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Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 End of Life

vm writes "According to Mozilla and other sources, Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 will soon be left behind some time in mid-December. The end result: no future security or stability updates. This will affect Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1, Camino 1.5, and any other projects based on Gecko 1.8. So, if you haven't already upgraded, there's no time like the present."

11 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. It won't actually affect SM, TB, e.a. that much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    See the mozilla.dev.planning thread in which the Firefox 2 EOL was first discussed. Yes, just dropping support altogether would cause problems for products like SeaMonkey, Thunderbird e.a. (which haven't yet shipped a version based on 1.9), and that's why that won't happen. Firefox 2 might be unsupported, but necessary security fixes will continue to be identified and backported to the Mozilla 1.8.1 branch, so that those products can continue to release security updates for a while until after their next versions have shipped (hopefully by the end of Q1 2009).

  2. Re:What about forks? by maxume · · Score: 3, Informative

    They will no longer receive upstream support or bug fixes.

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    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  3. Well I hope Thunderbird 3 comes out soon... by Yer+Mum · · Score: 2, Informative

    Then. In any case it's not nice to be forced to upgrade to version 3 and have support immediately cut off for version 2. I'd like to be able to stay with the old version for half a year or so, I like my mail profile and I don't like data loss bugs.

  4. Re:Panther Users by McDutchie · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is kind of a concern, Mac OS X 10.3 is still alive and well out there.
    [...]
    And FF has been he only alternative for an up to date browser.

    Actually, iCab and Opera are still supporting 10.3.9.

  5. Re:Thunderbird by Ambiguous+Puzuma · · Score: 5, Informative

    Thunderbird 3 is under development. An alpha version is available.

  6. Re:Thunderbird by msclrhd · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is a Thunderbird 3 in the works (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Main_Page).

    They are currently headed for Beta 1 (see the latest status meeting notes at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings/2008-11-11); the nightlies can be downloaded from the usual place (http://www.mozilla.org/developer/#builds) if you want to take a look.

  7. Re:too bad for my employer by pablomme · · Score: 3, Informative

    We use Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 at work. The GTK libraries are too old to build Firefox 3, and SLES 11 is not coming out for a few months.. I guess our local admin will have to seriously consider ditching SLES, its general obsolescence is becoming a problem lately.

    But in any case, I can't understand the decision of ending support for Firefox 2 just 6 months after having released Firefox 3, this is too short for some distributions to respond.

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  8. Re:linux ff3 stability? by imbaczek · · Score: 2, Informative

    99% of those symptoms were flash-related. installing adblock and noscript/flashblock also helped these crashes, at least for me on debian and ubuntu.

  9. Re:Thunderbird by Quartz25 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thunderbird 2 is affected by this, but afaik there is no Thunderbird 3.

    There, fixed your grammar for you.

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  10. Re:too bad for my employer by arizonagroovejet · · Score: 2, Informative

    According to a thread on Novell's forums, they and Red Hat will be back porting security updates to Firefox 2 until they release new versions of their Enterprise Linux products. http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/suse-linux-enterprise-desktop-sled/sled-updates/336654-firefox-support-2-x-ends-december-what-then.html The thread also contains a link to a guide to getting Firefox 3 running on SLES/SLED 10.

  11. Re:FF 3 in portage by tibman · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think he meant putting FF3 in the stable branch. I haven't synced for a while but if you did a normal "emerge mozilla-firefox" you'd get FF2. You have to explicitly say you want FF3 to get it. Then if you did an "emerge -vu world" it would of course, replace FF3 with FF2.

    BTW, that's a shit tonne of compiling : /

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