Finally Off Life Support: No More Updates for Firefox 3.6

By Douglas Perry
published

Mozilla has officially ended all support for Firefox 3.6 with the release of Firefox 12.

Originally released on January 21, 2010 as "Namoroka", the browser is phased out with version 3.6.28. Mozilla offered the first replacement for 3.6 with Firefox 4, which was released on March 22, 2011. According to StatCounter, Firefox 3.6 has still a market share of about 2.9 percent.

Mozilla has been entangled in a controversy of browser support time frames when it introduced its rapid release schedule with Firefox 5, which schedules a new browser version every six weeks. Businesses complained that they would not have the ability to update their corporate users as well as software manuals at this pace. The browser maker recently addressed these concerns with the release of extended support release (ESR) versions of Firefox, which provides a 54-week support period for a browser release. While updated every six weeks, these releases only receive security updates and not the feature updates that are included in the regular desktop browser updates.

The current ESR release is Firefox 10.0.4 ESR, which will be supported until February 12, 2013 as version 10.0.8. Mozilla will launch the next ESR version as Firefox 17.0 ESR on November 12, 2012, which provides businesses ample time to transition to the new browser version.

Douglas Perry
13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jacobdrj
    Good riddance: FF 3.6 was the version that was so unstable, I switched to Chrome... So glad they are on a rapid release cycle now: FF has been much improved since the 3.6 debacle...
    Ironically, I bet that with there being no more FF 3.6 releases, did they finally make it stable?
    Reply
  • keyanf
    I wouldn't have stuck with 3.6 if 4 didn't refuse to run ANY add-on, even newly installed ones.
    Reply
  • livebriand
    Why are people still still using 3.6 now anyway?
    Reply
  • alidan
    keyanfI wouldn't have stuck with 3.6 if 4 didn't refuse to run ANY add-on, even newly installed ones.
    yea, i remember that,
    now addons if they were made for 4, can usually run on the latest with a small tweak, there are some exceptions like down them all which will not run properly unless its made for that release.

    thats the reason i stuck with 3.6 untill i moved over to nightly 8,
    than whan i got my ssd, i moved to release 8 and now over to waterfox 10
    Reply
  • alidan
    livebriandWhy are people still still using 3.6 now anyway?i stuck with it as long as i did because of memory efficiency, only having 3gb of ram at the time... when i heard that 8 was around 3.6 level efficiency, i jumped to it, mainly to try, it used a bit more ram, but less than 4 and 5 ever did, pluss it handled a crap ton of tabs better so i stuck with it even though it used more ram...

    if i had a low ram system right now, i would use ff 3.6 on it, because of how i use the internet, a bit more ram at start up pays for itself when you load up 50 some tabs.
    Reply
  • joe nate
    livebriandWhy are people still still using 3.6 now anyway?
    Personally? Because I've tried Firefox 4, 5 and 10 and every one of them was laggier, buggier or otherwise slower than 3.6. I haven't tried any of the other ones, but I have no idea why, in my experience, 3.6 is just so stable and fast compared to everything else I've tried, thus, I've stayed with it.

    I wonder if the GPU acceleration they added to the browser actually slows it down, because I have a high end system, and offloading stuff to a GPU when my Intel i7-970 can more than handle anything a browser may encounter might create small delays that wouldn't be there in the CPU-only 3.6.

    But ultimately, I don't know why. I just know in my experience, firefox 3.6 (with it's addons like adblock plus) has been the most responsive, fast and reliable browser that I've tried.
    Reply
  • livebriandWhy are people still still using 3.6 now anyway?Version 3.6 was the last official version of firefox to support PPC Macs. Some people just didn't want to throw their $1,500 investment away easily, but they can download tenfourfox 12, which takes advantage of PPC's AltiVec hardware acceleration. Mozilla claimed, if i remembered correctly, that ppc macs don't have the hardware to take advantage of the new features of firefox four. Besides Adobe dropped support after Flash 10.1.
    Reply
  • BWMerlin
    bunnywannySome people just didn't want to throw their $1,500 investment away easily,
    First of all a computer is never an investment and secondly your computer is the better part of six years old, I think it is fair call for companies to stop supporting such a relic of the past.
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    joe natePersonally? Because I've tried Firefox 4, 5 and 10 and every one of them was laggier, buggier or otherwise slower than 3.6. I haven't tried any of the other ones, but I have no idea why, in my experience, 3.6 is just so stable and fast compared to everything else I've tried, thus, I've stayed with it.I wonder if the GPU acceleration they added to the browser actually slows it down, because I have a high end system, and offloading stuff to a GPU when my Intel i7-970 can more than handle anything a browser may encounter might create small delays that wouldn't be there in the CPU-only 3.6.But ultimately, I don't know why. I just know in my experience, firefox 3.6 (with it's addons like adblock plus) has been the most responsive, fast and reliable browser that I've tried.
    Funny thing about that... I'm running FF (more accurately, Pale Moon which is built off of FF) 11 and it is far faster than anything except for my Comodo Dragon (based off of Chromium) and even then, it's pretty close. It's also the most memory efficient browser I've ever had. It has Palemin, Adblock Lite, Fasterfox, NoScript, and Ghostery. Palemin keeps it's memory usage in check and it never goes over 50MB or so of memory usage, usually staying at or below 10MB of memory usage, regardless of how many tabs I have open (which can reach from the dozens to the hundreds).

    As for pure responsiveness and speed, my Comodo Dragon installation beats out everything else, even if it's not by a huge margin, including FF 3.6.x. Even my Palemoon browser beats FF 3.6.x significantly.
    Reply
  • gsacks
    livebriandWhy are people still still using 3.6 now anyway?
    For the reasons sighted in the article. In a corporate environment, most users need to stick with the software approved by their company, and most users also do not have administrative rights to their machine, so they could not update even if they wanted to break policy.
    Reply