Microsoft plans to end paid extended support for Windows 7 or free technical support for Win8.1 in the first half of 2023, which means that those who do not want to upgrade to the new version will be difficult to receive free security updates.
At the same time, major software companies will also face a choice: whether they should maintain support for this obsolete operating system for a long time, or drop it the day it is officially no longer maintained.
The end of the Windows 7 life cycle also means the end of support for mainstream browsers, with Google, for example, announcing that it will end support for Google Chrome on Windows 7 and Windows 8 in February 2023.
Chrome users on such operating systems can continue to run Chrome 110, but the browser will not receive any more updates, the company said.
Mozilla is also facing an equally difficult decision. About 15 percent of Firefox users currently use the browser on Windows 7 and 8.1 machines, the company said. While that percentage has dropped significantly over the past few years, it’s almost as much as Firefox’s percentage on all other operating systems.
Firefox now has about 15 percent of its user base on all Linux distributions, Macs, and all other versions of Windows except Win10 (including Windows 8.1).
According to a post on Bugzilla, Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, is considering two options: ending support in the first quarter of 2023, or continuing to update Firefox for older Windows versions through August 2023 until the next updated Extended Support (ESR 114) version is released.
For now, users using Firefox on Windows 7 or 8.1 devices have several options.
Upgrade to Windows 10, which will be supported by Microsoft until 2025.
Continue to use an unsupported version of Firefox on an unsupported version 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 says that ditching Windows 7 and version 8.1 of Firefox in early 2023 will make their lives a little easier because there will no longer be a need to prepare the Windows 7 test environment. At the same time, it’s “not the end of the world” to keep Firefox browsers running for a while longer, considering they still have “a lot of Windows 7 users.
