12 Million Firefox 3.5 Users to Be Upgraded

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 18 May 2011

Even though the latest Firefox version is 4.0 and even though there’s the older Firefox 3.6 version, there are still millions of users out there that are still on the no longer supported Firefox 3.5. There are as a matter of fact, some 12 million Firefox 3.5 users out there. The thing is that because Firefox 3.5 is no longer supported, Mozilla no longer releases updates and patches for the browser, which means that Firefox 3.5 users are surfing the web on an unsafe browser.

Mozilla said it is feeling frustrated with the fact that so many users are still on Firefox 3.5 and it also said that it is worried that way too many users are vulnerable. To address its frustration and worries, Mozilla has decided to push the millions of Firefox 3.5 users to a newer version of the browser.

In June, Firefox 3.5 users with the default automatic updates setting enabled will be automatically upgraded to Firefox 3.6. “We are treating the automatic update checkbox enabled as a ‘yes, I want mozilla to keep me updated’. Previously as a courtesy we had people opt-in between major versions due to the potential jarring nature of the update. We feel the difference between 3.5 and 3.6 is not severe and with 3.5 reaching end-of-life 3.6 *is* the security update for 3.5 users,” said Mozilla’s Christian Legnitto.

Furthermore Firefox 3.5 users will be presented with prompts informing them that they are using an unsafe and no longer supported Firefox version; the prompts are presented as pop-ups in the browser itself and in the Google homepage snippets.

Mozilla would ideally like users to upgrade to Firefox 4.0, the latest version of the browser that comes with a few cool new features: a fresh new interface, hardware-accelerated graphics, app tabs, Panorama, Firefox Sync, a new Add-ons Manager, and a faster JavaScript engine.


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