It's a resources thing (Score 2, Insightful)

I think one way of looking at this, maybe a pragmatic way, is as a resources issue, sort of along two different lines. First, is maintaining the backwards compatibility burdensome to FF devs? Gotta balance the advantage of Win9x support with the burden of keeping it to those who actually produce and maintain FF -- might those resources be better devoted to keeping FF as good as it is? Second, does the expanded codebase and unwieldy coding impact the usership -- either by performance reductions, bloat, or whatever? So you'd have to also balance this concern with the benefits of Win9x compatibility. I mean, I know one goal of FF is to keep the install package small; Win9x compatibility can't be good for that. Not being so hot on the technical aspects, I can only speculate about the performance impact, but if there is one, I would think it's silly to hold back the vast majority of users to accommodate a qiuckly vanishing minority. Especially when you've got an app that's on the move, like FF.

Maybe it is mean to Win9x people, but I think that FF has to (a) be well-coded; and (b) efficient, to maintain its level of competition. I think those are edges it has over IE7, and I'd hate to see it squandered on less than 3% of users...and note, that figure is only going in one direction: it's not as if we'll see an explosion in Win98 users sometime.