Mozilla to shift 12 m(illion) surfers off 2-year-old Firefox 3.5

[steve2470]

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

By Kelly Fiveash

Posted in Applications, 16th May 2011 15:03 GMT

Mozilla is planning to shunt 12 million users, who are still surfing the web on its aged Firefox 3.5 browser, over to a more recent version.

"We need a plan to obsolete Firefox 3.5 as we can't support it into perpetuity," said Mozilla.

"We have been frustrated with our efforts to move users off of old releases and are worried too many people do not upgrade and are on vulnerable and unsupported versions of Firefox."

Ideally the open source outfit wants to see all its users upgrade to the current version of its browser - Firefox 4.0.1. However, many people still connect to the internet via computers that were released in the pre-iPad age.

[hobbit709]

1. And how are going to do that?

On the rare occasion I use Firefox my version is 3.0 and even that is infinitely more secure than IE.
My usual browser is SeaMonkey.

[trud]

4. hobbit

I ran Firefox, SeaMonkey, Opera, and Safari side by side for awhile. SeaMonkey was noticeably slower than the others.

[hobbit709]

5. Haven't noticed any slow down problems with mine but I tweak the settings.

I like it because it has more of the feel of the old Netscape which is the first browser I used. I have always avoided IE like the plague.

[canetoad]

2. I don't like how the general population

is being frightened into abandoning 'unsupported' software and operating systems. There are users in this group who still use Windows 95 and 98.

A few years back I came across an old Mac Powerbook with specs like 40mb hard drive and 1 mb of ram. For fun I hunted down old software and made it capable of websurfing using a text only browser (remember Mosaic?), email and IRC. OS and programs definitely Not Supported but still working perfectly well.

Scanning the tech section of my local paper this morning I saw this, "Google has hailed its new laptops as a "completely new model of computing" whereby users don't need anti-virus software, firewalls, back-ups or even to install updates. In throwing down the gauntlet to Apple and Microsoft, Google argues that the world of computers today is "broken" and that it's come up with the solution."

Folks are being bullied, intimidated, hoodwinked and misinformed into turning their computing and therefore information management over to giant corporations. They'll take my last big desktop machine when they can prise it off my cold, dead computer desk.

[trud]

3. If they didn't produce trash in new versions

more people would upgrade. I still get caught by the Firefox change where you can no longer bookmark a page in two folders - for example: garden and readtoday, so that when you delete it from readtoday it's gone forever without your noticing it.

Plus the giant performance problems in the bookmark library that were introduced in a recent version which was apparently written by someone clueless about scale.