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Firefox 3.6 Support Ends April 2012

Posted by timothy on from the slow-motion-shutdown dept.

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."

9 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Group Policy by DCTech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Group Policy by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Firefox has to run as admin to update, strike one. It doesn't have low rights mode like chrome and IE, strike two. Its crazy release schedule means zero testing before deployment, strike three and you're outta there!

      As someone who used FF before it was even called FF and the suite before that i hated to see it go but go it had to as its performance has been getting worse it seems as far as CPU spiking and RAM leaking, extensions were breaking everywhere and the final straw was that XSS bug that allowed malware writers to spam yahoo mail accounts from FF. If you got a bunch of spam emails from friends with Yahoo accounts, all consisting of a single word or sentence and a driveby malware link? that was the FF XSS bug. With low rights mode its damned near impossible to pull crap like that since the browser runs even lower than a user it simply can't get the permissions to do a lot of nastiness. Low rights mode was released with vista in 2007 BTW and here it is 2012 and Firefox STILL doesn't have it. But hey they have personas right?

      I truly hope the FF devs will stop going Goatse at their users and get back to their original mission statement which was to build a small, fast, and light browser with good security because I do miss NoScript although I don't know if its really needed with low rights mode and sandboxing. But if you think IT are "worthless" for not deploying a less securable browser that requires admin rights to install and isn't easy at all to set up GPOs that can't be trivially bypassed by the user? Then I'd personally hate to see what the admins are like you'd consider competent, probably the type that just gives everyone admin rights and cleans up after the messes.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. quoting original document by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. System requirements by sirdude · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 by Luckyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Mozilla Unclear on the Concept by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:And PowerPC? by SiMac · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because Camino is still based on Mozilla 1.9.2, which is the base of Firefox 3.6 and will probably be EOLed along with it. TenFourFox is a port of Firefox 9 to PPC. It should work.

  7. Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.