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."

Comments

Group Policy

[DCTech]

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.

Re:Group Policy

[Richard_at_work]

Fine, script the installer.

Now update the home screen, and add new bookmarks to already deployed installs.

That's where GPO carries on and your solution ends.

Re:Group Policy

[Dagger2]

Firefox has to run as admin to update

True for now.

It doesn't have low rights mode like chrome and IE

True.

Its crazy release schedule means zero testing before deployment

Well, other than the six weeks it's in "Beta" (i.e. release candidate) where the intent is to make no changes, and the six weeks it's in "Aurora" (i.e. beta), where only bug fixes are made. And the extra twelve weeks it's in certify/deploy state in the ESR proposal. But other than that.

extensions were breaking everywhere

Extensions rarely break with the new "major releases are now minor releases" model. As of Fx10, it will even stop claiming they're broken too.

and the final straw was that XSS bug that allowed malware writers to spam yahoo mail accounts from FF ... With low rights mode its damned near impossible to pull crap like that

OK, I'm not sure which bug you're referring to, but generally running the browser in a low-rights mode doesn't prevent XSS bugs, because XSS bugs happen inside the browser itself.

that requires admin rights to install

Wait, install? You said "update" earlier. But OK... I believe it installs fine as a non-admin user if you opt to install it to a directory the user has write permission to, which is what Chrome does by default. Firefox Portable certainly works fine as a non-admin user (updates included!), and that's just a wrapper around a vanilla Firefox.

and isn't easy at all to set up GPOs that can't be trivially bypassed by the user

True, as far as I know. Though if you're allowing the browser to be installed without admin rights, the user could presumably just overwrite it with a version that doesn't obey GPOs, so either this applies to Chrome too or you in fact don't actually want non-admin users to be able to install the browser.

I dislike the new release schedule as much as the next guy, but I'd prefer it if you disliked it for reasons that were true, or at least not getting fixed before 3.6's EoL.

Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011

[Luckyo]

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.

Byob and Wpkg

[gQuigs]

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...

Re:FTFY: NotScript

[revealingheart]

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.

Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:System requirements

[BZ]

I believe the 3.6 requirements just hadn't been updated in a few years and were more or less totally bogus. When 4 shipped, the requirements were updated to reflect reality.