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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."

6 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Thunderbird by baadger · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    Is this is a death sentence for the project?

    1. Re:Thunderbird by jpt9 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree... I love Thunderbird, and would hate to see the project be ignored. -- J.P.

  2. linux ff3 stability? by uncleFester · · Score: 2, Interesting

    alas, the first time i tried cutting to ff3 on the linux side of my home pc (dual-booter) it was a nightmare.. constantly crashing/hanging, etc. it's wasn't the prereleases either.. it was 3.0 or 3.0.1. bad enough i actually reverted back to 2. i was just thinking of taking another stab at movin' on up.. just hope it's more solid and not as painful.

    -r

    --
    -'fester
  3. Panther Users by MrLint · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is kind of a concern, Mac OS X 10.3 is still alive and well out there. Somewhere along the line they cut 10.3.9 from the supported OSes for FF3, so now its 10.4 and up only. Now while I don't expect the 2.x branch to have any security compromising problems, the establishment dogs who's only job it is to demand that every possible security thing is addressed will start grousing. And FF has been he only alternative for an up to date browser.

  4. As a Mac user by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I currently own an iBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.3.9 and using Firefox 2 to browse the web. Since Firefox 3 recquires Mac OS X 10.4 or later, either I have to buy a newer verson of Mac OS X, use an "unsecured" version of Firefox or use another browser.

    Life sucks :/

  5. Re:FF 3 in portage by coolsnowmen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The more cynical part of me wonders if the reason to terminate support for Firefox 2 is to simply force everyone to upgrade. It's a bit too close to The Microsoft Way for comfort...

    As Raenex said, they want to stop supporting FF2, because it is almost twice as much work when fix needs to be merged. This required developers to stay familiar with twice as much code. They don't get any money from 'forcing' you to upgrade to get the newer fixes. You don't fail a registration.

    I agree, regressions should be fixed. My point was that this bug is an inefficiency in rendering a HORRIBLY designed web page. It is this that causes it to be a low priority; nothing to do with glitz/bling/& flash.

    Just remember the good old memory leak bug...

    that has nothing to do with this. Do you think firefox *refused* to fix any memory leak they can find?! No, and FF3 uses less memory than FF2. The biggest annoyance was done to people who like to leave the same firefox open for days, but didn't know how to limit firefox's memory usage in the oh-so-secret about:config.