Last Days for Firefox 2.0

There will be just two more security updates for Firefox 2.0 before it retires at the end of this year. According to Mozilla's plan the last update of the older browser will be Firefox 2.0.0.19. The current Firefox is 2.0.0.17, which was released last month to patch 14 vulnerabilities.

Mozilla's policy is to support a browser for six months after it's been superseded by a new version. The company unveiled Firefox 3.0 in mid-June; shortly after that, Mozilla announced that it would stop patching Firefox 2.0 later in the year.

A majority of Firefox 2.0 users have taken advantage of an upgrade offer to firefox 3.0 that Mozilla released 2 months ago. Presently two-third of the users are using Firefox 3.0.

One user on the mozilla.dev.planning message forum asked Beltzner how the end-of-life for Firefox would affect Thunderbird 2.0, the e-mail client that's built on the same Gecko foundation as Firefox 2.0, or other applications, such as SeaMonkey or Camino, also based on Gecko 1.8.1.

"Based on the current Thunderbird 3 release planning, Thunderbird 3 will be released 3-4 months after the Gecko 1.8 (end-of-life), when Thunderbird 2 is still the stable release," said Simon Paquet. 

But the demise of Firefox 2.0 support doesn't mean that Thunderbird 2.0 users will be left out to dry, Beltzner said today, making an effort to differentiate work on Firefox from the underlying Gecko engine. "The end of support for Firefox 2.0 doesn't mean that  won't be able to work on the Gecko code," he said. "It just means that our focus won't be on actively maintaining that 1.8 branch of Gecko."