Firefox 2 burns out next month

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Nov 2008 at 09:22

Mozilla has announced that it will stop supporting Firefox 2 in mid-December.

The Mozilla Foundation supports every old iteration of Firefox for six months following the release of a new version, but that period is coming to a close for Firefox 2.

Security upgrades and stability updates for the browser will culminate with the release of Version 2.0.0.19, expected some time next month.

Mozilla claims almost two thirds of its users have upgraded to Firefox 3, and is urging anybody using the older browser to follow suit.

It's not only Firefox 2, Mozilla's turning its back on. The retirement of the Firefox 2 codebase will also bring to a close any further work on Gecko 1.8, the rendering engine behind Firefox 2 and Thunderbird.

It will also hit other projects such as the all-in-one online apps suite SeaMonkey and Camino.

Recent reports suggest Mozilla has taken 20% of the browser market with Firefox, recovering from the early assault of Chrome.