Mozilla plans for Firefox 2.0's final days

Mozilla is considering just two more security updates for Firefox 2.0 before it retires the browser at the end of this year.

"We're starting to consult the [development] community for feedback," said Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, prior to setting a final 'end-of-life' date. If all goes according to plan, the last update for the older browser will be Firefox 2.0.0.19. The current build of Firefox 2.0 is 2.0.0.17, which was released last month to patch 14 vulnerabilities.

Mozilla's policy is to support a browser for six months after it's been superseded by a new version. The company unveiled Firefox 3.0 in mid-June; shortly after that, Mozilla announced that it would stop patching Firefox 2.0 later in the year.

Beltzner confirmed Wednesday that Firefox 2.0 remains on track for retirement by the end of December.

He also noted that a majority of Firefox 2.0 users have taken advantage of an upgrade offer to Firefox 3.0 that Mozilla triggered two months ago. "Presently two-thirds of our users are using Firefox 3, with more than 50% accepting the first major upgrade offer back in late August," said Beltzner in message posted early Wednesday to the Mozilla site.

One user on the mozilla.dev.planning message forum asked Beltzner how the end-of-life for Firefox would affect Thunderbird 2.0, the e-mail client that's built on the same Gecko foundation as Firefox 2.0, or other applications, such as SeaMonkey or Camino, also based on Gecko 1.8.1. "Based on the current [Thunderbird 3] release planning, [Thunderbird 3] will be released 3-4 months after the Gecko 1.8 [end-of-life], when [Thunderbird 2] is still the stable release," said Simon Paquet.

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