Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 End of Life 138
vm writes "According to Mozilla and other sources, Firefox 2 and Gecko 1.8 will soon be left behind some time in mid-December. The end result: no future security or stability updates. This will affect Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1, Camino 1.5, and any other projects based on Gecko 1.8. So, if you haven't already upgraded, there's no time like the present."
Re:too bad for my employer (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the issue with Firefox/Mozilla. They seem to ignore the enterprise requirements, how companies do things etc. As result, IE enjoys its kingdom on Windows desktop.
For example, while entire thing is documented, even open source package makers exist, they refuse to ship MSI packages. MSI is the Windows Native installer. It is not so different from shipping tar.gz to Redhat Enterprise and expect those sysadmins sit and convert them to RPM. It is same deal on OS X too while OS X doesn't have that many enterprise users. Normally, a .pkg should be provided.
Here is the entirely open source maker for MSI files coming from MS employee directly. (No moonlight/mono deal)
http://wix.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
No, Windows admins won't monkey around 2000 terminals to run "setup.exe" files. Some guys spare significant amount of time building their own MSI files just to satisfy Firefox fans.
If you can't run FF3, you better convert to Konqueror or Opera if they really stop security updates. Firefox is really popular and lots of 2.x users still exist. Black hats will sure use that advantage.
Re:Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems very odd.
I can't see Thunderbird 3 coming out before next year, so how can Mozilla put the current official product (TB 2) 'out of support' before release of the next version? Not to mention that customers will need a reasonable transition time to test 3.x in their own environments, before they migrate from 2.x to 3.0, which would call for TB 2 'support' for several months after the launch of TB 3.
Just like with Firefox, for example.
Or is the TB team going to maintain gecko 1.8 solely to support TB 2.0.x until 3.0 is out (and, hopefully, somewhat beyond that)?
That would make sense, but is a big drain on TB resources.
Or is this tantamount to saying that TB is a dead-end product, not worth Mozilla's time and effort??
Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta (Score:3, Insightful)
Seamonkey 2.0 is not yet even in beta (there are alpha releases available). The previous versions of Seamonkey (1.1.*) are based on Gecko 1.8. There are plans to get Seamonkey 2.0 into beta "Real Soon Now" but that probably won't be until Firefox 3.1 goes gold.
A bit of a shame since Seamonkey is the logical inheritor of the the old Netscape feature set and look-and-feel, but done right (and with far fewer bugs). It even has a WYSIWYG HTML editor that works much like the old Netscape editor, except that it very rarely (if ever) crashes - Unlike Netscape, in which it was always a gamble whether you'd be able to get anything done in the composer before Netscape crashed and you'd lose all your work.
Yeah, it's open to the criticism of being a prime example of the Swiss Army knife approach to software design - but in fact it does many of these things quite well, often better than specialized applications. For example, although there are a few other open source WYSIWYG HTML editors out there, virtually all of the others have died on the vine at this point.
Re:Thunderbird (Score:5, Insightful)
Even so, it is poor practice to end support for one of your products when its successor hasn't even been released yet.
Re:FF 3 in portage (Score:3, Insightful)
The more cynical part of me wonders if the reason to terminate support for Firefox 2 is to simply force everyone to upgrade.
Of course it is. You don't even need to be cynical. What other reason makes sense? From their point of view supporting two versions takes more resources.