Mozilla to shift 12m surfers off 2-year-old Firefox 3.5
Forced upgrade incoming
What you need to know about cloud backup
Mozilla is planning to shunt 12 million users, who are still surfing the web on its aged Firefox 3.5 browser, over to a more recent version.
"We need a plan to obsolete [sic] Firefox 3.5 as we can't support it into perpetuity," said Mozilla.
"We have been frustrated with our efforts to move users off of old releases and are worried too many people do not upgrade and are on vulnerable and unsupported versions of Firefox."
Ideally the open source outfit wants to see all its users upgrade to the current version of its browser - Firefox 4.0.1. However, many people still connect to the internet via computers that were released in the pre-iPad age.
Besides from that, Mozilla has committed to continuing to support Firefox 3.6, allowing older machines, such as Power PC Macs, to be able to connect to the interwebulator via that version of the browser.
To get the message across to Firefox 3.5 holdouts, Mozilla plans to issue a warning to all such users telling them they are running an out-of-date browser that is no longer supported against the threat of online attacks.
The message will be displayed through Google's default search page starting tomorrow.
"At the same time we also put a big warning on all Mozilla web properties, pointing them [users] to the new version to download," it said.
Anyone with automatic updates switched on will have Firefox 3.6.18 pushed out to them on 21 June, the same day Firefox 5 is expected to be released.
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 in June 2009 six months later than scheduled. ®
COMMENTS
Status Bar Gone
The removal of the status bar irritates me in 4.0.x versus 3.6.x as many plugins I use put stuff there and no longer have a place to put their stuff - apparently.
Also, there are still a shitload of plugins that simply do not work on 4.0.x, some of them I find particularly useful.
Removing something that worked and was widely used and relied upon and replacing it with nothing is not a way to endear oneself to one's users. I do not buy this "we gotta look like chrome" bullshit.
Dweeb
Stop me if I'm missing anything here, but...
...am I the only one out here still using FF3.5(.7) because it doesn't suck? I took a crack at 3.5.8 when it came out, and you wouldn't believe how long it took me to pick all the metaphorical shards out of my metaphorical ass.
Oh, and I like how they brandish that threat of "online attack", too. Looks like Mozilla's been taking lessons from Microsoft. Way to sling that FUD, guys.
Goddamn' plankers.
Well this sucks
If they still have 12 Million users why are they being asshats forcing people out of it?
I'm using it myself on several machines, it's actually better and ligher than 4.X for many things.
I just hope the $57 million a year Google pays Mozilla to use them as the default search engine doesn't have anything to do with this.
That agreement would end this year year and there's not been any news of a renewal yet.
http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
