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Firefox 3.6 Support Ends April 2012
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla for some time after switching to the rapid release process talked about releasing Extended Support Releases that would give companies and organizations some breathing space in the race to test and deploy new browser versions. With the first ESR release (which will be Firefox 10), comes the Firefox 3.6 end of life announcement. Firefox 3.6 users will receive update notifications in April to update the browser to the latest stable version by then."
companies and organizations some breathing space in the race to test and deploy new browser versions
I doubt this hardly matters to companies. The thing is, they *cant* deploy Firefox as it is. There is no group policy like with IE, and recently with Chrome. You can distribute it easily within your company. This is what Firefox has always lacked and I don't understand why they have been so ignorant about it. Yes, it does nothing to home users, but it's required for companies.
For those who think "Wow, that's 6 versions ago", consider it was released just two years ago.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Does this mean FF 10 will support PowerPC?
(probably not)
One less supported browser for my old PPC boxes...
Not bothered about Firefox frequent updates but thoroughly dislike Thunderbird getting updated so fast so looking forward to this ESR release.
Data depends on it being stable, while firefox can be downgraded if not stable with nothing major lost.
p.s. Darn another abbreviation that forces you to repeat the last word.
I am using 3.6 and when they stop supporting it, I plan to stop using Firefox. The only reason I am using it in a first place is NoScript, otherwise I would have moved to Chrome ages ago. NoScript allows me to be sloppy with updating hosts killfile, it is by no means mandatory.
The ESR is specifically targeted at groups looking to deploy it within a managed environment. It is not intended for use by individuals, nor as a method to mitigate compatibility issues with addons or other software. Mozilla will strongly discourage public (re)distribution of Mozilla-branded versions of the ESR.
They essentially admit that the problem is major enough for people to want to get this "corporate world only" release, and they actually want to prevent people from getting it as much as possible. Disgusting.
With the first ESR release (which will be Firefox 10), comes the Firefox 3.6 end of life announcement.
ESR stands for extended support release. Which means it will lag behind in updates to the main version but be updated only for security/stability reasons, just like Firefox 3.6.
This is what people were asking for right...? A stable version of Firefox that will be updated about every year instead of every 6 weeks?
And Noscript already works on the latest Firefox.
Use NotScript: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn
There you go, FTFY, now you can move to Chrome.
I8-D
Looks like I may have to try out Fx 4 and see how things go.
3.6 is a very nice browser. Never had any problems using it or with memory usage.
*Sigh* Why is it when I find something that just does what I want, the manufacturer has to discontinue it and replace it with something a whole lot crappier?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Sigh. As one of the Righthaven tools[1] found out the hard way ... the CM/ECF system used by all Federal District Courts has been tested to work with FF 3.5; from extensive personal experience it also works fine with FF 3.6. It does not work at all with FF 4.0+ (in that you can't use FF to upload PDFs, which is all you'd use the Electronic Case Filing system for (document retrieval is done through PACER, though they overlap).
For some stupid reason, ECF specifies an ACCEPT parameter of “image/*” for the PDF upload forms, which of course is incorrect (PDFs are MIME type “application/pdf” per IANA; see also, e.g., RFC 3778).
As of FF 4.0 (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/input), that 'accept' parameter is honored and FF filters the file selector box to only permit image filetypes to be uploaded. End result? #massivefail
Yes, ECF is broken. But try getting not one, but 89, Federal bureaucracies to fix their tech in a timely fashion... (Each district court runs its own ECF system.)
Sigh.
[1] Declaration of Shawn A. Mangano, Esq., Righthaven LLC v. Democratic Underground, LLC, No. 10-cv-01356-RLH-GWF, docket entry 127-1 (Dist. Of Nevada, June 29, 2011)
geek. lawyer.
Finally, we know for sure which "major versions" are worthwhile: 10, 17, 24...
My small business runs PPC Macs on OS 10.4. We cannot upgrade to 10.5 because of certain software dependencies which would cost too much to fix. What are IT people like me supposed to do now that the only remaining browser that was any good on our machines is going away?
People being forced to hold on to an outdated version of a browser because specific sites (add-ons) won't work with newer versions.
Note that this only applies to Windows
It's interesting looking at how the minimum requirements for 3.6 and 9 compare. In just under 2 years, the recommended hardware for FF has effectively quadrupled in Windows. Macs have odd changes and Linux doesn't warrant minimum/recommended requirements.
Looking at the recommended requirements from a different angle, you need at most a 12 year old system to run FF on Windows and a 6 year old system for Macintosh. Linux's restrictions are solely software dependencies.
Weird.
