Firefox 5 in, Firefox 4 out

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 23 June 2011 09:58

Business IT - Open Source

The arrival of Firefox 5 marks the end of support for version 4.

Firefox 5.0 arrived as expected and included fixes for eight security issues, five of them rated critical. Those fixes are not being retrofitted to Firefox 4, so the old version can no longer be considered secure.

The existing policy is that a major version of Firefox will be supported for no more than six months after the release of its successor [our emphasis]. And dropping support as soon as the successor arrives is clearly consistent with that policy, which is a warning rather than a promise.

The prevailing attitude within the Firefox development team seems to be that it is more important to push ahead with the implementation of new technologies and standards that advance the web than it is to provide long term support. From the perspective of an individual user or a small business that needs compatibility with as many web sites and cloud services (eg Google Apps) as possible, that's not a bad thing.

But that doesn't sit so well with larger organisations that need a standard operating environment that's been extensively tested for compatibility with a variety of internal web applications, some of which may have been untouched for years. Insofar as such organisations use Firefox, the immediate end of support for version 4 puts them in a quandary.

Do they stick (at least temporarily) with a browser that has known vulnerabilities, or should they deploy the new version without fully testing it? The old model where point updates may have contained nothing other than security patches was much more amenable to rapid testing.

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