Firefox 3.6 Support Ends April 2012 187
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla for some time after switching to the rapid release process talked about releasing Extended Support Releases that would give companies and organizations some breathing space in the race to test and deploy new browser versions. With the first ESR release (which will be Firefox 10), comes the Firefox 3.6 end of life announcement. Firefox 3.6 users will receive update notifications in April to update the browser to the latest stable version by then."
Group Policy (Score:5, Insightful)
companies and organizations some breathing space in the race to test and deploy new browser versions
I doubt this hardly matters to companies. The thing is, they *cant* deploy Firefox as it is. There is no group policy like with IE, and recently with Chrome. You can distribute it easily within your company. This is what Firefox has always lacked and I don't understand why they have been so ignorant about it. Yes, it does nothing to home users, but it's required for companies.
quoting original document (Score:4, Insightful)
The ESR is specifically targeted at groups looking to deploy it within a managed environment. It is not intended for use by individuals, nor as a method to mitigate compatibility issues with addons or other software. Mozilla will strongly discourage public (re)distribution of Mozilla-branded versions of the ESR.
They essentially admit that the problem is major enough for people to want to get this "corporate world only" release, and they actually want to prevent people from getting it as much as possible. Disgusting.
System requirements (Score:4, Insightful)
It's interesting looking at how the minimum requirements for 3.6 [mozilla.org] and 9 [mozilla.org] compare. In just under 2 years, the recommended hardware for FF has effectively quadrupled in Windows. Macs have odd changes and Linux doesn't warrant minimum/recommended requirements.
Looking at the recommended requirements from a different angle, you need at most a 12 year old system to run FF on Windows and a 6 year old system for Macintosh. Linux's restrictions are solely software dependencies.
Weird.
Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the main reason for emotional response like yours (and mine, which largely mirrors yours) is because many of us in IT actively advocated firefox as a replacement for IE in corporate world, and actually got it pushed through. Which is one of the biggest reasons why firefox took off, people like using the same browser at home and at work.
And then, they essentially gave everyone in corporate IT a very public finger, especially when you have to explain to your bosses why firefox cannot be supported anymore and you have to switch to something else if that was your primary browser in the company. Not only do you end up feeling used, but your reputation (and potentially career) get stained.
Mozilla Unclear on the Concept (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And PowerPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Camino is still based on Mozilla 1.9.2, which is the base of Firefox 3.6 and will probably be EOLed along with it. TenFourFox [floodgap.com] is a port of Firefox 9 to PPC. It should work.
Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you see the link above that says "Extended Support Releases"? What exactly is wrong with that proposal?
The problem is it starts with version 10. Those of us who have avoided the "version number race" aren't using 4, 5, 6 ... 10 for a reason. ESR for version 10 really offers us nothing. The ESR roadmap in the article already goes up to version 24 (which should be out by Christmas at this rate). And who knows how long they'll "extend" it for? Their roadmap shows version 10 supported until version 17, which will be a shorter duration than 3.6 was supported.
Re:My support for Firefox ended 2011 (Score:4, Insightful)
"Too little, far too late".
They already took the PR hit, and they already hit their supporters in corporate world. The damage is done. Half-assed damage control (which is what these ESRs are) is not going to bring firefox back to corporate world, nor remove the huge stain from reputation of both FF itself and IT professionals who were pushing for firefox acceptance in their workplace.