Firefox 3.5 forced upgrade coming soon

Published: 2011-05-16
Last Updated: 2011-05-16 21:39:57 UTC
by Jason Lam (Version: 1)
8 comment(s)

With Firefox 4 released not too long ago and Firefox 5 supposed to be released on June 21st. The firefox train is moving full speed ahead, the laggers are dealt with in an aggressive manner as well. There seems to be 12 million users still on Firefox 3.5, that's still a significant amount of users. We all remember what happened with IE6... To avoid that from happening again, Firefox will start issuing warning on Google's default pages for users of version 3.5 and planning to push out 3.6.18 as an update (if auto update is enabled) once Firefox 5 is out (finger still crossed on the Jun 21st day).

The days when a common web applications tell users that a certain new version of browsers not being supported is long gone. Still remember when lots of government and banks websites are asking users to use only supported browsers IE 6 and maybe IE 7. I think we are all moving towards sites aggressively making the users upgrade to newer browsers in an effort to protect them as well. Newer browsers generally have better protection and support new protection mechanisms (have you seen all the protection HTTP headers that are supported by the new browsers?)

More info about the Firefox 3.5 forced upgrade,

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/16/mozilla_firefox_3_5_forced_upgrade/

Keywords: Firefox update
8 comment(s)

Comments

What's the deal with the Firefox roadmap?

Firefox 7 is going to be out this year. That's +3 versions over the latest right now.

Why is that considered a good idea? Are the versions just the new point releases?

For a product that relies on add-ons for wide appeal, this will make it difficult for add-on developers to keep up, especially since so much of it is volunteer.

I don't envy supporting a company that has switched from IE to Firefox as the standard, that's for sure.
This irks me to no end. Let's face it, new versions = bugs. To not fix the bugs before moving ahead is simply lame at best. Not to mention Jason's talk of add-ons. I had chosen to move to Flock if this constant push to new buggy version didn't slow, the only problem I have found that Flock is no more.

I hope they loose their market share and die, well, not die. This from someone who has used Mozilla since his first days on the net.

Seamonkey is looking better every day and insanity has not taken them over, yet.
Did you mean 3.6.18? .17 appears to be the latest from what I can see? Had me worried I'd missed an update...!
...good, hopefully they realized how much 4.x sucked. Perhaps it's their "Vista" -- skip it as quickly as possible!
What's with the Firefox hate all of a sudden?

All browser vendors have to choose how to spread their resources out. Supporting a browser that is two or more major versions back makes no sense, especially as migrating 3.5 users to 3.6.x is not quite the leap that 3.5 to 4.x would be.

On the new version numbers, this marks the move to schedule-driven releases, not feature-driven. There will be a new +1 release every three months, backed by four levels of deployment - nightly, aurora, beta and release levels, depending on how bleeding edge you like your browser.
Have we reached the point where it if it compiles, it ships? Mozilla would have a LOT more persons upgrade if they would NOT ship a product with so many show-stopping bugs. Each time I upgrade I have to revert back to the prior release for a few more months due to issue after issue...
Personally I dont mind the forced upgrade. I feel if it’s an issue of security risk do to lack of support then it is in the end users best interest. I have been using Firefox 4 for some time now and find it to be very user friendly. Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to roll on with each update as they occur, in most cases I find the new is better than the old and any bugs that may be present soon enough there will be a fix for that as well.


I've tried Firefox 4 several times, including the latest 4.0.1, and keep having the same problem -- web pages suddenly stop rendering and all I get is a blank page. I have to close and restart Firefox, sometimes more than once. Just to provide feedback to them, I had to close and restart Firefox 4 SIX TIMES before I got the page to come up.

I'm staying with Firefox 3.6.17 until they fix this problem.

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