The Death of Firefox 3.5

According to the download page for Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has already killed off this browser version. Users visiting the site that allows them to grab the previous iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser are welcomed by a message noting that August 2010 was the last month in which the browser vendor supplied security and stability updates for the predecessor of Firefox 3.6.

“Firefox 3.5.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until August 2010. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.6,” reads the message from Mozilla. (emphasis added)

Obviously, this is not the case. August 2010 has come and gone, but Mozilla is hard at work on the next stability and security update for Firefox 3.5.

In fact, as I said just a few days ago, early adopters can download and start test driving the Beta Build of Firefox 3.5.12, along with a pre-release development milestone for Firefox 3.6.9.

Traditionally, Mozilla doesn’t keep older versions of Firefox alive for very much time. In fact, the browser vendor starts planning to discontinue a previous release after six months of availability for a new major version.

For those not really keeping track of Firefox releases, version 3.5 was wrapped up and delivered to end users on June 30, 2009. This makes Firefox 3.5 more than one year old.

At the same time, it has already been over half a year since Firefox 3.6 was released, as users got the chance to download the finalized Build of the version on January 21st, 2010.

However, despite the message from Mozilla noting that there will be no more security and stability updates for Firefox 3.5.x after August 2010, this is simply not true.

The browser vendor plans to release Firefox 3.5.12 on September 7th, a release which will be synchronized with the availability of Firefox 3.6.9.

At the same time, Mozilla is already planning at least another security and stability refresh for Firefox 3.5, namely Firefox 3.5.13, which will be accompanied by Firefox 3.6.10.

The bottom line is that Firefox 3.5.x is very much alive, and is bound to stay that way for the coming months, including by enjoying support from Mozilla.

At this point in time, Firefox 3.5 still accounts for a market share of 3.41%, according to Net Applications, and it’s hard to believe that Mozilla will leave all those users hang out to dry.

But as with everything, the time will come for Firefox 3.5 to be killed, and in this regard, users still running the precursor of Firefox 3.6 should upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Linux is available for download here.