This week, Google drove one of the final nails in the coffin of Firefox 2.0, by discontinuing a service designed to keep users of the now obsolete version of the open source browser safe while browsing. As of January 20, 2009, the Mountain View search giant shut down the Phishing and Malware Protection service that informed Firefox 2.0 users that they were at risk when browsing malicious websites, especially spoofed sites.

“The data service that is used by the Phishing Protection feature in Firefox 2 is being turned off by Google on Tuesday, January 20th. Any Firefox 2 user with version 2.0.0.19 or later may have already noticed that the option to enable this feature is disabled. If you’re using a previous version of Firefox 2, even though the feature is enabled in your browser, as of January 20th no new data will be sent to your computer,” Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience lead, revealed.

As far as Mozilla is concerned, Firefox 2.0 is dead as of December 2008. The past month, Mozilla issued the last security and stability update for Firefox 2.0, namely version 2.0.0.20, and informed that it no longer offered any support for the browser. While it continues work on Firefox 3.1, the company advised all Firefox 2.0 users to upgrade as soon as possible at least to version 3.0.5 of the browser, released in December 2008. As of last year, Firefox 2.0 users have been getting upgrade notifications to Firefox 3.0. Mozilla plans to deliver 3.0.6 in February 2009.

“We strongly recommended that you upgrade to Firefox 3. If you wish to continue using Firefox 2, we recommend turning off the preference titled 'Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected forgery' in the Security preferences,” Beltzner added.

Firefox 3.0.5 and 3.1 Beta 2 for Windows is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Linux is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Mac OS X is available here.