Mozilla confirmed it will continue supporting Firefox ESR 115 for an additional six months. That gives PCs still running Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and older versions of macOS a secure web browser until early 2025, at the earliest.
Mozilla released Firefox 115 in July 2023 as the final planned update for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. It was also the last Firefox update for Macs running macOS 10.12 Sierra, 10.13 High Sierra, and 10.14 Mojave. When Firefox 116 was released in August 2023, those older platforms were migrated to the Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) channel, which receives regular security updates but less frequent feature updates. Firefox ESR is mostly intended for environments that need the most stable experience, and it can be supported on older platforms for longer than mainline Firefox, since Mozilla only has to backport security fixes.
Firefox ESR was updated to version 128 this month, following the release of Firefox 128 in the stable channel in July. That version requires Windows 10 or later, and newer versions of macOS, but Mozilla has also extended support for Firefox ESR 115 for an additional six months. Devices running newer operating systems have been updated to ESR 128, and they can also use the regular stable version of Firefox.
Mozilla said in a mailing list, “After reviewing that usage data, it was decided that we will continue to support the ESR 115 branch only for those previously-mentioned platforms for another 6 months. Users on newer platforms will still be migrated to the ESR 128 branch next month as originally planned. In early 2025, we will review the current usage data again and decide at that time whether further extension is warranted or not. […] We recognize that ESR 115 is an increasingly difficult target for patch backports and as such will be limiting the scope of approvals to only critical security and quality fixes.”
Firefox is the last remaining mainstream web browser to support Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge both dropped support for those operating systems in January 2023, and most other web browsers followed shortly afterward—many of them use the same underlying Chromium codebase. Those old macOS versions also don’t have another supported web browser, as the last Safari update for macOS 10.14 Mojave was in 2021. Chrome and Edge require macOS Big Sur 11 or newer.
It’s great to see Mozilla continuing to offer a reasonably-secure web browser for people stuck using old computers. You can download Firefox ESR from Mozilla’s website.
Source: Firefox Nightly News, Firefox Dev List
