Mozilla details plans for killing Firefox 3.5

PanARMENIAN.Net - Mozilla plans to push 12 million users of the aged Firefox 3.5 to a newer version next month by taking the unprecedented step of automatically upgrading their browser.

Firefox 3.5, which debuted in mid-2009, is already on life-support: Mozilla gave users their last version 3.5 security patches three weeks ago. But in June, Mozilla will use another strategy to make Firefox 3.5 "being dead," as one page on the company's site said.

"We are treating the automatic update checkbox enabled as a 'Yes, I want Mozilla to keep me updated’," wrote Christian Legnitto, the Firefox release manager. "Previously as a courtesy we had people opt-in between major versions due to the potential jarring nature of the update. We feel the difference between 3.5 and 3.6 is not severe and with 3.5 reaching end-of-life 3.6 is the security update for 3.5 users."

Mozilla would prefer that the estimated 12 million Firefox 3.5 users upgrade to the much newer Firefox 4 instead, but will settle for migrating them to Firefox 3.6 , the version that launched in January 2010.

On June 21, the day Firefox 5 is supposed to ship , Mozilla will automatically push Firefox 3.6.18 - a standard security update - if the company resolves a few remaining bugs. If those bugs don't get fixed by then, the auto-update will hit Firefox 3.5 users some time later.

Before that, however, Mozilla will rev up the warnings to Firefox 3.5 users that they're running a now-unsupported browser .

According to a detailed planning document on Mozilla's site, beginning Tuesday, May 17, Firefox 3.5 users will see a message on the default Google search home page that reads , "Your version of Firefox is no longer protected against online attacks. Get the upgrade -- it's fast and it's free!"

Mozilla has already told Firefox 3.5 users that they're running an out-of-date browser .

Firefox 3.5 users can avoid the message and June's auto-update by downloading and installing Firefox 4.0.1, which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Computerworld reported.