Why support version 3.6 when the current is 9.0.1?
*cough*
I can think of at least half a dozen enterprise applications (Avaya UCM, TripWire Enterprise, Juniper Netscreen WebUI, etc) off the top of my head, latest versions of which require Firefox 3.6 to run (with disclaimers, warnings, broken functionality an all). They sort of work with FF9, sometimes, and absolutely don't with IE. This is going to suck.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Anyone know if debian will have a backport of a more recent version for squeeze (stable)? They currently have 3.5.16. http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=iceweasel
I think the main reason for emotional response like yours (and mine, which largely mirrors yours) is because many of us in IT actively advocated firefox as a replacement for IE in corporate world, and actually got it pushed through. Which is one of the biggest reasons why firefox took off, people like using the same browser at home and at work.
And then, they essentially gave everyone in corporate IT a very public finger, especially when you have to explain to your bosses why firefox cannot be supported anymore and you have to switch to something else if that was your primary browser in the company. Not only do you end up feeling used, but your reputation (and potentially career) get stained.
Firefox is the only major browser (well maybe Opera too) that still runs on Windows 2000. So I will continue to use it.
They just relaunched Build your own browser, (byob.mozilla.com), which should help customize the settings. (I haven't tried it yet as we customized it manually)
We deploy with WPKG and find it works quite well. Not all companies use the MSI deployment tools...
I'm running Firefox 3.0.6. If I'm shopping for a video card online and the web site doesn't work, then I go find another web site that does.
Someone tell me why any enterprise should ever donate Mozilla a single penny of support ever again? Mozilla has aggressively and loudly snubbed enterprise users (after having courted them), has refused to listen to anything other than their politically-driven BS, and have told people to change their way of dealing with upgrades just to accommodate Mozilla. Looks like an abrupt about-face after those "evil corporations" stopped contributing. So when's the next ideologically-motivated "fuck you" change coming?
It's very disappointing. I worked at Netscape back in the 1994-1996 timeframe, and I knew some of the people who did very well in the Netscape IPO then went on to Mozilla. They've apparently changed. I guess it's okay to be enterprise-hostile after the enterprises have landed them a huge paycheck...
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
They're talking about x weeks after y weeks....what business need is z YEARS, with z>=2, with only bug fixes and security updates. This pandering to out of control bloat, bugs, eye candy and gee-whiz nonsense needs to stop. Business and many people like myself want a stable, secure, predictable, and useful browser, not a petri dish for every brain fart a mozilla developer has.
Firefox 3.6 was the last of the good versions of Firefox, back when it was the little browser that took on the big bad IE. Now it is sucking Chrome's cock while getting it up the ass from IE while Opera films it and Safari faps to it.
A billion dollars from Google, and yet they can't even keep their extentions stable unless you lie about being "compatible" and they ignore the massive pile of complaints covering everything from user interface changes to ignoring enterprises to not testing on low memory systems like netbooks and wonder why there so many memory complaints.
I'm a Chrome user now, and I'm not ever going back. Firefox is the abusive ex who keeps claiming he's changed every six weeks, but if you go back he will beat you up again.
In all the versions I've used, FF offers you an upgrade without first checking how many of your existing extensions won't come along for the ride. After one bad experience, I decided no upgrade was preferable to a negative upgrade, on the suspicion that one or more of my plug-ins would bonk.
The simple technical advisory function was MIA.
For example, no Firefox newer than 3.x has a resizeable Save Bookmarks window.
Newer FFs have regressed in this area because Mozilla's policy is "If you want that window to be resizeable, write an extension to do it". Unfortunately nobody ever wrote such an extension so we've ended up with less functionality than in 3.x.
Another example of FF regression is bookmarks lookup speed. It used to be instantaneous in 3.x, which used a single XML file to store bookmarks. Now that FF uses SQLite, it's hundreds of times slower --- almost unusable when you have thousands of bookmarks, whereas FF3 doesn't blink an eyelid under these circumstances.
There's lots of good stuff in newer FFs of course, but it hasn't all been progress. In a few areas it has regressed dreadfully.
Did you see the link above that says "Extended Support Releases"? What exactly is wrong with that proposal?
It's good they have finally picked a release for long term support. I don't give a shit that they say it this is not for individuals, I'll be sticking with 10 if it is LTS in any way, and that is what I will encourage others to use.
I am tired of being what amounts to their beta tester. And it irks me that anyone would use the public at large in that way.
Just hope they are serious about this. In the past most of their "enterprise" efforts have just been talk.
So I should probably think about updating all the machines I have running Firefox 2.0.0.20?
We have a bunch of older Mac running 10.3.9 that can't even update to Firefox 3.6 because it requires 10.4.
