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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."

22 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. FF 3 in portage by Woek · · Score: 2, Funny

    Time for the Gentoo Portage people to mark Firfox 3 as stable!

    1. Re:FF 3 in portage by Raenex · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The more cynical part of me wonders if the reason to terminate support for Firefox 2 is to simply force everyone to upgrade.

      Of course it is. You don't even need to be cynical. What other reason makes sense? From their point of view supporting two versions takes more resources.

    2. 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.

    3. 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 : /

      --
      http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
  2. 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. Re:Thunderbird by Ambiguous+Puzuma · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

      --
      Most people don't get why the integral of "e to the x" is so funny. Most math majors don't have a sense of humor.
    5. 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??

    6. 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.

  3. 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
    1. 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.

  4. 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).

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

    They will no longer receive upstream support or bug fixes.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  6. 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.

    1. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

    --
    The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta by bcwright · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.