Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released [LWN.net]

Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released

Posted Jul 16, 2008 16:04 UTC (Wed) by pbrutsch (guest, #4987)
In reply to: Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released by pointwood
Parent article: Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released

They've always done it that way. 1.0 was supported for 6 months after 1.5 came out, 1.5 was supported for 6 months after 2.0 came out, etc.

I agree, though, that they should support the previous release longer than they do.

However, I should also stress that the Mozilla folks do not have the resources to commit to developing and QA'ing security updates for 10 year old browsers the way Microsoft does. I suspect that 6 months is the best they can do with what they have.

(Log in to post comments)

Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released

Posted Jul 16, 2008 17:35 UTC (Wed) by ami.ganguli (guest, #9613) [Link]

It's also a niche that third party support organizations could fill.  

Individual consumers will be quick to upgrade, but larger companies might want to move more
slowly, and be willing to pay somebody for continued support.

Anybody know what Canonical does for Ubuntu LTS releases?

Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released

Posted Jul 16, 2008 17:46 UTC (Wed) by andybruk (subscriber, #31794) [Link]

Anybody know what Canonical does for Ubuntu LTS releases?

I believe that regardless of LTS or not, if a version is no longer supported, they will
upgrade to the latest version. I remember this happening with Ubuntu Breezy and Thunderbird.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 Released

Posted Jul 16, 2008 19:10 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link]

Well, they did choose to release the latest LTS with Firefox 3 beta.

They ARE supporting it

Posted Jul 16, 2008 21:03 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Latest version is 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.15~prepatch080614c-0ubuntu1 - and yes, it includes backports from 2.0.0.15. Hopefully we'll see new version with backports from 2.0.0.16 soon...

I'm not big fan of Ubuntu (for various reasons) but I admit that promised support is quite real.

They ARE supporting it

Posted Jul 17, 2008 1:25 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link]

Latest version is 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.15~prepatch080614c-0ubuntu1 - and yes, it includes backports from 2.0.0.15.

Keeping Firefox at 1.5 for the sake of appearance of "long term support" seems rather misdirected in this case. Apart from a few ancient add-ons, does upgrading Firefox to 2.0 or 3.0 really break anything? Surely Ubuntu can put the engineering resources into something more important. (Even Red Hat's rather crusty RHEL 4.x is getting an upgrade to Firefox 3.0.)

Extensions?

Posted Jul 17, 2008 4:47 UTC (Thu) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link]

The way Firefox extensions work (AFAIK) is that they have to be whitelisted as "works with version X" so a major upgrade like 1.5 to 2.0 would break every extension. This is not ideal.

Users can go and upgrade the extensions on the system and in their profiles, but that is a long, long way from being a drop-in replacement with no side effects.