Mozilla to end Firefox 2.x support in mid-December

Mozilla announced on 18 November that they are continuing their EOL (end of life) policy with their products by ending support for Firefox version 2 even though version 3 itself has its own problems. The EOL policy is a system Mozilla set up to allow the developers to end their work on a previous version so they can work on the future versions. The EOL for the previous product kicks in after 6 months of release of a new product. If you are using version 2 of Firefox you may not be able to get any security updates or patches for flaws that could occur from now on.

It's not just Firefox that will soon be unsupported, the Gecko engine version 1.8 that is a key factor of Thunderbird 2 will also be ended and it in turn could stall the production of Seamonkey, Camino and Galeon. Despite this move Michael Connor from Mozilla announced "Mozilla (in some form) will provide support for Thunderbird based on the official lifecycle policy."

Despite there being no support for Seamonkey or any other 3rd party application using Gecko 1.8 Mozilla said the developers making those applications can still release their own updates but the system its self will not updated.

Mozilla will now set focus on improving Firefox 3. Many people have had problems with Firefox 3 crashing or stalling at various times something that the previous version didn't do that often. Other problems with Firefox that have been noted is the amount of memory the browser uses during a good few hours usage.

Firefox 3 set a world record when it was downloaded more then 8 million times when it was unleashed to the world this past June.