I thought the whole point of Firefox was that it was supposed to have lower system requirements than IE.
For those that would like a nice cross platform browser and don't mind going off the beaten path a bit, may i make a suggestion? try QTWeb which is just what you think it is, a browser made with the QT framework and Webkit rendering engine. It works in Windows, OSX, and Linux, runs quite well from a thumbstick and is pretty nice and zippy.
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic. On the older AMD CPUs like my Sempron nettop FF slams the CPU to the point it is unsuitable for purpose yet both Dragon and QTWeb give the 1.8GHz Sempron new life and make it an excellent low power nettop. if I would have stayed with FF I'd have had to shitcan the box and built something more powerful which when we are talking about a fricking web browser is pretty crazy.
To the FF devs, what did you do when you switched from 3.0.x to later versions? Because whatever you did you need to undo it. 3.0.x was just fine on any AMD or Intel chip, the 3.5 and 3.6 branches were okay but not great with the spiking starting, and 4 and everything after was just shite on a crusty roll. The latest version is a little better but when you are talking about going from a 100% CPU spike for nearly 2 minutes to a 98% CPU spike for a minute that still isn't really good and makes the machine unusable until FF quits slamming the chip. Now when i can take the exact same system and under Dragon be using a good 40% less CPU, or get better performance from QTWeb when its on a thumbstick than I do from your browser when its natively installed? then to steal a line from an old K's Choice song "Something's Wrong". But I recommend Dragon and QTWeb and install both on new builds whereas I used to install FF before doing anything else. FF is just too power hungry and the performance simply isn't there which i think is a damned shame, it was truly a great browser before all this craziness.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Mozil;a was originally supposed to be released in 2000 as "Netscape 6", but it was bloated and slow, then it took them four years to go through Seamonkey/ Pheonix / Firebird before Firefox was released in 2004. If they got their chops right they would of released Firefox in 2000 and added GPO/MSI support then before IE could take a foothold. But no, they didn't and let IE 6 ruin things.
It was actually Safari that was the first viable non IE browser (mainly in part due to Steve Jobs getting booed for IE in 1997). Opera doesn't count because it was shareware/adware until too late.
In Firefox 3.6 sync extension is not available.
Did you see the link above that says "Extended Support Releases"? What exactly is wrong with that proposal?
The problem is it starts with version 10. Those of us who have avoided the "version number race" aren't using 4, 5, 6 ... 10 for a reason. ESR for version 10 really offers us nothing. The ESR roadmap in the article already goes up to version 24 (which should be out by Christmas at this rate). And who knows how long they'll "extend" it for? Their roadmap shows version 10 supported until version 17, which will be a shorter duration than 3.6 was supported.
... just maybe the Redhat/CentOS guys will decide for a newer version in their repos.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I wonder what version Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will move to? It's still on FF 3.6. There's just over a year of support left for the desktop LTS version.
Ok.
I agree with everything you posted BTW and would only add the thing that finally broke me was how bad later releases ran on AMD CPUs. I don't know if they are using the Intel Cripple Compiler or what but the performance difference between AMD and Intel CPUs when it came to FF was pretty startling, with my losing a good 30-40 minutes on the battery using FF on my E-350 compared to using Comodo Dragon or QTWeb, both of which seem to be CPU agnostic.
Interesting... The older machine I've had the most problems with newer FFs has an old AMD chip. I'd figured it for memory footprint till I dropped in a couple more GB, hadn't considered the CPU.
But, it's not the Intel compiler, as the problem is worst on Fedora, which builds the binaries themselves using gcc.
For what?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"Too little, far too late".
They already took the PR hit, and they already hit their supporters in corporate world. The damage is done. Half-assed damage control (which is what these ESRs are) is not going to bring firefox back to corporate world, nor remove the huge stain from reputation of both FF itself and IT professionals who were pushing for firefox acceptance in their workplace.
April 24th, 2012. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Seriously, Mozilla has something like 30% marketshare and IIRC Google gave them 300 Million. So they only manage to gain 3% (= 1/10 of Firefox users) with a conservative stable version, then that would be 30 million. Surely that would be worth the trouble.
Is nobody in the community smelling the money?
Yes, and supporting a release for 6-12 months is no support at ALL. Seriously the other day people were (incorrectly) calling out MS for only supporting an OS for 10 years but you're giving Mozilla a pass on possibly less than 12 months? No, I need a browser that will have security fixes for at LEAST 3 years, but prefer 5. When we upgrade a major piece of software like our ERP platform or content management system it takes 6-12 months to do full regression testing, with FF we would now be out of support by the time we were ready to go to production.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm on 12 already.. get off the short bus people!
