Why did Tor Browser drop support for legacy operating systems?

Legacy unsupported operating systems receive no security updates and may have known security vulnerabilities. They also lack the new features and functionalities required by Tor Browser.

Legacy operating systems are unsupported versions of operating systems. They no longer receive security updates and may have known security vulnerabilities. For instance, Microsoft ended official support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 in January 2023.

Support for Windows 8.1 or lower and macOS 10.14 or lower has been discontinued with the release of Tor Browser 14 (based on Firefox 128 ESR).

Users on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and macOS 10.12 to 10.14 remained on Tor Browser 13.5, based on Firefox 115 ESR, whose support ended at the beginning of 2026. With no official support from the OS vendors and Firefox dropping support for legacy operating systems, maintaining Tor Browser for obsolete platforms became unfeasible.

Users on legacy operating systems are strongly advised to upgrade their operating system to obtain the latest stable version of Tor Browser with all the security fixes and new features.

  • Windows: users are recommended to upgrade to Windows 10 or 11.
  • macOS: users are recommended to upgrade to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or later.
  • Linux: most recent distributions that use glibc 2.17 or higher are compatible. Note Tor Browser 16.0 (the current alpha and the next stable version, scheduled for mid 2026) drops support for 32-bit x86 platforms.

In some cases, newer hardware may be required to support the newer operating system.

Please refer to the Tor Browser installation page for a complete and up-to-date list of requirements.