Firefox 13 dependencies

Here's a follow-up to my previous journal entry that I recently posted earlier this week. Since the release of Firefox 13, the browser no longer works officially. Why is that?

Firefox 13 was complied using Visual Studio 2010 SP1, thus resulting in a lot of dead code. 448 KB of overall code was reduced as developers removed the dead Windows 2000 support code from Gecko when they switched from Visual Studio 2005.

In Firefox 13, the Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest msvcm80.dll, msvcp80.dll, msvcr80.dll were removed and replaced with msvcp100.dll, msvcr100.dll. Using Dependency Walker, here are the following dependencies that do not exist on Windows 2000 and Windows XP < SP2:

DBGHELP.DLL: SymFromAddr
IPHLPAPI.DLL: GetAdaptersAddress
KERNEL32.DLL: DecodePointer, EncodePointer, GetProcessID, InitalizeSListHead, InterlockedFlushSList, InterlockedPopEntrySlist, InterlockedPushEntrySList, IsWow64Process, QueryDepthSList, SetDllDirectoryW
PSAPI.DLL: GetProcessImageFileNameW
SHELL32.DLL: SHopenFolderAndSelectItems, SHParseDisplayName

In all 15 entry point dependencies were added with the first two dependencies that were added when developers switched to Visual Studio 2010.

In SeaMonkey 2.10, the browser is still complied using Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and 288 KB of code was added, but as developers removed the dead Win2k support code from comm-central, they added three dependencies in SeaMonkey 2.10+ that will deliberately not work on Win2k:

KERNEL32.DLL: GetProcessId, IsWow64Process, SetDllDirectoryW

Despite the fact that Sea<onkey is still complied using MSVC 2005 in the 2.x, it is quite obvious that MSVC 2005/2008 support will most likely be dropped in the near future as developers are starting to get some issues trying to build the latest browser complied under VC8/VC9 with newer code.

Go to the latest forum thread if you want to get Firefox 13 (and higher) running on Win2k.