Mozilla launches Firefox 3.5, starts kill clock for older 3.0

Offers upgrade on opening day to users of older browser to boost uptake

By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld, 06/30/09

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Mozilla launched Firefox 3.5 today, ending six months of delays to wrap up its newest browser almost exactly a year after its last major upgrade.

Firefox 3.5 was posted to Mozilla's servers early Tuesday, Eastern time. The browser, which until several months ago was named 3.1, first entered public testing with an Alpha 1 release in July 2008, then moved to beta last October. The browser moved to release candidate stage this month.

The launch makes good on a Mozilla promise to ship the browser in the first half of the year. Early in development, however, Mozilla said it was shooting for a quick turnaround for the upgrade, and pegged a late 2008 date. Those plans were made moot by decisions to delay the upgrade in order to add significant new features, and then to deal with numerous hard-to-handle bugs.

"There are some great new enhancements here," said Sherri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research, who noted that some of those additions, in fact, played catch-up to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and Google's Chrome. "Part of this release is to provide a private browsing mode," observed McLeish.

Unlike last year, Mozilla didn't heavily promote the upgrade this time. In June 2008, Mozilla coordinated Firefox 3.0's availability with an attempt to set a world record for downloads. In the ensuing rush, Mozilla's servers were briefly overwhelmed.

There was little sign of a similar outage today. Computerworld staffers were able to update without significant problems Tuesday, although some saw extremely slow download speeds.

The appearance of Firefox 3.5 also starts the end-of-life clock ticking for Firefox 3.0. Mozilla's policy is to support an older edition for only six months after the launch of a successor, meaning the kill date for Version 3.0 will be Dec. 31, 2009. At or around that time, Mozilla will stop producing security patches for the older browser.

To address that, and to move more users from 3.0 to 3.5 in a shorter span, Mozilla has changed from past practice and started offering the upgrade to Firefox 3.x users today. They can update by selecting "Check for Updates" under the "Help" menu.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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