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."

Comments

It won't actually affect SM, TB, e.a. that much

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:What about forks?

[maxume]

They will no longer receive upstream support or bug fixes.

Re:Panther Users

[McDutchie]

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.

Re:Thunderbird

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

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

Re:Thunderbird

[msclrhd]

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.

Re:too bad for my employer

[pablomme]

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.