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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."
How will this afect all the software that have forked from these versions?
Time for the Gentoo Portage people to mark Firfox 3 as stable!
damn, i was really looking to downgrade my software, too.
"they didn't know it was impossible, so they did it!" - Mark Twain
Thunderbird 2 is effected by this, but afaik there is no Thunderbird 3.
Is this is a death sentence for the project?
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
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).
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.
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.
Our sysadming at work refuses to install FF3, largely because of the large number of support libraries that he would also need to install/update. I guess I can understand to some extent that some things are certified for our CAD software vendors to support things, but it feels uncomfortable to move into a situation lacking security updates in any part of the system.
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 :/
"So, if you haven't already upgraded, there's no time like the present."
That's why one should upgrade to [insert commercial software here] version before it's too late.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
phew!
thank god i'm safe, my 1.8 install isn't being chopped.
liqbase
Then turn it off. If you don't want search results, set "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" to zero in about:config. If you want the old appearance try oldbar. I actually found that Firefox 3 was a tiny bit faster than 2, so I'm happy.
For more information look here and here.
Bad form to reply to my own post, I know. Oldbar is kind of out of date. Old location bar may be a better bet.
Also, more info here. With instructions.
Or the fact that you can't centrally manage it. There are some unsupported community builds out there, but none of them come close to what IE can do in the right hands - especially the whole Zones concept which, while not perfect, can allow very powerful policies to be set.
Add to that that a browser is highly security critical, and deploying IE updates is a breeze even in very small Windows deployments thanks to WSUS, it's not that easy with Firefox.
It clearly shows that the Mozilla Foundation, like Apple, only targets home users.
Please don't be silly. It is entirely possible that this policy is reducing the numbers of enterprises that are adopting Firefox, but I know for a fact that at least one enterprise has accepted this, so your claim is trivially shown to be false and everything you say thereby becomes suspect.
Give it some time. Your reaction is a common one, but not everyone who starts off hating it stays that way. I should know; I went from hating it, to accepting it, to finding it really quite useful on occasion.
FF 3 has a number of improvements over 2 for enterprise deployment, and I believe more are planned for future releases.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Golly, maybe we should release Thunderbird 3 *before* discontinuing support for 2.
You know. Just a thought.
self-signed certificates
The instructions to accept the certificate are right there on the screen. You don't even have to dig through a bunch of menus, just click where it tells you to click.
Yes, you have to click several times (as opposed to once in FF2). Unfortunately a great number of embedded control devices generate a new self-signed cert. every time they boot, which makes FF3 basically unusable for operating this sort of thing.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta (there are alpha releases available). The previous versions of Seamonkey (1.1.*) are based on Gecko 1.8. There are plans to get Seamonkey 2.0 into beta "Real Soon Now" but that probably won't be until Firefox 3.1 goes gold.
A bit of a shame since Seamonkey is the logical inheritor of the the old Netscape feature set and look-and-feel, but done right (and with far fewer bugs). It even has a WYSIWYG HTML editor that works much like the old Netscape editor, except that it very rarely (if ever) crashes - Unlike Netscape, in which it was always a gamble whether you'd be able to get anything done in the composer before Netscape crashed and you'd lose all your work.
Yeah, it's open to the criticism of being a prime example of the Swiss Army knife approach to software design - but in fact it does many of these things quite well, often better than specialized applications. For example, although there are a few other open source WYSIWYG HTML editors out there, virtually all of the others have died on the vine at this point.
Does anyone know of FF3 extensions that... - let me zoom in/out of text only, like in FF2? - prevents the url bar from showing everyone standing behind me what sites I've been visiting?
nooooo! I'm still hooked on 2.0 for Google Browser Sync (only supports 2.0, development has stopped.) Why can't another browser incorporate such a feature?!
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Unfortunately a great number of embedded control devices generate a new self-signed cert. every time they boot
I think your angst should be directed towards these lazy and inconsiderate hardware developers for violating the intended purpose of HTTPS, rather then at Firefox for doing what is essentially the right thing.
Oh, but wait, it makes your life just a little bit more difficult. I guess it must be bad.
The last firefox 'security update' I installed completely wrecked it, making it crash on startup. Now it only runs in safe mode. I hope they never realise any more of these 'improvements'.
A good chunk of my Selenium tests don't work with FF3, as of a couple of revisions ago. (I understand that this is due to security being tightened, so I doubt that it's going to work now unless a bug has crept back in.)
So at least one of my machines is going to have to stay FF2 for some time yet.
I'm using FF 3.0.3 right now. On the view menu, there is a "Zoom" sub-menu. When I zoom in, the web page gets zoomed, but not the UI. The URL bar doesn't change size at all. If you want a literal "zoom text only" where graphics don't get zoomed with the text, that too is an option on the "Zoom" sub-menu.
I have to ask, have you even tried FF3 before concluding that there was no zoom feature?
I tried 3.0 when it first came out and uninstalled it in 2 days because I couldn't switch tabs. The tabs switched, but the window content didn't repaint, to be exact - so you could switch tabs, and not know you did it. the only way to repaint it was to scroll the window down and back up. A similar thing happened if you loaded a page as it reflowed - the old screen elements didn't erase, and you ended up with the reflowed elements overdrawing each other, leading to a huge drawing mess...
It's probably fixed... I should try the latest updates and see.
I couldn't agree more. I really don't understand how can FF3 propose some completions as you type. Beginning an URL with the exact syntax of a previous one doesn't trigger the final URL, or at the bottom of the list. I hate that,
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.
Well, at least FireFox is opensource. Source is accessible to anyone.
If there are enough establishment dogs, they can band together and either hire developers or even code themselves if they have enough developers among their ranks, and continue either backporting security fixes to the 2.x branch or adapt the 3.x branch to run on Mac OS X 10.3
Nobody is going to stop them from doing that - it's the whole point of free/libre opensource software.
Only the whineboys need to stop bitching and start to do something about it. (Or suck it up and upgrade their OS).
Same reflexion also goes for dinosaurs running antediluvian (DOS-based) Win9x OS and whose support got dropped out of official Mozilla too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The Linux versions of the ASUS eee are still stuck on Firefox 2. It's a pain to upgrade to FF 3 as you have to put in a newer GTK 2+ and all. Silly Asus.
If you can sniff on the network, you can poison the ARP cache and plant a man in the middle router. You can redirect all the HTTPS traffic to your own server (which presents its own BS certificate), proxy everything to the real HTTPS server, and log everything that is sent or received. The idiot IT guy, blindly accepting every new certificate he sees, unknowningly connects to the malicious HTTPS server, and all his traffic is logged.
The way the original poster was (ab)using SSL isn't offering security at all, just an illusion. In fact, something like this might already be in place on his network, and he would never know.
Hands in my pocket