End of Life Near for Firefox 1.5.x

Mozilla Foundation recently released Firefox 2.0. The new version includes new features such as antiphishing technology and enhanced features such as improvements to site feed technology and tabbed browsing.

Now that Firefox 2.0 is available and nightly builds are being released to fix minor bugs as they are discovered, Mozilla will soon cease work on Firefox 1.5.x. Mozilla recently released an update, Firefox 1.5.0.8, that enhances stability and fixes three security problems. The vulnerabilities addressed in the most recent version are related to JavaScript, RSA signature forgeries, and memory corruption problems. With this release, Mozilla said that work on Firefox 1.5.x will cease as of April 24, 2007, meaning that even if major security problems are discovered in Firefox 1.5.x after that date, Mozilla won't likely fix them in that version; instead they'll be corrected in Firefox 2.0.x, if they also exist in that version of the browser.

Firefox 2.0 was reportedly downloaded 2 million times in the first 24 hours after its release, and as of October 27, Mozilla said it was seeing as many as 30 new downloads per second. The foundation also ran a campaign to encourage users to create original videos that promote the browser. The goal is run a television ad using the best user-submitted video.