefox. Firefox 52 is an Extended Support Release it will receive security fixes (and only security fixes) for approximately one year. Future major versions of the browser will require at a minimum Windows 7. The release is the final major version to support two legacy operating systems: Windows XP and Windows Vista. Firefox 52 is out today, and it's a landmark release for a couple of reasons.