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.]
Now if only those [*** expletives deleted ***] would get their act together and fix the most important bug in Firefox3 that they broke between 2 and 3…
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374011
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[John’s note: I’ve edited the language to be suitable for a professional forum. I decided to publish Falcon’s comment, with the tone unchanged, to show his obvious feelings on this topic. Regardless of whether this is a security “feature” or a loss-of-functionality “bug”, it is my opinion that the more useful place for this comment is in the bug, where more relevant people are involved… not as a comment to a mildly related post on this blog!]
[…] For users of Firefox 2 remember that Mozilla will no longer support Firefox 2 with security and stability updates after 12 December, so if you’re among the minority that hates the changes in Firefox 3 with the heat of a thousand nuns you only have a few months left of updates before you’ll be using an obsolete program. […]
I guess today is the day.
It’s apparently confirmed with the latest security update and this blog post http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2008/12/16/firefox-305-and-20019-security-updates-now-available-for-download/
“Mozilla is not planning any further security & stability updates for Firefox 2, and recommends that you upgrade to Firefox 3 as soon as possible.”
RIP FF2
[…] After the FF2 EOL on 17dec2008, and my earlier posts here and here, we’re finally getting ready to power off and recycle the FF2 machines listed below. The actual work is being tracked in bug#487235. […]