[colug-432] Mozilla and Google conspiracy

[Rob Funk]

On Monday, October 08, 2012 12:19:33 PM Rick Troth wrote:
> For several months, Google has been nagging me to "upgrade to a modern
> browser".  I am offended that they expect me to upgrade so often.
> Firefox 3.6.x is only two years old.  The rapid-fire release numbers
> since then are unnerving at least.  Where is stability??  I do have
> newer releases of Firefox (and of Thunderbird), but cling to the older
> ones for a variety of reasons (some rational, some not).
> 
> THE QUESTION is ... how concerned should I be that Google will pull
> the plug?  They warn me "some features may not work".  I consciously
> take my chances.  But Googoo has been whining more loudly for a week
> or two.  Then today, they upped it again.

I'm a web developer, and to us, Firefox 3.6 is *ancient*. It's as bad as 
IE8, which we really only still support because we still have to support 
XP.

FF 3.6 dates back almost three years now, and not only has lots of security 
holes, but also doesn't support modern web standards. The web has moved on 
quite a bit since then. Meanwhile, current versions of both Firefox and 
Chrome now do automatic updates to keep the user current on security fixes 
and web standards. This is good for everybody.

If the web developer needs to pay attention to oddball or really old 
browsers, that makes it more difficult to support everybody else. At some 
point we need to say that the share of this old browser in our audience is 
not large enough to be worth the time and effort required to make sure 
things work for them. We were eventually able to do that with IE6, and have 
mostly been able to drop IE7 by now. Firefox 3.6 is the next one to go.

I think you'll find that things work much faster when you upgrade too.

Firefox's answer to those organizations highly worried about stability is 
the "Extended Support Release" (ESR) of Firefox:
  http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
But they really don't want individuals using that version for personal use, 
probably it requires paying attention to the support mailing list for 
update information.