Wait... Support ends? I didn't think Firefox 3.6 had even been released yet! I could have swore that just the other day they released Firefox 3...
Seriously. At this rate, I probably can't even count on Firefox 29.7 being supported until the end of this year!
The upgrade rate is too fast to keep up with. By the time Firefox gets out through stable distributions it's already 2 or 3 versions old. IE isn't even this bad. And if it were not for the fact that we actually do run Linux on most of our desktops, I would give IE serious consideration now. Firefox and Mozilla has been a serious let-down. Chrome or Opera looks like where we might be going.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My complaint (well, one of them) is the automatic conversion of every popup window to an iframe.
Some of them were popups for good reason, once the popup is up, I can grab it and move it out of the way, since I need to know whats behind it.
Can anyone help with this issue?
Tell me again why I should upgrade Firefox in April. Will it suddenly cease to run on my PC? Will version 9 (or whichever number we have by then) start to look and behave like 3.6 does?
I think it is a good thing I got into paranoia mode early, it will save me from the waves of exploits aimed at 3.6 when I continue to use it.
. . . to something more in line with expectations. For the ESR patches, number them 10.0.1, 10.0.2, etc, while the mainline goes 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, etc. until the new ESR (currently planned to be 17) gets version 11.
I apologise for not modding you up to +5 where you belong, why you're at -1 is beyond me. I blew my points on this guy replying to you http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2605870&cid=38600372 who has a point but this is my own fault for not surfing at -1
Someone please mod this guy up, because he's right on the fucking money. ... I'm kind of stuck)
(3.6 user here also, I have no idea where to go from here, I think chrome is ugly as fuck, newer version of FF are a joke and I'm not going to IE,
(Edit, yes I know my points go to waste but someone NEEDS to mod you up)
Maybe they are just writing code that doesn't run well on anything but Intel? Or are using intel based profiling during testing? Because i can tell you that I compared a first gen 1.7GHz Pentium 4 to a 3GHz AMD Athlon and it was pretty startling at least to me how badly FF favors the Intel CPU. Loading the same pages in both machines i noticed the memory spiking was MUCH more dramatic on an AMD CPU, and its CPU footprint was just insane.
As i said this 1.8GHz Sempron i'm typing on makes a wonderfully low powered nettop for the shop, lets me download drivers and check my mail without skipping a beat or ever hitting above 60% CPU on Dragon or QTWeb and that is during SD videos, but FF will slam the CPU to 100% for up to a minute launching a new tab and give it up when it comes to SD video as with FF it jerks so damned badly its better to download the video and run it than it is to attempt to watch in FF. And it isn't that QTWeb or Dragon are passing off to the GPU either as this unit has a truly ancient TNT Vanta 32Mb card I slapped in there just so i could run my 1600x900 LCD at native resolution so it simply doesn't have the horse to be offloading squat. hell i don't even think the old Vanta had support for MPEG 2 acceleration back then.
So I don't know what they did to it but FF is like night and day when it comes to AMD VS Intel CPUs, which considering i became an AMD only shop after the compiler rigging and OEM bribing came out makes FF unusable for me. Why would I want a browser that runs like you tied a boat anchor to it if its run on anything but Genuine Intel? Maybe someone ought to try switching their CPUID to Genuine Intel and comparing the performance to see if its some sort of intel based profiling on the part of FF because it certainly don't like AMD CPUs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
3.6.x is the last supported release for PowerPC-based macs. Models from 2005 do have the horsepower to surf today Internet, but they will get unusable because of the lack of software.
I'm assuming you run Windows. I have noticed something along those lines. The same version of Firefox works beautifully on my AMD when I use Linux, but when I boot to Windows 7 and try to use Firefox, it craps all over my desktop. It tends to crash, freeze and memory and CPU usage spike all the time. Now that I read your comment, I'm thinking it could very well be the compiler used. Firefox for Windows is compiled on either Microsoft's compiler or ICC, if I recall correctly. On the other hand, IceWeasel is obviously compiled with GCC by the good folks of Debian. And Peacekeeper reports very different scores for my browsers: Firefox 9.0.1 has 1076 points while IceWeasel 9.0.1 gets 1814. IceWeasel scores a bit lower on Canvas, which is probably fglrx's fault (it tends to suck), but nevertheless wins by a ridiculous wide margin. Intel has resorted to this sort of foul play in the (recent) past, so it's not tinfoil hat territory I'm navigating here.
