What do you mean my system doesn’t meet your requirements?

Mozilla’s website told me: “Your system doesn’t meet the requirements to run Firefox.” With 8 gigs of ram, a speedy processor, and plenty of disk space, I feel alienated by one of my favorite brands. Let’s improve the copy.

 

This generic message gives no indication what the requirements are.
This generic message gives no indication what the requirements are.

I recently gave my old Macbook a boost: It’s got 8 gigs of ram, a 500 GB solid state drive, and it’s a Core 2 Duo. What do I need more of — RAM? Check. Disk space? Check. Bandwidth? Check. Twitter followers?

Clarify error message: You can’t have the latest version of Firefox because your OS is old

What’s happened here is that I’ve tried to download Firefox using an older Mac that’s running Mac OS Lion (10.7), but Mozilla dropped support for that version of Mac OS. The minimum requirement to use Firefox 50 (the latest as of this blog post) is Mac OS 10.9. The error message should state that clearly:

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We discontinued Firefox for your platform, but if you upgrade to OSX 10.9, you can have the latest and greatest Firefox.

Better error message: Detect visitor OS and suggest appropriate versions for them:

Users are empowered by choices. Empowering users is one way to gain loyalty:

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The latest and greatest Firefox isn’t available for your platform, but you can still download Firefox 46 for OSX 10.7 here.

Sadly, Mozilla does not make it easy at all to find old versions of Firefox.

This ultimately penalizes Mac OS users who don’t want to upgrade to the latest OS because they know Sierra will slow their computer to a crawl, or can’t, because their hardware isn’t supported any more.

Mozilla should make a better effort to reach across the market for users. Any version of Linux has its own packaged (or installable) version of Firefox, so why penalize Mac OS users?

Strangely, Mozilla still supports Firefox on Windows XP.