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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.
They're releasing less versions now then they did during 3.x if you look at the total quantity of updates rather then the version number.
Does this mean FF 10 will support PowerPC?
(probably not)
One less supported browser for my old PPC boxes...
Hell
There are some who are whining IE 6 is no longer supported after 10 years and refuse to upgrade. I guess its assumed the web hasnt changed at all on 10 years so why update?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
So should we expect that six weeks later firefox 4 support ends? followed six weeks later by the end of firefox 5 support? etc...? etc...?
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.
Except FF3.6 doesn't suck.
Say that again 11 years past it's release date in 2020 and we'll have a fair comparison.
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.
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.
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...
Realize that as part of running a business you might have to upgrade software/hardware at least once in seven years.
You could also try Camino
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.
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.
You'll have to provide sources for Firefox's alleged instability. Here's a link to Mozilla's Firefox crash statistics. If you can link to a report about Chrome's stability, it would be very useful.
As for memory, Mozilla have been working on reducing memory in Firefox with the MemShrink project. Nicholas Nethercote's blog has the latest reports on improvements to the upcoming versions. Even then, it's been established before in testing that Chrome is a relative heavyweight when it comes to memory.
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.
Why? Firefox 4 wasn't released six weeks after 3.6.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
Chrome makes it so you don't care what version you use.
Updates are applied transparently in the background (no admin needed), which happen when you start the browser. Extensions stay working and AREN'T version-dependent. (Firefox is supposed to have a stable extension API so new versions don't break extensions, but...).
And no funky UI changes that keep tweaking the way stuff acts.
And when will they add low integrity mode support that IE and Chrome have, and the ability to do no-admin updates.
I'm lucky in that migrating to the rapid release is possible now I figured out al lthe crap - using the new profile manager (a separate download, but it's stable now), which extensions are required to keep a "traditional" look and feel (and how to move stuff like NoScript back t othe bottom-right corner) and what extensions are outdated and what the new extensions to use are. But it's a huge PITA.
And requiring admin means I basically have to physically go into my parent's computer periodically and update firefox. Bleh. (They don't have passwords, so RDP doesn't work, and RDP'ing into the admin account does a force-logoff for them (can't figure out how to get around this - I have fast user switching on and it's win7 enterprise...)).
Considering the past holiday season was the call to "upgrade and update your parent's browser"...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a problem that Mozilla has failed to address
Because it's not actually their problem. They can't update every add-on or extension ever written to the newer versions themselves. Many of them aren't even open source.
If you installed crappy extensions onto the base product, it is not the problem of the base product if they don't work.
The crashes aren't uniformly distributed. Far from it. If you hit a problem case, it'll crash 10 times a day. If you don't, it'll run for months without an issue.
As you already observed, extensions are the main problem makers, and that's true for all browsers.