I have just blamed the compiler for it a few posts down, then read your post. Funnily enough, IceWeasel runs extremely well on my AMD machine, while the Windows version sucks. Fedora never did like my system, it seems, and I recall F15 taking about half a minute to launch Firefox. It did behave erratically, but no more than KDE, so I can't really blame Firefox for its hiccups on Fedora with any degree of certainty.
It looks like Firefox 3.6 is going to become the IE6 of the 201Xs.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
They've never bothered fixing enterprise affecting bugs. DHCP WPAD (because DNS based WPAD is more open to hijack), for example, simply DOES NOT WORK, and the bug has been open since at least 2006. I filed the same bug with chromium and it was fixed in dev within 3 months.
Seriously, a patch was even submitted for this in 2006, and it still doesn't work.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Exactly. Most companies SOE is based on a 3-5 year support lifetime (which is when hardware will be refreshed). Providing support for a critical component of that for only 6-12 months is taking the piss.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Along with quite a few others I'm forced to remain with 3.6 because v6 and higher fail to recognize, install or update extensions and add-ons. This is a problem that Mozilla has failed to address beyond suggesting workarounds that do not work or that are not accurately documented.
But being aware that EOL for 3.6 was coming very soon I am switching to something else that isn't just a newer version of fail like Chrome.
Correct and on both XP and Win 7 FF is like a bad joke. If its the Intel Cripple compiler this should give everyone the evidence that Intel ties a boat anchor to any code compiled on their compiler that is run on AMD processors because when you see an old non HT P4 stomp an Athlon X2 you know something stinks. Since I don't run Linux I'll have to take your word for it but it really doesn't surprise me as i found that most of the other browsers like Dragon, QTWeb, Safari, Opera, and Chromium are pretty much CPU agnostic but FF should come with a "For Intel processors ONLY!" warning because its pretty much unusable on AMD chips, at least from what I saw.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Some minimal research would have shown that Firefox releases for Windows are compiled with MSVC 2010 in PGO mode. Not the Intel Compiler. There is absolutely nothing in Firefox that cares what brand your CPUs is. It runs even on ARM.
Then how do YOU explain why a 1.7Ghz P4 without HT will stomp an Athlon X2 when it comes to page load, memory usage, CPU usage, on the same pages when the ONLY difference in the systems is the CPU? I'm really tired of FF fanbois waving their flags and sticking their fingers in their ears. How many years have we been complaining about the memory leaks only to get told by the devs "They don't exist, you're crazy' right up until they said "We fixed the leak BTW LOL!"?
If you don't believe me break out a stopwatch and use Chrome's built in memory tool which will show you REAL memory and CPU load and try it yourself why don't you? you'll find that a 5 year old Intel chip will stomp a brand new AMD chip and if you believe that is factually true I have a bridge to nowhere you might be interested in. if they aren't using the Intel Cripple compiler than i bet they are using Intel profiles on their builds because as it is now FF is unsuitable for purpose on AMD chips!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Could someone explain to me what "stable" means, in the context of a full version release every month or two? How is this "stable"?
Or is it "stable" in the sense of containing what's in stables: lots of horsesh*t?
mark, who upgrades via yum
Umm, how about the fact that version 10 is not even released yet (as of early 2012), and meanwhile support for the last version that any sane person would call stable officially ended in late 2008.
Support for long-term stable releases, which _don't_ have major show-stopping bugs (especially data-loss bugs) is supposed to overlap by quite a bit, to give people time, _after_ the new long-term stable version comes out, to plan upgrades ahead of time.
The overlap -- the amount of time each long-term stable release is still supported with security updates AFTER the next long-term stable release comes out -- is twelve months for Debian, twelve months for Ubuntu LTS releases, longer for Apple products, and MUCH longer for anything that comes out of Redmond.
Even if we are exceedingly generous and call Firefox 3.6 a "stable release" (which stretches the definition of the term rather thin, but similar stretches have been made for some other vendors' releases at various times, so okay), it would be expected to receive security updates for a year or so AFTER the next long-term stable release is, you know, actually _released_ (not merely preemptively announced as being in early alpha or whatever Firefox 10's status officially is this afternoon).
More to the point, if we're talking about what has already happened, Firefox 3.6 came out more than a year AFTER support for 2.0 was discontinued, not a year or so BEFORE as would be expected.
Even 3.0, which was about as stable as the Lebanese government, was released a mere six months before support for 2.0 ended, and no sane network administrator would have considered deploying 3.0 in any case.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
3 to 5 years? Are you crazy? This is why we had this mess with IE6 - because of companies and people that were too lazy or too incompetent to make a browser agnostic standard compliant solution.
it takes 6-12 months to do full regression testing
Are you shitting me?