An important milestone happened this week.

• 17-jun-2008: Firefox3 shipped, Firefox2 started its 6 month end-of-life support cycle.
• 17-sep-2008: Firefox2 is half-way through its end-of-life cycle
• 17-dec-2008: Firefox2 will be formally de-supported.

It’ll be sad to see the ending of an era, and there’s still lots of details to sort out, including how to deal with Thunderbird2 support. However, when this happens, it will be a great relief for RelEng. We can finally de-support and mothball those 28 machines and just as importantly, we can simplify our automation  / unittest / talos code by cleaning out the special-case conditionals needed to handle Firefox2.

Only 3 more months to go…

[update: Mozilla’s 6month End-of-Life support policy can be seen here. And the Firefox2 download page mentions it also.]

Just back from vacation (more on that later), and just noticed it was exactly 7 days (to the minute) since we made FF2.0.0.16 -> FF3.0.1 Major Update live, so I had to go look. In those 7 days, we’ve now served major updates to 41,300,460 users.

That’s an average of 4097 major updates *per minute*, or 68 major updates *per second*, over the entire week. And still going…

No matter how you think of it, that is a lot of people. For comparison, the nearest I could find was the entire population of Argentina (40,677,348). Or 10 times (!) the population of Ireland (4,156,119)… although hard to imagine this planet being big enough for 10 Irelands 🙂

So far, this Major Update release still feels like it went really smoothly. I haven’t heard of any problems yet, but if you’ve heard of anyone hitting any problems (or you’ve hit problems yourself), please do file a bug.

Meanwhile, back to unpacking, and trying to catch up on the last week of planet.mozilla.org…