After yesterday’s article about Mozilla rolling out Firefox 3 update notifications it’s clear that there are still some of you who don’t intend on making the leap to Firefox 3 just yet. Maybe you’re still waiting for extensions to get updated, have problems running Firefox 3 on your computer, or just don’t want the new features it offers. Those of you tightly holding on to Firefox 2 will have to let it go by the end of the year if you want any future security and stability updates.
The Firefox 2 download page states that Mozilla is targeting mid-December as the cutoff date:
Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.
That means they’ll be supporting the older version of Firefox for about 6-months after the general release of Firefox 3. That’s about the same amount of time Firefox 1.5 was supported after Firefox 2 was released, and so this doesn’t really come as a surprise.
As we approach the end of the year we’ll be keeping an eye on how many of you decide to make the upgrade. As it stands about 25% of our readers have not jumped on the Firefox 3 bandwagon, but I’d predict that we can get that down to 10-15% by the end of the year.
I though it would be a bit longer than that, considering the fact that older OS can’t run Firefox 3.0.
Makes sense given Firefox 3.1 should be released around the same time.
True, but I don’t think Mozilla wants to take on the responsibilities like those Microsoft has had to with XP. If you’re having to support it for such a long time it can hinder future development.
That’s kinda what I was thinking.
By December, Firefox 3.1 should be out as well.
3.1 has some cool stuff like XS XHR, cool CSS3 features like border-image, text-shadow, etc, and further performance improvements.
Firefox 3.1 will be in Q1 2009 sometime rather.
The end of support date for Firefox 2.0 is old news for a couple months now at least.
Bummer. I was looking forward to having it by the end of the year. Thanks for the update though.
Well It may be as soon as late November perhaps if rushed or things go smoothly, but most of the regular testers are guessing it to be in early 2009 to be more realistic.
Much like that Thunderbird 3 won’t be until sometime in January or February now.