Firefox 3.0 reaching end of the line
A few months later than had been expected, Mozilla is calling it quits for version 3.0 of its Firefox browser."There will be no more updates for Firefox 3.0.x," Mozilla said in a meeting planning document on Tuesday. The last update will be Firefox 3.0.19, due March 30, according to the Mozilla Wiki page, and Mozilla started building the new version after some last-minute security fixes over the weekend.
Mozilla had planned to discontinue support for Firefox 3.0 in January, but the browser got a lifespan extension after Firefox 3.6 arrived later than planned.
The move reflects a gradual shift to upgrade browsers more frequently, not just to keep up with new features, but also to free up resources otherwise spent on testing and maintenance chores and to reduce security risks of older browsers. Google is even more aggressive: its Chrome browser updates automatically in the background by default, and it calls new releases "milestones" to be passed rather than version numbers to be attained.
Microsoft issues frequent patches to its browsers but sees things differently when it comes to longer-term issues. It still maintains support for Internet Explorer 6, introduced in 2001. "We are excited for people to move on. We want people to move on," said IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch in an interview this week for the IE9 Platform Preview launch, but meanwhile, providing security updates is the "responsible" thing to do.
Browsers are a fast-moving, increasingly important technology central to the shift toward cloud computing. But there's a tension between organizations and people for whom change can be a technical challenge or an expensive compatibility-breaking problem. Compatibility with standards can ease these transitions, but Web standards are in flux and aren't uniformly supported either with browsers or Web sites.
Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 with great fanfare in June 2008, and it's been patched 3.0.18. Firefox 3.6 is the current supported version, and of course future work is under way. Mozilla has released two public alpha releases of its successor called 3.7 for the time being but not necessarily permanently.
In the nearer term, it's also preparing a Firefox 3.6 update called Lorentz. Mozilla had hoped for a beta release of Lorentz, but its chief feature, the out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP) design aimed to reduce crashes by putting Flash Player and its like into a separate memory compartment, is proving thorny. In addition, Mozilla programmers have only just begun the OOPP work for Mac OS X.
