Mozilla retires Firefox 4 from security support

[haydnguy]

Upgrade to Firefox 5 to get patches, says company, but add-on compatibility issues may make some users hesitate

Computerworld - Unnoticed in the Tuesday release of Firefox 5 was Mozilla's decision to retire Firefox 4, the browser it shipped just three months ago.

As part of Tuesday's Firefox 5 release, Mozilla spelled out vulnerabilities it had patched in that edition and in 2010's Firefox 3.6, but it made no mention of any bugs fixed in Firefox 4.

That's because Firefox 4 has reached what Mozilla calls EOL, for "end of life," for vulnerability patches.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...curity_support

[haydnguy]

I thought this deserved a second post just so everyone understood.

[Philidor]

There was some polling done the other day - I can't source it off hand - in which people were asked which browser they used. I think it may have been Chrome as part of their big marketing exercise. Something like 80% of respondents -- all big internet users -- didn't know what a browser was. So that's probably a lot of out of date browsers out there, just waiting for a clever fraudster.

UPDATE YOUR BROWSERS FOLKS! PUT THEM ON AUTO-UPDATE. GO AND MAKE A CUP OF TEA WHEN THE DOWNLOADS START!

[Baroque Mongoose]

Er...

Not cool, Mozilla! Usually they put up a message encouraging you to update well before they withdraw support for the browser you're currently using. I appreciate the fact that they've realised so quickly that FF4 is pants, but failing to alert users to the fact that they've just released a replacement is not the best way to go about things.