The second option that Mozilla considers extends support until the release of the next Firefox ESR version. The downside would be that Firefox would lose a percentage of its user base over night.

This option would remove a lot of headaches regarding testing, development tools and other tasks related to engineering. Some might move to a different browser, depending on whether it continues to be supported on their platform. These users could continue to run the then-unsupported browser, similarly to how Chrome users can do so starting in February 2023.

Extend support until at least June 2023.Įnding support in January 2023 would alienate about 15% of the browser's user base.

Mozilla considers two main options right now: A decision has not been made yet in regards to a potential support extension for these operating systems. Mozilla started to discuss the end of support for Windows 7 and 8.1 almost three years ago, but the thread on Bugzilla got traction only recently. Firefox on all Linux distributions, on Mac, and all other versions of Windows, including Windows 8.1, also have a user base of about 15%. The percentage dropped significantly in the past couple of years, but is still almost as much as the percentage of all other operating systems that Firefox runs on, with the exception of the dominating Windows 10 platform. About 15% of Firefox users use the browser on Windows 7 and 8.1 machines.

Google did not reveal how large the browser's user base is on these two Windows operating systems. The company told Chrome users who run the browser on devices powered by these operating systems that they could continue running Chrome 109, the last version to be released for Windows 7 and 8.1, but that the browser would not receive any more updates. Google announced that it will end support for Google Chrome on Windows 7 and Windows 8 in February 2023.

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