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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."

10 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 Ambiguous+Puzuma · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    2. 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.

    3. 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??

    4. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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?
  6. 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.