14 DAY TRIAL // While Mozilla is moving ahead with its rapid release cycle and has now pushed three major versions through it, two if you don't count Firefox 5 which was an interim release. Yet, despite the amount of publicity this has gotten, plenty of people are still happily running the rather ancient Firefox 3.6.
Some may have valid, and not so valid, reasons for doing this, but many are simply unaware that a new, updated version is available.
Which is why Mozilla is launching a new round of notifications for Firefox 3.6 users which should inform them that a new, better Firefox is here and that they can and should update.
The very latest stable release, Firefox 7.0.1 is being pushed as an update option. This will be only a notification, Mozilla is not forcing anyone to upgrade. Yet.
"Just a friendly reminder that we are planning to offer the Firefox 3.6.23 -> 7.0.1 advertised update this Thursday, 2011-10-6," Mozilla's Christian Legnitto, Firefox's release manager, wrote in a Mozilla mailing list, as Cnet noticed.
This is a fairly run of the mill process and one that Mozilla has underwent, even for Firefox 3.6, in the past. Importantly, it doesn't mean that Firefox 3.6 has reached its end of life and it is also not a forced upgrade.
To date, Mozilla has pushed two of these notification waves to Firefox 3.6 users, once when Firefox 4 was released and the second when Firefox 5 was made available.
The plan still is to support Firefox 3.6 with security updates until the ESR (extended support release) version of Firefox is ready. If users decide they are happy with Firefox 3.6 they can ignore the notification and go about their business as usual.
"This is mainly to move regular Firefox users who don't know there is an update up to a newer/better version if they are so inclined," Legnitto explained.
"Based on previous advertised update offers we expect to see a significant percentage of users installing the new version. We are, of course, watching the data closely to see what happens and to make sure there are no unexpected issues," he said.