'End of life' beckons for Firefox 2

Support for Firefox 2, which includes security and stability patches, is scheduled to end six months after Firefox 3 shipped (June 17, 2008), which puts the end-of-life date in the mid-December range.

[ SEE: Talking Firefox security with Mozilla’s Window Snyder ]

Mozilla has not yet set a final date for Firefox 2 end-of-life activity but the open source group has started discussing the "requirements or issues" that would force a deadline extension.  The current plan is for the next Firefox 2 patch to the final update of that version.

According to Mozilla's Mike Beltzner, only about one-third of Firefox users are running older versions of the browser.

• Presently 2/3rds of our users are using Firefox 3, with more than 50% accepting the first major upgrade offer back in late August. We're looking through Hendrix and other sources to understand why people didn't want to upgrade and ensure that those bugs have been fixed.

Firefox 3 is considered a major security improvement over Firefox 2 because of the addition of an anti-malware blocker and improved Web forgery warnings.

ALSO SEE: Browser Wars 2.0: Firefox scrambles to add ‘private mode’ browsing