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Mozilla offers Firefox 3 as an update to Firefox 2 users
Posted by BostonPeng on 26 August 2008
Last night Mozilla turned on the major update mechanism for Firefox 2.0.0.16 users to encourage them to accept an update to Firefox 3.0.1. You can accept it or decline the update for now if you want. If you say “Later” you’ll be asked again in 24 hours. You can select “Never” and they might ask again in “several weeks or moths” according to Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner on the Mozilla Developer Center.
Some add-ons still have not been updated to work with Firefox 3 yet, so if there’s an extension or theme that you simply can’t surf the web without you should check to see if it works with Firefox 3. Themes written for Firefox 2 especially need to be updated to work properly in Firefox 3.
Of course Ubuntu users (and possibly users of other Linux distributions) won’t have to worry about this update notification if they’re running Firefox 2 from Ubuntu’s repositories, but if you installed it yourself, either manually or via a script, you may get this notification as well.
For more information check out Mike’s post about it, but I recommend you backup your Firefox user profile before accepting the update. Users have found that once Firefox 3 uses your profile it may not be usable by Firefox 2 again.
gavintlgold said
Funny thing is, I just updated a relative’s firefox, and we were wondering why it hadn’t told her already about it. Nice to know why they hadn’t said anything (I assumed it was because they considered it a more major update and not a ’security’ update).
Peng said
They do consider the update from one version to the next (2..x to 3.0.x) a “major” upgrade. Once Firefox 3.1 comes out next year it should be a faster rollout to existing Firefox 3.0.1 users. We saw this type of delay from 1.5 to 2.0 as well, but I expect there will be a delay like this when Firefox 3.0 users get encouraged to update to Firefox 4.0 when it comes out.
I think the Mozilla devs were waiting to make sure the first minor update (3.0 to 3.0.1) went well and they didn’t have anything else needing immediate fixing in 3.0.1 before throwing the Major Update switch.
Thanks for your comment, gavintlgold. It’s always nice to hear from readers and not just the spammers.