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Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 End of Life

Posted by Soulskill on from the out-with-the-old dept.

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."

3 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:too bad for my employer by Ilgaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That is the issue with Firefox/Mozilla. They seem to ignore the enterprise requirements, how companies do things etc. As result, IE enjoys its kingdom on Windows desktop.

    For example, while entire thing is documented, even open source package makers exist, they refuse to ship MSI packages. MSI is the Windows Native installer. It is not so different from shipping tar.gz to Redhat Enterprise and expect those sysadmins sit and convert them to RPM. It is same deal on OS X too while OS X doesn't have that many enterprise users. Normally, a .pkg should be provided.

    Here is the entirely open source maker for MSI files coming from MS employee directly. (No moonlight/mono deal)
    http://wix.sourceforge.net/

    No, Windows admins won't monkey around 2000 terminals to run "setup.exe" files. Some guys spare significant amount of time building their own MSI files just to satisfy Firefox fans.

    If you can't run FF3, you better convert to Konqueror or Opera if they really stop security updates. Firefox is really popular and lots of 2.x users still exist. Black hats will sure use that advantage.

  2. Re:Thunderbird by Web-o-matic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This seems very odd.

    I can't see Thunderbird 3 coming out before next year, so how can Mozilla put the current official product (TB 2) 'out of support' before release of the next version? Not to mention that customers will need a reasonable transition time to test 3.x in their own environments, before they migrate from 2.x to 3.0, which would call for TB 2 'support' for several months after the launch of TB 3.

    Just like with Firefox, for example.

    Or is the TB team going to maintain gecko 1.8 solely to support TB 2.0.x until 3.0 is out (and, hopefully, somewhat beyond that)?

    That would make sense, but is a big drain on TB resources.

    Or is this tantamount to saying that TB is a dead-end product, not worth Mozilla's time and effort??

  3. Re:Thunderbird by CSMatt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even so, it is poor practice to end support for one of your products when its successor hasn't even been released yet.