Some site, for some random reason, decided to warn me that my Firefox browser was out of date, I have mine set so it does not automatically upgrade.
I was running 49-something, and the latest was 50-something, so upgraded. I had been running sluggish for a while, and thought an upgrade would be the ticket. Well, everything suddenly started getting slower and slower. Task manager said system idle was staying up around the 90s. CPU usage and memory normal values, I defragged, ran Malwarebyites and AVG re-scan and came back clean. No suspicious plugins. Rebooted, no change. The only thing I could remember doing was to install the new Firefox. So I went back to Mozilla and loaded an old Firefox 47.0.1, no reboot required. Slicker than snot – it’s never been faster. Even faster than when I was using 49.
I’m running Windows 7, 32-bit. Is it possible that Firefox is running away from older operating systems, and even with OS upgrades and service packs, a support divide forms between older computers and newer software? And Firefox 50 is the version that crossed the threshold and opened the visible gap?
If you think that having 32-bit Windows 7 is the problem, look elsewhere. That OS is not old enough to be obsolete yet. If you were running XP I would say yes. If you were running Vista, maybe. But Win 7 is still supported by Microsoft at this time and is still pretty popular, they wouldn’t be abandoning it yet.
I would venture a guess that something else is out of date… Maybe Java, or .Net, or some other component like a video driver. Or it could be simpler than that, maybe there was a problem with the download and/or install of Firefox when you tried to update it.
It’s also possible that your hardware is indeed obsolete and you hit a wall as you suggested. You didn’t say exactly how old your hardware is.
Well, I run WinXP with Firefox v43 just fine. After a discussion here a few weeks ago, I upgraded to v47 (what my update window recommended). I hated the Bookmarks with various added things I don’t need or want. I updated again to v53 something and the Bookmarks were still the same, so I went all the way back to 43 and am very happy. The newer versions seemed to work fine with XP, although I did not keep them long enough for any speed issues.
In fact, when I went back to v43, the stupid new Bookmarks were still there. The new Bookmarks are a pain to many people on various forums and I found that if I imported an older version of the bookmarks it should go back the V43 bookmarks. It did.
Just to note that you need to be careful of sites which warn you that your browser or Flash, etc is out of date. It’s a common ruse that malware uses. Make very sure
that link goes to Mozilla (for FF), Adobe (for Flash) or whatever.
The default setting for the Firefox browser, for instance, is to update automatically so you should never see an FF update request from any other site.
It’s more likely your Firefox profile is in need of a clean up. Google how to Refresh Firefox. There’s just not a big difference between 49 and 50. Refreshing Firefox will uninstall your addons, but will otherwise preserve everything important. Even after reinstalling addons, it can make an old profile like 5x faster.
As for the bookmarks–the only new bookmarks I am aware of is that, by default, your recent bookmarks are displayed. But you can turn that off by right clicking and unchecking “Show Recently Bookmarked.”
Firefox 43 was released in December 2015, and is over a year old. That’s forever in web browsers. If you don’t want to upgrade to v50, then please at least upgrade to the ESR version, which is on 45.6.0.
You’re playing with fire having an old insecure OS and an old insecure web browser.
Windows 7 will continue to receive security patches from Microsoft until 2020. If automatic updates are enabled and other reasonable precautions are taken there’s no reason to call it insecure, no more than any other version of Windows at least.