Mozilla prepares to extinguish Firefox 3.0

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 17 Mar 2010 at 10:31

Mozilla has confirmed that the final update for the ageing Firefox 3.0 will arrive at the end of March.

The foundation had originally planned to call time on Firefox 3.0 at the end of January, but the deadline was pushed back after delays to the release of Firefox 3.6.

However, Mozilla confirmed on its Wiki planning page that "Firefox 3.0.19 is a last security and stability update to Firefox 3.0.x.", and that the foundation will continue to push users towards the latest release Firefox 3.6.

As part of this plan, Mozilla has been prompting users of older versions of Firefox to update to Firefox 3.6. The screen appears after "60 seconds of keyboard inactivity", and offers the option to upgrade, delay the decision for 24 hours, or simply refuse.

The foundation is currently working on isolating plugins in Firefox 3.6, which should prevent them from crashing the browser when they stop working.

The feature is already a staple of Chrome, but whereas Chrome sandboxes individual tabs, Firefox isolates all plugins running on a page. A developer preview of the feature is available for Windows and Linux, though there's no confirmed date for a final release.