Rage, rage against the dying of the light
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Mozilla is mulling plans to get users off Firefox 3.5
OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPER Mozilla is hatching plans to move Firefox 3.5 users onto the latest version of the web browser.
Mozilla, which recently saw Firefox 4 surpass 150 million downloads, is in the midst of working out a plan to get users off Firefox 3.5. According to the software outfit, at least 12 million users are still using the older version of the web browser. Mozzarella's team says they 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".
Understandably, Mozilla cannot continue to keep patching Firefox 3.5 forever and, with a large number of users on versions that might present security risks, Mozilla needs to make a determined effort to get users onto supported versions of Firefox. While Firefox 4 is the natural choice, Mozilla also said that it will "settle for users being on the oldest supported [version] (Firefox 3.6.x)".
Mozilla is looking at a number of options to make casual web users aware of the latest version of Firefox, including putting little pointers on the customised Google home page that is loaded on Firefox installations. Other methods include a popup message and working with the press to get the word out.
Some of Mozilla's plans have already been implemented, with the Google homepage it puts up now urging Firefox 3.5 users to upgrade. The outfit has said that Firefox 3.5.19 will be the last update to the Firefox 3.5 track, however the next visible move will happen on 17 May when Mozilla will update its web sites pointing users to download the latest version. With this move, Mozilla hopes to bring the number of remaining Firefox 3.5 users down to four million.
As for getting that figure down to zero, Mozilla still has several options under consideration, however its preferred option is to release Firefox 3.6.18 on 21 June as a minor update to Firefox 3.5.19 and 3.6.17 users. However, Mozilla doesn't know whether this will be possible, as it depends on changes to the release automation that have yet to be fully specified.
Mozilla has enjoyed considerable success with Firefox 4, however as the outfit pushes out further releases, the way it shepherds users away from older versions is vital. If a large number of users are stuck on old versions of Firefox, not only will it increase any security attack audience but it will eat up the organisation's resources to patch older versions.
Firefox 3 users are strongly encouraged to make the move up to Firefox 4. The latest version of Firefox is not only better supported by Mozilla but it is considerably faster and natively supports the latest web standards. µ
Tags: Software
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I'm one of the 150 million users who downloaded FireFox 4, as the article states. But what the article doesn't state is that I'm one of the millions of users who uninstalled FireFox 4 because it's terrible. Total DOWNLOADS is an incredible misleading number -- where are the actual USAGE numbers? That's where your real story is.
I tried the 4.0 beta a while ago and it was not user friendly. The changes seem geared more to supporting technology for advertisers than to users. I am going to stay with 3.6.x Maybe I will test out their 5.x when it comes out. Until then, 3.6.x works fine, despite a memory leak.
I'm with Matt.
Q. Why does a 'security upgrade' have to also involve irritating moving around of the user interface buttons ?
A. It doesn't, but I expect the developers were told to "make it look like Chrome".
I wouldn't mind, but I haven't noticed a way to reconfigure the interface to the 'old' style, and if there is a way I have better things to do than go drilling down to look for it.
When I "upgraded" to 3.6 a long time ago I wish I hadn't because of some horrific memory leak that they only semi-patched about a version ago. I am extremely reluctant to "upgrade" to 4.x and suffer having my extensions not work, other bugs like that memory leak, and just my bad experiences dealing with the Minefield beta and its annoying and unusable update program.
I think it's really funny that now FireFox has the popularity, they have run into the same problems as Microsoft with Internet Explorer. While all the tech savvy run out and download the latest updates, the people who had their son/daughter/neice/nephew/some damn kid install their browser for them have no idea how to updgrade.
FireFox 3.5 will be the next IE6 ;)
FF4 zorked my snow leopard with 100% CPU use and slowly chumpfed its way through half of my available ram by the time I blodged it. I probably will try again later when FFgets to 4.1.x (I still have one computer using FF2.x and it feels nice and snappy and low-footprint!)
Open firefox 4.01 after a few seconds crash 4.01, give up and use 3.6 or chrome or IE
Add-ons, sorry, my mistake. Nevertheless, the add-ons developers don't have to push out new versions every 6 monts...
It crashes very often, much often then the 4.0 Beta, so I switched to Chrome, that is very stable, it didn't crash and work fast...I am very sure I will not go back on firefox , at least not until they fix it...
I like 3.6 version better, i don't like the look or layout of 4.1 at all. They flipped the open in new window or open in new tab. Way to mess with what people are use to.
I will stick with 3.6 for awhile.
I use 3.6 and won't go 4 until they fixed the cache to have the option to use the old system instead of the retarded 'do not cache large files' idiocy.
I don't get why they make changes that will obviously annoy a lot of people but then resolutely refuse to make a config setting to give people a damn choice, even if it would be trivial and not affect the core systems.
Always with the know-it-all attitude of coders eh.
I think you're referring to add-ons rather than plugins. The plug-ins are usually
things like Flash and Java, while I believe you're referring to extensions made
by other 3rd party developers and published on the addons.mozilla.org site.
It's up to these add-on developers to update their add-ons to be compatible
with new versions of Firefox, so you need to mither them to do so. Add-ons
by 3rd parties are not actually Mozilla's responsibility.
I tried firefox 4, 4.01 on my Mac with Snow Leopard. The the program will just go solid at random times. At least on my system it is not stable, so after spending two week trying various suggested fixes, I just went back to 3.5 it may be slower, but it does not go solid.
What about incompatible plugins? Or the fact that many old plugins just checks for 3.xx and refuse to install on 4.x (even if they are in fact compatible with 4)?
I had two plugins to edit their files to get them work on 4 and they do work fine. But not every user can do this.
Of course, Mozilla have put some compatibility checks and questions user to mark the plugin as a compatible, but i talk about the plugins that implicitly checks inside for 3.xx.
Even MS IE 6.0 still have a big appearance despite all the MS efforts to put the users off to IE 8/9.