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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see win XP continues to be a supported platform.

Thunderbird uses Firefox ESR as a base. Firefox ESR supports Windows XP while it is at version 52.x. Firefox ESR will move up to 60.x in August 2018 at which point neither Firefox nor Thunderbird will support Windows XP any longer.

Honest question - why?

There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.

What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its official support ended, which according to Wikipedia was on April 2014. Both Firefox and Thunderbird supported Windows XP for a few more years after that (since Windows XP was and is still popular even after its official support ended); version 52 of both (which is an ESR release) is going to be the last one with support for Windows XP.

The operating system support doesn't change within a major release, which is why 52.7 has the same operating system support as 52.0.

> What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its official support ended

Well, or when a serious replacement arose (because XP was aging at that point). Vista was quite alright if you had a beefy computer, but for the majority I guess it took until 7, which would be July 2009.

Not saying you're wrong or that support should be dropped, I'm just not sure end of support is the best date to use.

I think end of support is a pretty good metric. If Microsoft won’t keep the underlying platform safe, one could argue it’s ethically problematic but to continue to encourage people to use it.

XP Embedded has security updates until 2019, https://www.pcworld.com/article/2310301/windows-xp-registry-...

I was about to make a snarky comment here but... yeah, if you’re still connecting an XP machine to the internet, you’re asking to be pwned.

> There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.

Does the army accept 16-year-olds?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

"It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and broadly released for retail sale on October 25, 2001."

You have to be 17, so I guess we still have a couple months, my bad.

But sad it only goes back to Mac 10.9.

Actually I wonder why. Probably using GTK or something that only supports newer systems, but still too bad.

GTK doesn't have anything to do with that; Thunderbird and Firefox use native widgets to implement XUL on macOS. It's mostly a platform decision based on numbers of users and if there are any technical pain points supporting earlier SDKs.

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